Indurain

by Alasdair Fotheringham

  ‘There was a legacy of interest in cycling as a whole, and within that the huge doubt, after one champion can there be another like him?’ points out Manolo Saiz. ‘In fact, we were lucky that after him, there were various stars, because we knew how to take care of the cycling base. But only Olano lived through the problem of “If Indurain won a Tour then so must you” because people, in general, wanted that to happen so much. But after him, there were no such issues for [later stars] Joseba Beloki or Alberto Contador or Alejandro Valverde.’

  This lack of a hangover from the Indurain era was also partly due to a racing strategy that had no established links to Spanish cycling history. Traditionally its top Tour performers had been erratic climbers in the vein of Pedro Delgado and Federico Bahamontes or if they were gifted time triallists – like Luis Ocaña – were notably inconsistent or firebrand strategists. Barring Olano, the dearth of riders who produced consistently good results and who were also gifted against the clock – as well as the rapid emergence of a hugely talented and charismatic, if wayward, climber like José María Jiménez, all contributed to the idea that Indurain was indeed a unique cycling phenomenon.

  ‘I don’t think he’s left a legacy in terms of how he raced, and to be honest I don’t think that’s a bad thing. It’s not something the public particularly like,’ argues Juan Carlos González Salvador. ‘They prefer the Alberto Contador style of racing, attacking all over the place, testing the opposition just in case they crack at every point. Miguel never did that.’

  ‘But he wasn’t racing for his sponsor, for his public, for anything like that. He was racing to win, and simply because he had the most options of winning like that. And if there were people out there who didn’t like it, well they don’t have to watch.’

  ‘I think more than the Tours per se, he’s proud of how he did it. The self-sacrifices and the effort he had to put in to get them. The results – that’s for other people to look at and consider.’

  Not that Indurain had any intention, after his retirement, of capitalising on his popularity to forge a career. Rumours in the spring of 1997 that he would continue at Banesto after they offered him some kind of unspecified position within the company’s organigram were quickly scotched. Equally, there was never any clear sign that Indurain would form part of another team’s management or, although he has formed part of UCI committees, take up any other permanent role inside the cycling community. When he was linked, inaccurately, to Fernando Alonso’s aborted cycling team project as a manager, Indurain denied it immediately.

  Initially Indurain would very sporadically appear in commercials – mostly for food products, like yoghurts – and he still takes part in cyclo-tourist events, sometimes for top charities, and is sometimes a guest at races, or acts as a media consultant. But this was the professional who once talked about how he would spend at least some of his retirement time with the senior citizens of Villava, playing cards – at which he is reportedly extremely good. Indurain’s dedication to ‘the quiet life’ has been as consistent, then, as it was to his racing.

  Still living in Pamplona, Indurain will make excursions to homages to his former team-mates, such as the one to Dominique Arnaud in France when a square was named after the Frenchman in the town of Les Mées in 2016, shortly before Arnaud’s death. But it is never to play the star. ‘I remember when he came to a showing of a cycling documentary,’ says Pierre Carrey, a French journalist from near Pau, ‘and he was really acting just like another normal person. After the documentary, he started stacking away the chairs in the hall – unasked. I can’t see another big cycling name doing that.’

  One element shines through all this: Indurain’s dedication to his family, to his wife and three children. It was not just cycling: for the best part of one year Indurain used to drive from Pamplona to Barcelona with his son Miguel to watch Catalonia’s top football team. Typically of Indurain, he insisted on doing so without publicity and paying his own way for the tickets.

  ‘I do a bit of everything,’ Indurain said in an interview with Catalan newspaper La Vanguardia in May 2016. ‘Luckily I don’t need to clock on for eight hours a day. There’s a bit of advertising work, my business deals, a foundation [now run by the Navarran regional government with limited private backing and named after Indurain, who is its president] to help top athletes. I don’t get bored. But what is true is that I don’t travel as much. I started travelling at eighteen, now I’m fifty-two and it’s getting harder and harder for me to leave home.’ He has also, throughout the years, dedicated considerable amounts of time to fundraising events for charities. And every October, Indurain is the star of the show at the CC Villava dinner and team presentation, greeting and talking to parents about the same club that he attended – and as did his children, too.

  ‘In Navarre, he’s widely admired, socially speaking he’s a positive reference point, but he’s admired for being Miguel, and for being so accessible to, say, whoever wants to stop him in the street and have a photo taken,’ comments Luis Guinea. ‘That is what people like the most, there’s no airs and graces, no showing off. I come across him training when I’m out on my bike and like everybody else, I can talk to him, the best ever Tour racer, about the most everyday things in the world. That’s really amazing.’ Nor is Guinea overly sure if Indurain, as a retiring, publicity-shy type, would be keen to have his legacy exploited more deeply.

  As of 2016, Indurain told La Vanguardia he had ‘no special project’ in mind for the future but he spent a fair amount of time riding his bike, ‘which is what I like doing. I like the open air, seeing how the countryside changes through the year with the changing seasons. I only go out now when the weather’s good, though.’ He is a keen walker and hunter. ‘You can tell how much he likes the countryside,’ says Manu Arrieta. ‘And when you’re following him in the mountains, he still goes walking along at one hell of a pace.’

  Of his three children, the eldest, Miguel has been the most interested in cycling and until 2016, formed part of the Caja Rural amateur squad, one of Navarre’s most important after the Banesto feeder team folded in 2001. ‘I remember seeing Miguel [senior] at an amateur race in France, standing on the side of the road in a torrential rainstorm under his umbrella watching his son take part and nobody even realised it was him,’ Saiz said. ‘When I drove past him I stopped, he gave me a really big smile, we were pleased to see each other.’ Indurain’s comment was cheerfully dry when Saiz commented on the nasty weather the racers were enduring: ‘Oh well, they shouldn’t have chosen to be cyclists.’

  The idea of Indurain as the image of modern Spain reverberated onwards after 1992 and the Euro-Tour victory. But by the time he quit, whilst still very much held up as a role model, his modern image was mentioned less than might have been expected in the mainstream media’s analysis of his career. Spain had grown used to its new, more solid status in Europe, perhaps, and at least symbolically, Indurain – like the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, like the Expo ’92 – represented a a breakthrough that was a thing of the past. But although Spanish cycling suffered from a major drop in interest when Indurain retired, as indicated by the halving of the TV viewing figures in the Vuelta when he quit, the stature of Spanish sport reached a new high tide mark both nationally and internationally thanks to him.

  ‘Until [Rafa] Nadal appears he’s rated as Spain’s greatest athlete of all time,’ argues Pedro Delgado. ‘I didn’t live through the Indurain era as an out-and-out fan,’ adds Alberto Contador, whose palmares of two Tours, two Giro and three Vueltas has come the closest of any rider barring Chris Froome, in or outside Spain, to Indurain’s. ‘I was only 15 when I started getting really interested in cycling, but I still remember how every July here in Spain in the early 1990s belonged to Indurain.’

  ‘He made people feel he was part of their lives and after Indurain quit racing my big brother bought a series of five video tapes called “Indurain’s Five Tours” and we wore them out, watching them again and again. He’s somebody for whom I feel
a huge amount of respect and admiration. He’s never been in the limelight like other retired champions, but he’s been a key example to follow.’

  Yet the irony of any great champion is, of course, the greater he or she is, the bigger the gap left to be filled after they quit. Concerning Spanish cycling in the post-Indurain era, ‘Well it dies a bit, doesn’t it?’ says Olano. ‘But that’s also because of other things. At WorldTour level we’re still doing well, but there has not been one champion since that pulled the masses together like Indurain.’

  ‘There had been an incredibly strong spotlight on cycling when Indurain was there, and when he went, people would say “but I just want to know about Indurain”,’ Delgado recognises. Yet Banesto remained as the team’s sponsor until 2003, long after Indurain had quit. The first major drop of top-level Spanish teams did not occur until 2006 and the Operación Puerto anti-doping probe, which was followed by the worst economic recession since the 1950s. By 2014 Echavarri and Unzué’s team was the only ProTour squad in Spain, and only one second-division squad, Caja Rural, remained in existence. Even Villava is no longer as strong a club as it was in Indurain’s heyday. ‘There was a time when there were 25 or 30 kids in each level and now there are only 80 altogether,’ observes Pruden. Although the latest crop of champions – Carlos Sastre, Contador, Valverde, Joaquim Rodríguez – have carried the flame well, they are all nearing retirement or in Sastre and Rodríguez’s cases, retired, and the lack of top teams makes finding substitutes an ever greater challenge.

  ‘Long-term in Spain I’d say the only legacy left of Indurain is the Movistar team,’ says Josu Garai. ‘Echavarri and Unzué have always been labelled the discoverers of Indurain and I imagine this has opened a lot of doors for them.’

  ‘But in Spain, in general, that golden age of Indurain and the boom of interest wasn’t exploited at all. We’ve had some great riders – Contador, Sastre, Olano – but in terms of the base, building for the future, that didn’t happen.’

  As for the professional team Indurain left behind, if Olano could not fill the gap in terms of results, Unzué argues that Indurain’s approach to racing endured for much longer. ‘He left us with a sense of internal calm, wanting to take those three extra seconds before we said something. There’s a saying in Spain están las cosas mejor por decir que dichas [things are better when they are still to be said] although maybe that doesn’t make sense to a journalist. But then,’ Unzué points out, ‘Miguel was a master of the language of gestures.’

  For all Indurain balanced his talent for non-verbal communication with a chronic inability to provide dramatic soundbites, he was still broadly liked, and appreciated, for his huge degree of empathy with the media. For those who argue that this could have been a way of currying favour, I would point to the degree of kindness Indurain showed towards everyone, not just the press. Javier García Sánchez, in his book Induráin: una pasión templada, illustrates this with an anecdote concerning Indurain heading for supper in the Banesto team hotel after his defeat at Les Arcs. Despite the physical exhaustion Indurain must have felt, as well as the massive disappointment and an urgent need to ‘fuel up’ with dinner, when he came through the hotel lobby he still took all the time in the world to sign autographs and pose with fans as he inched, step by step, to the dining room door. García Sánchez, who was witnessing the scene, says that it took Indurain a good fifteen minutes to cross a twenty-metre-wide lobby, during which time he was stopped no fewer than fifteen times by fans.

  In terms of the media, I can remember, too, one Spanish cycling journalist telling me how he was on the point of being fired by his editor after his requests for Indurain to give him some exclusive thoughts on the Tour had been stonewalled, time and again, by the Banesto media department. However, a chance encounter in the team hotel with Indurain when the journalist was on the point of throwing his computer at the lobby wall in despair saw Indurain insist the two sit down and do the interview. Internationally, William Fotheringham recollects the courtesy Indurain always showed when he was interviewed. In 1991 he wrote that Indurain was the only rider he had known who was polite enough to come down to the hotel lobby to take him up to his room for the interview, rather than letting him find his own way there.

  To say these are not typical kinds of behaviour on the part of a fair proportion of modern-day sports stars even when they only have a tenth of Indurain’s fame and results would be an understatement. As for the better known names in cycling, attitudes vary, but – by way of example of the wrong kind of media handling – Saiz argues that the rider who (briefly) succeeded Indurain as a five-times Tour winner paid a high price for his arrogant attitude to the press. ‘What brought Lance Armstrong down, ultimately, was his relationship with the media. Indurain never had that problem. He only ever saw the media for what it was, something that was there to tell people about what he did. He wasn’t looking out for “good” journalists or “bad” ones. He understood your role.’

  ‘People would ask him for photographs and they still do,’ observes Pruden, who knows this from personal experience – in public he was often mistaken for Miguel, and still is, when looked at from behind. ‘But we were never too bothered about the press, there was no Internet’ – and hence less stress for the journalists to file their stories, too – ‘so when they came to the house, we’d show them around a bit, give them a bit of wine. We’d get bus-loads of fans stopping outside the house and wanting to look, photographers … the fans still look out for him, but it doesn’t bother him very much.’

  On the plus side for Unzué, Indurain’s departure meant there was – in the mid to long term after it was realised what Olano’s true limits were – a considerable drop in the level of expectation about what Banesto could achieve. This, in turn, allowed racing and directing to regain one pleasurable aspect. ‘Afterwards there were great riders, but when you raced with them, you no longer felt so obliged to win,’ he reflects. ‘Winning the Vuelta with Abraham in 1998, say, was really something very beautiful, it was so difficult to do. We did the Vuelta knowing that there were a lot of days we could lose it. But [as with Indurain] you never had that obligation to win, which is the really tough part.’

  Even the head of the strongest opposition in Spain (or elsewhere) to Indurain recognises that what struck him, as much as if not more than the victories, was the attitude of the man that captured them. ‘What I most admired about him was his tranquillity, his ability to treat things as normal,’ says Saiz. ‘I’d go to the Tour de France and get angry because they took half an hour to serve me my pasta in the hotel restaurant. He was always calm enough to say, “It doesn’t matter, I’ll eat it when it comes.”’

  ‘I remember one year we went to get the TGV to go to Paris and I was pissed off because it didn’t arrive on time,’ adds Saiz, ‘and I said, “God, they’re always late in this country,” and he simply answered, “and who cares about that, if we have to do it anyway?”’

  Unzué, too, is unstinting in his praise of Indurain’s human qualities, saying ‘When it turns out that you’ve got a world class figure living on your doorstep, somebody as straightforward and normal as Miguel, those qualities are what we still remember. It’s very easy for me to say he’s a legend, but it’s true. There are other people who’ve won five Tours or who have a more splendid palmares, but the way he won them – that is what puts him on a special level.’ As Olano confirms, ‘Miguel as an athlete was brilliant but as a person, even more so.’

  Indurain’s ability to put a broader perspective on things never failed him, even in his worst defeats, confirms his brother Pruden. ‘In 1996 in the Tour he was the one who calmed us down, everybody was upset except him. And the same thing happened with the Hour Record and when he retired from the Vuelta, it would be “hey, I’m fine, no problem, no pasa nada”,’

  Indurain himself, in a 1995 interview for the magazine Cycle Sport, was typically low-key about how he would like to be remembered: ‘as a normal person who had a certain vocation and w
ho did it the best he could.’ He did not, he said, care what was written on his gravestone: ‘Once you’re gone,’ he pointed out with a dose of his most laconic style, ‘you’re gone.’

  Yet for all Indurain’s calculating racing style was seen as a harbinger of modern Spain, in terms of cycling’s fight against banned drugs and doping there was something fin-de-siècle about Indurain’s succession of Tour wins, too. It is true that doping offences, or suspicions of them, have regularly stained one or another champion’s copybook since bike racing began. But it’s equally undeniable that from the late 1980s onwards, the background noise from stories involving banned drugs and professional cycling slowly but surely grew louder across the board. Olano himself was named by a French Senate report in 2013, 15 years later, as one of 18 riders in the 1998 Tour de France who had traces of EPO discovered in retro-active testing, a charge Spanish media later said he had rejected. What few direct accusations there have been concerning Indurain, though, as opposed to the steadily darkening cloud of suspicion that surrounds that period of time, have never been substantiated.

  Regardless of the developments in cycling in the last 20 years, some for better and others for worse, Indurain’s massive grassroots popularity in Spain endures. Abroad, however, Indurain was – and sometimes still is – criticised as being excessively dull as a racer. As William Fotheringham once wrote in the Guardian, ‘Indurain was the first Spanish stealth champion, and each July the most dramatic event was the annual ritual of watching him receive his birthday cake.’