Indurain

by Alasdair Fotheringham

  ‘Indurain isn’t a great communicator and the team were very hermetic, but by 1996 the relationship was beginning to deteriorate seriously,’ says Vidarte. Delgado argues that, bizarrely enough, the very fact that the Spaniard’s relationship with his directors had been so strong now began to play against him: ‘It reminds me of something that Manolo Saiz used to say about how the best people he’d work with were blind, because they needed the support, the blind support as it were, of others. And Miguel was so trusting that it was easy that he should feel betrayed.’ Once that trust had gone, though, it proved almost impossible to repair.

  After the Olympics Echavarri began negotiating with Olano, widely tipped as Spain’s most promising young rider and Indurain’s successor, to break his contract for 1997 with Mapei and sign with Banesto. When Olano finally signed a preliminary contract with Banesto, just before the Vuelta, he still believed that he would be second-in-command and that Indurain would lead at the 1997 Tour. He saw Indurain’s defeat in the 1996 Tour as more a glitch than a permanent setback. ‘I didn’t think Miguel was going badly [on Hautacam], it was just that his form wasn’t so great. But I thought that he would be the same, normal Miguel when we went back to the Tour the next year. Anybody who rides a bike for a living knows that not every year is the same. Just ask Peter Sagan’ – who had a near-disastrous first half of 2015, with numerous runners-up spots before coming back to win the World Championships. ‘The differences can be minimal between winning and coming second. You can make a comeback.’

  Vidarte believes that by the time that Olano’s potential signing with Banesto came into play, ‘the relationship with Indurain was already broken or on the point of doing so.’ But it did nothing to alleviate the considerable confusion and speculation surrounding the issue, which intensified yet further when Indurain announced during the Vuelta a Burgos that August that he would be racing the Vuelta a España, which had moved to September in 1995 – and shortly afterwards, that he was doing so because he had been obliged to race it by the team.

  Then, as now, it is not hard to find those who felt that after all the positive publicity Indurain had generated for his team, to force him to race the Vuelta was wrongheaded in the extreme. ‘Indurain has always been a real gentleman and has never really wanted to talk about all of this,’ argues Vidarte. ‘But he felt – I think – exploited, used, and that once he’d decided to quit, the idea was to exploit him right the way through to the end.’

  Olano cites a much-quoted phrase of Echavarri’s: ‘September is for those that fail in July’, a reference to Spain’s education system and its round of autumn re-sit exams. ‘You go to the Tour, if you don’t pass the exam in July, you have to go back [to the Vuelta] in September – just like in school. Miguel didn’t want to go to the Vuelta, [but] if you were a little more coherent about everything that Miguel had given you, then if he says he’s not up to going, then he’s not up to going. And I think it was the fact it was imposed on him that forced him to quit [cycling].’

  ‘It was an ignominious end for him, wasn’t it?’ argues Boardman. ‘It wasn’t controlled, and I sort of blame Banesto at the end, they forced him to ride the Vuelta, which was quite disrespectful.’ Even now, Prudencio Indurain makes no bones of his feelings about Echavarri and Unzué. When asked what his opinion was of them as management figures, he states, ‘I prefer not to give my opinion, we don’t have any relationship now, nothing … zero. It didn’t end well, neither with me nor … We live in Pamplona and we’ll greet each other in the street, and that’s it, we don’t have much to say to each other. They went from being like parents to there being no relationship at all. But that’s life.’

  ‘It was a strategic error by the company. They wanted to save their not having won the Tour by having him do the Vuelta,’ argues Saiz. ‘That was the only mistake José Miguel made.’ Rather than the rights or wrongs of Banesto’s decision, Saiz points at the difficulties of the Vuelta itself as a logical reason not to send Indurain there: ‘You don’t sort out your season by racing it.’

  Discussing their decision to take Indurain to the Vuelta, Unzué repeats a claim made by Echavarri after Indurain’s retirement, that in fact they backtracked at the last minute and said they would be willing for him not to go. But by then, the damage in terms of broken trust was done. ‘We said to him, “we don’t have the moral right to ask you to do it, but it would be a nice thing to do for Banesto, who have never complained about you not racing the Vuelta since 1991.”’

  Unzué says the Vuelta could have been like a lap of honour for Indurain. ‘I was convinced he wouldn’t go on [into 1997], because Miguel, when he decides to do something … I proposed that the Vuelta would be a good way to say goodbye to Banesto, to the country and the people.’ Indurain’s triumphs, Unzué points out, had mostly happened abroad and ‘We told him to forget about the overall classification, and that this way the people of Spain could see him on the road.’

  ‘Finally, maybe I got too insistent, and then Banesto told us, “Hey, if he doesn’t want us to do it, then forget it.’’’ But the idea of using the Vuelta as a three-week homage could well have fallen foul of the organisers, too, and by the time Banesto began to backtrack, Indurain had also told Unzué that if he did the Vuelta, it would be to go for the win. What Indurain thought of Unzué’s initial insistence that he race the Vuelta was clear enough. ‘It’s the first time in my life that I’ve had something imposed on me,’ he told Josu Garai, ‘and I’m not taking it at all well.’ As for Unzué, the regret at what he did is still palpable. ‘Looking at what happened [in the Vuelta],’ he says, ‘we can’t doubt that my insistence [about Indurain doing the Vuelta] was a huge mistake.’

  There could be no doubt, either, that once Indurain started the 1996 Vuelta that September, he was not there to make up the numbers. When ONCE formed an echelon in a surprise attack on stage three to Albacete, both Fernando Escartín, the Kelme leader, and Rominger were caught out. But Indurain was on the right side of the split and collaborated with ONCE, pushing Escartín and Rominger to eight minutes. As the race continued for flat stage after flat stage across the south of Spain, Indurain, although losing nearly forty seconds when he was caught behind a crash near the finish in Murcia, remained very much in contention. Then in the stage ten time trial near Ávila, finishing third, merely twenty-five seconds down on Zülle and twenty-seven behind Rominger, elevated him into second overall. This was despite the rain, too, that teemed down most of the day in Ávila, and a rugged, highly technical course with no fewer than 186 different corners. There were few warning signs of what was to come, even then – apart from the way in which Indurain’s comments after Ávila felt curiously non-committal. He described his time trial, which was a solid, if unspectacular performance, as ‘one of the oddest I’ve ridden’, and warned that ONCE, headed by Zülle and Jalabert, would be a force to be reckoned with. His prediction that the mountainous stages that followed almost immediately in Asturias ‘would be very important for me’ proved uncannily correct, if not his specific hope that his fortunes would change on the stage to the Lagos de Covadonga, ‘a finish which traditionally has not been good for me.’

  Even prior to Covadonga, the climb of El Naranco, the race’s first summit finish and one of Spain’s most emblematic ascents, began to show that the Ávila time trial was not a reliable form guide. Indurain had demonstrated that mentally he was still able to handle the idea of contending for the Vuelta until then, and en route to Naranco there was more evidence he was not thinking of abandoning when he and team-mate Orlando Rodrigues were the only two Banesto riders to make it into an echelon containing all nine ONCE riders. After that move was brought back, on the short and relatively benign ascent to the Naranco sanctuary, Indurain initially made it into a front group of eleven, which broke free thanks to a viciously hard acceleration by ONCE’s Mikel Zarrabeitia. But when faced with a devastating attack by Alex Zülle two kilometres from the summit, Indurain was instantly left reeling. In two kilometres o
f fairly gentle uphill, he lost almost a minute – a serious setback for such a short distance.

  After nearly two weeks of phoney war and some solid performances, Indurain’s bid to win the Vuelta suddenly looked to be on the verge of total collapse. He was understandably pessimistic about his chances, whilst Spain’s most veteran cycling journalist, Javier de Dalmases, wrote a blistering op-ed over the illogicality of Indurain’s Vuelta participation in El Mundo Deportivo: ‘Indurain deserves a resounding send-off to his career, but greed has caused the door through which he will presumably leave the sport at the end of the year to shrink ever smaller. We have to hit the red light and stop this sporting massacre as soon as possible. This is not the Indurain we know. It’s a man overloaded with pressure who is pedalling to please the rest of the world whilst he thinks of his wife, his son, his home and his land. Let us leave him in peace for once.’

  In the event, though, as he dismounted and walked through the door of Hotel El Capitán the next day, his Vuelta over with his first race abandon in six years, it was Indurain himself who pressed the red light.

  Results from medical tests carried out on Indurain on the evening after Naranco later showed what had been increasingly obvious since July. More than able to handle a steady pace on flatter terrain – as could be seen in the time trials he had ridden in the third week of the Tour, the Olympics and again in the Vuelta echelons – Indurain’s problem, Banesto team doctor Iñaki Arratibel explained, was a drop of aerobic capacity, or as he called it, ‘a lack of punch’. Indurain, in other words, was riding on fumes: racing the Vuelta had been, as Unzué says, a colossal mistake.

  For the historically inclined, there was, as Indurain had already pointed out two days earlier, a tradition for him to suffer misfortune in or near the Lagos de Covadonga. He had lost the Vuelta lead there in 1985 and in 1987 had abandoned a stage of the Vuelta that left from Cangas de Onís, the town at the foot of the climb. In 1989, meanwhile, he had broken his wrist on the descent from the Fito. Even when things were going relatively well like in 1991, when the Vuelta did the two 1996 Asturian stages in reverse order, it was always relative. That year, Indurain did not gain enough time on race leader Melchior Mauri either at Covadonga or Naranco to topple a rider whom nobody would have, prior to the Vuelta, considered capable of winning it – unlike Indurain.

  Five years on, and just an hour or so after Zülle and Jalabert had continued ONCE’s crushing domination of the Vuelta by taking a joint triumph at the summit of Covadonga, Indurain came down the stairs of El Capitán and analysed what proved to be the final, definitive defeat of his career to the press. Courteous as ever, he thanked fans for their continuing support on the roadside, and said he had started the stage wanting to fight back from the Naranco defeat. However, he also stated clearly that he was not motivated to go on fighting ‘to finish fifth overall’. His laconic sense of humour had clearly not abandoned him, as he revealed when he was asked by the media what he had been thinking about as he pedalled towards El Capitán. ‘I thought’, he replied drily, ‘that I was not having a good day.’

  Indurain argued that his abandon of the Vuelta ‘should not affect his future’, but it was difficult to see how it could not. Rather than a victory in the Olympic Games as his curtain-call, the last images of Indurain as a professional – and watched in the Vuelta by an average viewing figure of four million Spaniards, a total that halved as soon as he quit – were anything but triumphant. Some of the Banesto team staff, Manu Arrieta says, were distraught at Indurain’s exit from the Vuelta in such a spectacularly low-key fashion: ‘He was cross because he wasn’t in a good enough condition to go, and he was forced to go and then the day he abandoned, I was in tears. He never said he was going to stop, he just stopped and that was it.’

  However, whilst Olympic success increased public speculation that he might continue, and had had the opposite effect on Indurain himself, his abandon of the Vuelta – as he was to reveal later – revived his own private interest in continuing his career. Bizarrely enough, to the broader public it felt like the end of an era, particularly as the Vuelta acted as yet another nail in the coffin, arguably the biggest, of Indurain’s relationship with Banesto’s management.

  Key to it all was the seemingly unstoppable destruction of Indurain’s trust in his bosses. Nor, at least as Delgado sees it, was that entirely Unzué and Echavarri’s fault: ‘From that moment onwards, everything that Eusebio and José Miguel say gets an answer of “no”. [Indurain thinks] “The trust is gone, now I don’t want to know anything.” And I don’t think life is like that, but at that precise moment and given Miguel’s character, it was. Miguel had been obedient, they forced a yes to something out of him and then he said “OK, that’s it. Game over.”’

  From Delgado’s point of view, ‘It’s like a house of cards, many things fell apart incredibly fast. Miguel was respected, but he should have put his foot down, and said he wasn’t up to racing the Vuelta, whatever Banesto said.’ What had been the strongest element in Indurain’s relationship with Echavarri and Unzué – the rock-solid trust between them – was now what was disappearing the fastest. Part of the reason, Delgado believes, is inherent in top-level sport. But once again Indurain’s personality did him no favours: ‘When you’re a top-level sportsman your stress levels are at an absolute maximum. It’s not just about riding a bike well. You have to put up with the people, the journalists, you’ve got no private life, it goes on for one year, for two years, for ages. So if your mental shelter is your team and your director and as Miguel is not communicative, you don’t understand the few messages you’re getting, then he’s going to say, “These people aren’t any good to me any more.” And like the good Navarran he is, then it’s over.’

  Other teams, unsurprisingly, were not slow to pick up on the deterioration in Indurain’s relationship with his lifelong squad and there was no doubt which was pushing the hardest, either, to be first in line should Indurain opt to continue into 1997.

  ‘The first big moment of communication between us came on the road to Albacete [stage three], when I drove past Miguel when he and the ONCE riders were in the echelon,’ recalls Manolo Saiz. ‘And I say Miguel, it’s time and he says “You’re right” and he starts working with my boys. If there’s a sporting moment of communication like that, then there can be a possible signing. You understand that there can be a chance.’

  ‘For ONCE, having Indurain in their team would have buried the hatchet completely with the Spanish cycling fanbase,’ argues Delgado. ‘For them it was an ideal situation, for five or six years they were a Spanish national “product”, but they had a Swiss rider [Zülle] and a French rider [Jalabert] attacking a Spanish rider [Indurain], so they were the “anti-Spanish” team. I can imagine that Manolo must have had a hard time of it sometimes.’

  There was also another huge personal motivation for Saiz, as a director: the chance to work with cycling’s greatest ever Tour de France racer. A few weeks after the Vuelta a España – ‘during which our only aim had been to eliminate him from contention’, Saiz says – Indurain, Sabino Padilla (as Indurain’s friend), Saiz and ONCE manager Pablo Antón met in Vitoria with a very different subject to discuss. Although Indurain later said he had only attended out of courtesy, Saiz says that there was a definite meeting of minds in terms of the race programme and sporting criteria each side wanted to bring to a possible contract for 1997. The stumbling block was financial, with the difference in terms of hard economics, according to a comment Padilla reportedly made to a journalist at the time, considerable. ‘He said, “ONCE wanted to buy a Ferrari at the price of a Seat 600,’’’ Vidarte recalls. ‘The minute it went a bit wrong, it was all off,’ Delgado observes.

  Indurain was tracked down by one Pamplona reporter a few days after the Vitoria meeting to a local car dealer’s where he reportedly had a business investment. Indurain was cautiously diplomatic: he told the reporter that he had noted similarities between ONCE and Banesto and said that he was sure there wo
uld be no difficulty in terms of how he and Jalabert could race together. However, he added that he had no idea how he and Alex Zülle could share out the calendar, given that they were so similar as racers. This was a problem that, in any case, Indurain would have had to face in Banesto after Olano’s signing, although Olano appears confident it could have been easily overcome.

  Saiz insists that there was ‘more in common than there wasn’t,’ but points out that Indurain’s contract was in a different league. ‘When I went to sign Indurain, his contract alone was worth more than the whole of ONCE’s budget for the following year. Our budget was at most five million euros [annually], just over half that of [top Italian squad] Fassa Bortolo. The fourth-ranked rider in Banesto was worth the same as the fourth rider in ONCE. But it was the top names who were worth so much more.’ On the plus side, he says he encountered no opposition to signing Indurain ‘when I discussed it with Alex [Zülle] and Laurent [Jalabert] on the plane over to race those last three Italian Classics [Giro di Lombardía, Milan–Turin and Piamonte].’ Saiz even had a new sponsor theoretically on board for the team, a Spanish TV channel, to help pay for Indurain’s salary, ‘and that was the closest we’ve been to the teams actually having control of the TV rights to races.’ (The question of TV rights is a longstanding bone of contention between race organisers and cycling’s professional squads that continues to rumble through the sport to this day.)