But the ONCE deal failed to get off the ground, and subsequent alleged offers from Kelme and Lampre never gained any serious traction at all. The route of the 1997 Tour de France, with the novelty of the first time trial coming after the first major series of mountain stages in the Pyrenees, not before, was not ideal for Indurain, but it brought no comment either way from the Spaniard. With his last official race, the Vuelta, a fast-fading memory, by late autumn Indurain had made his last appearance in Banesto team kit at an exhibition race at Xàtiva, near Valencia. And whilst a prize-giving ceremony in Navarre for Indurain brought – possibly for the last time as a pros – Echavarri, Unzué and Indurain together, there was no last-minute reconciliation. Echavarri, using religious imagery to the last, said that he had lit a candle in a church – whether this was a metaphor or not was unclear – in the hope that it would act as inspiration to help resolve his differences with Indurain. ‘By then it was ONCE or nobody,’ Saiz claims and on 2 January 1997, coincidentally in the same Pamplona hotel where Reynolds had announced their sponsorship of a professional team seventeen years before, Indurain read a communiqué in which it became clear which choice he had taken.
Reading from a single sheet of paper Indurain acknowledged that the decision had been three months in the making but that – as the single year’s contract in 1995 would seem to confirm – he had already been thinking of quitting since early in the year. Racing the Vuelta had almost made him change his mind, he confirmed, and he still felt that he could have won a sixth Tour de France at some point later in his career.
But as he put it in the communiqué, ‘Being at the maximum level in this sport requires a great deal and every year that goes by it is harder to achieve. I think I have dedicated enough time to cycling, I want to enjoy this as a hobby. I think this is the best decision for me and my family. They are waiting for me, too.’ And, after thanking his team, the media and, ‘above all’ the fans, Indurain’s career was officially over.
Less than nine kilometres away, where Banesto were holding a team training camp in the outskirts of Pamplona, Echavarri watched the scenes on TV. Indurain, with his usual underestimation of how widely he was appreciated, had booked a hotel conference room that could only accommodate 80, far less than the number of journalists crammed in there to listen to the outcome of a dilemma that had gripped the country and taken 103 days to resolve. It finally took a police officer to beat a path for Indurain through the sea of microphones and up to the single table and chair behind which he sat, alone. There was no emotion in his voice as he read, no changes of tone, simply a summary of the news that he was quitting. It could almost have been about another person.
That was possibly the most shocking element of Indurain’s exit: the lack of theatre, of anything special about it at all. It was almost to be expected that nobody from the team was with him, but Indurain’s departure from a sport he had dominated was utterly low-key and strikingly solitary.
Unzué still regrets his part, as he sees it, in Indurain’s leaving with so little fuss or recognition. ‘When Miguel retired, if anybody deserved a homage it was Miguel, for everything he had done for cycling, for everything he had done for us,’ Unzué argues. ‘Unfortunately, the end was not the best we’d have liked and on top of that it was something which is open to many different interpretations. It became a farewell which he didn’t deserve, and that is the biggest outstanding debt I have with my team’s past. It’s not something he needed, but something he should have had from cycling.’
Yet after all the drama and tumult of his final year in the sport, was it such a bad thing for Indurain to leave cycling with as little fanfare as possible? As might be expected with Indurain, the manner of his retirement underlined something, for one last time: that as a person, he remained as unchanged and as normal, in the very best sense of the word, as the streets of Villava where it had all begun, just a few kilometres away.
CHAPTER 11
Exceptionally Normal
High on the outskirts of a hillside village somewhere outside San Sebastián, Manu Arrieta, the former Reynolds soigneur, has a cabin opposite his house that feels like a cross between a bachelor’s den, a Basque pintxos bar and a fan’s shrine to a certain 1990s Spanish rider.
In the cabin’s airy, brightly lit interior, three of the four walls surrounding the spotlessly clean rustic furniture are lined with posters of Indurain from his victorious Tours and Giros. The posters rub shoulders with framed team jerseys of Banesto and Reynolds from the Vuelta and Tour – several signed by Indurain, of course – and articles on Indurain. If you look hard enough above the cabin’s wooden benches along the side of each wall, you can find a few small pictures of Arrieta when he himself was a rider. But there is no doubt who is the real star of the show.
As such places illustrate, there can be little doubt how much Indurain means and meant to Arrieta – capable of driving across half western Europe to see what kind of surprise his idol planned to unleash in the 1995 Tour – and to Indurain’s other diehard cycling fans. But it was only once Indurain had himself driven away from the Pamplona hotel where he had announced his retirement that the broader, longer-term implications for Spanish sport of having had the Tour de France’s most successful champion amongst its stars for over half a decade began to sink in.
Given the size of the vacuum Indurain was leaving behind and the six-month debate over whether he was retiring, when Indurain actually quit the sport the speculation as to who in Spain could be his successor was already in full swing. Much as Freddy Maertens was tipped to be Belgium’s next Merckx from 1974 onwards, well before Merckx himself retired, in Spain the done deal was all about Abraham Olano. And it wasn’t just inside Spain, either. As The New York Times put it in July 1997, when Olano won a stage in the Tour at Disneyland, Olano ‘looks like Miguel Indurain, dresses like him in the Banesto team jersey and has finally started to ride like him.’
The way Olano’s results were intertwined with Indurain’s at the 1995 World Championships (as curiously enough, Maertens and Merckx had been in the 1973 Worlds, when Maertens left Merckx flailing in an equally controversial finale) proved hugely effective at helping the Spanish public to form a mental link between the two. In 1996 there was Olano’s silver in the Atlanta Olympic Games behind Indurain to help maintain the association. For some, in any case, it was already set in stone: following the 1995 World time trial, Spanish national trainer Pepe Grande said categorically, ‘Abraham is the Indurain of the future, in one or two years he’ll be able to win any race he likes. He has the same kind of mentality as Indurain.’ And that was well before anybody knew Indurain was retiring the year after.
Both riders also came from the north of Spain – Olano from Guipúzcoa, the Basque region closest to Navarre and a cycling heartland. Their characters – tenacious, quiet, unpretentious – seemed remarkably similar too, and so did their strongest suit: time trialling, at which Olano would go on to win the World Championships title in 1998. On top of that, Indurain left Banesto just as Olano was joining the team: from the outside, it looked like a seamless handover of the mantle of Spain’s Grand Tour champion from one tall, dark-haired, taciturn time triallist clad in blue and white to another.
But as Olano points out, the reality was nothing like that at all. To start with, his racing background was totally unlike Indurain’s, given Olano had turned professional as a sprinter-cum-all-rounder for the short-lived CHCS team. Secondly, after he slowly found his time trialling and – to a lesser extent – stage racing legs with Lotus (when CHCS folded), Clas-Cajastur, Mapei-Clas and Mapei-GB, Olano only signed with Banesto because his Mapei team owner, Giorgio Squinzi, gave him virtually no other choice if he wanted to break his contract with the Italo-Belgian squad for 1997.
There were other offers, but none of them satisfied Olano, who was keen to leave Mapei because ‘it was going to focus almost exclusively on the Classics after 1996 … Just before the start of the Clásica San Sebastian in 1996, somebody came up and gave
me a piece of paper with the amount on it that Kelme were prepared to pay for me. It was a huge sum, but Kelme didn’t have a reliable stage racing line-up. And when I told Squinzi I wanted to sign for ONCE, he said that I could go anywhere I liked but ONCE, because … the last thing Squinzi wanted to do was make ONCE stronger. Finally there was an option with a new team Juan Fernández was trying to form for 1997, but we disagreed over his not wanting to sign Tony Rominger.’
Banesto might have been the best option, but they were thus the only option, too. But Olano is emphatic that he had no idea, when he signed his pre-contract, that Indurain was not going to be there in 1997. ‘It certainly caught me out, Miguel had never said that he was going to leave and then all the pressure of being the lone leader was on me. My idea at the time was to go to Banesto to do the Giro and maybe the Vuelta, Miguel would still do the Tour where I would get a bit more experience under his wing.’
Olano, in fact, found himself expected by a sizeable proportion of the Spanish, to go on cranking out the Tour wins and ‘if the Tour didn’t work out for me, then I’d have to do the Vuelta.’ Compared with what he signed up for, as he says with considerable understatement – something both he and Indurain do have in common as one of their favourite means of expression – ‘It wasn’t the same.’
Other options, despite Olano’s evident ability at one-day racing and time trialling, not to mention the track, were not even taken into consideration. As Olano puts it, ‘Even today, the Olympics aren’t as valued as a Worlds or a Tour and in Spain there was no interest in the Classics. Time triallists weren’t as appreciated as they should have been, that’s why I never wanted to be a specialist in that. And if the team pays you to be a boss for the Tour de France, then that’s what you prepare for.’
By 1997, Olano and Indurain had known each other for years – since they had met at a dinner after Indurain won his first Tour. Although they got on, Olano recollects with a grin what made the greatest first impression on him was ‘the size of Indurain’s hands when I shook one of them when we were introduced – they were scarily big.’ Whilst he learned his racecraft from Rominger, with whom he spent four years in Clas-Cajastur and Mapei-Clas, Olano said he and Indurain never discussed the question of his ‘succession’, in theory the strongest link between the two. ‘Miguel’s very reserved and so am I,’ he points out, ‘we’ve talked a lot but not about that.’
In Olano’s opinion, the physical similarities between himself and Indurain were only superficial. ‘My strongest point in a time trial was that I was more aerodynamic, and Miguel’s was more about pure power output. For example, he always said his kidneys were too hard for him to bend over the bike at more than a certain angle, and he never went beyond that angle.’ Olano, in fact, was something of a tech-head in the line of Chris Boardman, and, like the Briton, had a considerable amount of experience on the track. ‘I had loved the track, ever since I was a junior and I worked with Guido Costa, an Italian track trainer’ – who many decades before had overseen Italy’s outstanding cycling success in the 1960 Olympics, garnering five golds, a silver and a bronze in seven events – ‘during a period when I was training for the Military World Championships. I learned a heck of a lot from Guido.’
In Olano’s opinion, there was not so much to be inherited in Banesto from Indurain, technologically. ‘I liked his Espada time trial bike, but I didn’t see any advances in it. He knew what was his best position, but aerodynamically, the numbers [efficiency] weren’t so good. So you should have changed his position, which was the best for his strength, to improve his speed.’
In Olano’s opinion, Indurain ‘was basically thinking, “how many time trials do I do where the average speed is over 50 km/h” and [seeing there were not many] he did well in his calculations. But for the Hour Record say, that particular calculation didn’t work.’ In terms of trackcraft, too, Olano says there was little to learn from his predecessor and he gives an example to explain why: ‘Indurain lost a little time in the curves because normally in an oval-shaped velodrome, if you come in to the curve too low’ – as Indurain apparently would – ‘then you overcompensate. But then if you go in to the corner slightly higher on the curve then you come out a little bit underneath’ – but with a better overall line, and hence faster.
In terms of Banesto’s racing philosophy, Olano says that during his time there was the same conservative approach to stage racing – ‘keep the group together as much as possible and then go flat out in the time trial.’ He also noticed that, in another possible hangover from the Indurain era, riders were trusted to turn up in top condition to race, rather than being constantly chivvied and kept tabs on. ‘They think that if you’ve got as far as being a professional, you should know how your body works and what you should do. Everybody has their preassigned role and that’s it.’ Furthermore, there was also a clear pyramid structure for the Grand Tours. ‘It’s the same as Team Sky now, they have got such good domestiques that they could race for themselves in the Tour. Instead they were all focussed on one cause, working for the leader.’ But how that leader would fare, after Indurain’s exit and under the intense scrutiny and high expectations of the Spanish public, remained to be resolved.
If Olano avoided emulating Indurain on the track and an assault on the Hour Record with Banesto was never on the cards, on the road he followed a very similar programme. In 1997, Olano’s fourth place overall in the Tour and a stage win, an overall win in the Euskal Bizicleta and second in the Dauphiné Libéré, despite a fair number of setbacks and injuries, would have been considered a relatively successful season – were it not for the constant Indurain comparisons. Fourth in the Tour, where Olano had only reached top form in the third week, felt light years away from Indurain’s relentless run of success. Then the sight of Olano abandoning in the Vuelta in September 1996 as ONCE, once again, crushed the opposition brought back vivid echoes of Indurain’s debacle in the same race the previous year.
Although there was a huge emotional debt with Indurain, according to Olano Banesto had few problems putting the Indurain era behind them in practical terms: ‘They brought through a lot of young riders, [José Luis] Arrieta, Txente [García Acosta] in 1997. People were motivated and the idea was that we would fight for the Tour.’ But individually, Olano could not live up to the incredibly high standard set by Indurain before.
In 1998, Olano won several middle-ranking stage races in Spain including the Bizicleta Vasca and Vuelta a Burgos. Although he was injured and abandoned the Tour de France, he bounced back in the Vuelta with a vengeance, winning overall. He rounded off his season with victory in the World Time Trial Championships. But Olano and Banesto’s management had fallen out, principally, he says, over their apparent failure to support him as leader when team-mate José María Jiménez began racing in his own interests in the Vuelta. A disgruntled Olano signed with ONCE for 1999, and spent the rest of his career with Banesto’s key rival. ‘I was very upset, because I felt the management weren’t taking responsibility for their errors and at the same time I thought ONCE had more of a family feel to it. Also because Manolo [Saiz] might give his riders a bollocking, but he always defended them.’
As for the chances of him following in Indurain’s wheel-tracks, Olano argues that it never felt like a reasonable proposition. ‘I’m from northern Spain, we had very similar ways of racing, and I understood people labelling me as his successor. All I could do was do the best possible, and I’m very happy with my palmares, even if some people feel it didn’t live up to Indurain’s standards.’
History was not in his favour, though: ‘Normally there’s a new big name in cycling about once every ten years and that was Miguel in the 1990s and it would have been pretty weird that another, new rider, coming from the same area, impacted in the way that Miguel did. I never saw myself as a successor. I was labelled that way, above all in the period when I was with Banesto, but I never gave that label to myself. I was one of the best in Spain, but abroad there were riders who were bett
er than me.’
‘It was very unfair on Olano, he was a great rider, but first he had to handle all that stuff with the 1995 Worlds, even though it was simply a question of team tactics,’ observes Delgado. ‘If there had been a gap between him and Miguel, maybe it would have been much simpler. He could have finished fifth in the Tour three or four years later and people would have said, great. But instead he had to handle things immediately after Miguel had gone and that fourth or fifth place in the Tour – people weren’t so impressed. In terms of time between one Tour and the next, there wasn’t any space for them to lose interest and so Abraham had to go through everything he did.’
Ultimately what the Indurain legacy meant to Olano was not in terms of achievements, but rather its negative effect: ‘I retired a lot earlier than I would have liked, because of the way Miguel had been treated by the media in the Vuelta and the criticism he had to handle there. I thought “If they are prepared to treat him like that, with all he’s achieved, how are they going to treat me, a person who’s achieved a heck of a lot less?” Something like that can scar you. A person [Indurain] who has done so much for cycling and for the sport, and then the day he cracks in the Vuelta which he didn’t even want to do … what are you going to do to the rest of us? Shoot us?’
Curiously, speculation in Spain about the next Indurain, though, all but stopped completely after Olano. There were murmurings about Ángel Luis Casero, also a tall, gifted time triallist, who won the Tour de l’Avenir in 1994 and Santi Blanco, about whom Echavarri famously said, in his umpteenth play on words, ‘the 2000 Tour will be coloured “white” [Blanco]’. Both raced for Banesto but much as happened when Olano left Indurain’s team, when Blanco and Casero quit for Mínguez’s new squad, Vitalicio Seguros in 1998 (as did Prudencio Indurain), the comparisons dried up fast. And unlike in Belgium, where even Frank Vandenbroucke, twenty years on, was labelled as the next Eddy Merckx, or in France, where both Jean-François Bernard and Laurent Fignon were dubbed as potential Hinaults in the making, in Spain there seems to be no such need to fill the vast gap left behind by their greatest ever champion. Perhaps, though, that is due to the patchiness of Spain’s ‘cycling culture’ outside the Basque Country and Navarre, and the massive emotional investment many Spaniards had made in Indurain.
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