Indurain

by Alasdair Fotheringham

  Outside Spain, Indurain has also been attacked for failing to show the same degree of driving, all-out ambition as Hinault, Merckx or even Anquetil, the five-times Tour winner most similar to Indurain in racing style. The figures appear to back this up: in the Tour de France, in total Indurain spent 61 days in yellow and won 12 stages, four more days in the lead than Anquetil, but with four fewer stage wins. Merckx’s Tour total of 96 days in yellow and 32 stages, and Hinault’s 78 days and 21 stages, are far higher. Indurain’s approach path to the summit, a steady, year-on-year improvement in the Tour de France – abandon in 1985 and 1986, 97th in 1987, 47th in 1988, 17th in 1989, 10th in 1990, 1st from 1991–5 – suggests little of an impulsive racer, either: rather someone who gradually but relentlessly refined his strategies and performances.

  Indurain’s career, like Hinault’s, was one of the shorter of the top champions – 12 years in comparison to Merckx’s 14 at the summit and Anquetil’s 15. Even José Miguel Echavarri recognised this up to a point when he once said, ‘Of the four – Hinault, Merckx, Anquetil, Indurain’s the best all-rounder … for the Tour.’

  It sometimes feels futile to compare different historical eras in cycling, given the way events were raced in different eras and their relative difficulty makes for an automatically distorted contrast. But what cannot be denied is that of the five-times Tour winners, Indurain has the leanest palmares outside it. And as Eddy Merckx has never been slow to point out when asked about Indurain, other races count, too.

  To take the five-times winner most similar to Indurain, Anquetil lacked the voracity of Merckx or Hinault. But apart from netting five Tours, two Giros and an Hour Record, like Indurain, he won five editions of Paris–Nice – two more than Indurain, as well as three events Indurain never did: a Monument – Liège–Bastogne–Liège – and two more of the most prestigious lesser Classics, Bordeaux–Paris and Gent–Wevelgem. Only in the World Championships – where there was no Time Trial event at the time – does Indurain have an edge on the Frenchman, with a TT gold, two road-race silvers and a bronze compared to one silver. There is one achievement, though, which is Indurain’s alone: he is the first, and to date only, rider to have taken the Giro and Tour double in two successive years, 1992 and 1993. That particular feat even proved impossible for Merckx. What is fair to conclude, then, is that Indurain’s victories in the Tour built up so quickly, they tended to overshadow, wrongly, the rest of his triumphs.

  ‘When they attack people for having one objective [like Indurain in the Tour] then I say look at Chris Froome,’ argues Olano in Indurain’s defence. His point is that Froome has also given overwhelming priority to the Tour. But as Olano sees it, there is logic behind Froome’s doing so – and by extension, Indurain’s. ‘It’s clear that if you’ve got a peak of form for one objective in the year, then it’s always going to be better than when you try to go for two objectives. And that first peak of form is always better than the second.’

  As Olano sees it, Indurain’s character is what gives his Tour wins their greatest value, and not just amongst his allies or inside Spain. He cites as an example when Laurant Jalabert gifted a win to a breakaway Bert Dietz in a stage of the Vuelta at Sierra Nevada in 1995, after closing down the former German amateur national champion’s 200 kilometre breakaway just metres from the line – but that Jalabert had only done so because he was obeying Saiz’s team orders. ‘I think that’s a winner’s mentality, and that’s normal when you are ambitious. I’m not going to say Miguel was generous, but he was respectful with his rivals. He always valued their hard work and if he beat them, he’d beaten a good rider – which indirectly made him an even better one. It wasn’t like the Spanish media’s attitude, which is when there’s a football match they start saying how bad the opposition are and then when we lose the match, suddenly the opposition are very good.’

  Furthermore, it was not only inside Spain that it was recognised that Indurain’s human qualities gave his victories a special edge. ‘He’s always had his feet on the ground, he’s an old-school champion,’ points out current Tour boss Christian Prudhomme. ‘He reminds me a lot of Poulidor’ – 1960s star Raymond Poulidor, who also had a strongly rural background – ‘even if Poulidor never wore yellow and Miguel won the Tour five times. There’s that deep wisdom of the countryman, the patience and the sense of taking time to work things through. That story about Indurain treating the Tours like harvests, I think it sums him up perfectly.’

  Prudhomme knew Indurain personally as a rider: he interviewed Indurain many times when working as a TV reporter in the 1990s and says that ‘he was always very discreet, he didn’t talk in French and that was a bit of a protective mechanism, he’d say something in fifteen seconds and Francis [Lafargue] would turn it into a minute long. But he was never somebody to try to stand out from the crowd on purpose … We’ve seen him a few times afterwards, in retirement, it took a heck of a long time to persuade him to come to the Tour’s 100th anniversary celebrations but finally, he came.’

  Speaking from a personal point of view, Jean Marie Leblanc, a former team-mate of Anquetil’s and the Tour’s director throughout the Indurain years, argues that he was ‘exemplary as a grand champion, physically graceful, and morally, too – no scandals. His performances in time trials were magnificent. As a racer he was one of the most graceful I’ve seen.’ From the media’s point of view, though, Indurain was, ‘Less good, too discreet in the interviews. I’m no fan of over-talkative types, but he didn’t talk enough.’

  There are those, particularly outside Spain, who have argued that Indurain’s Tour victories were favoured by an excess of time trialling. Certainly in comparison to the Tour under Christian Prudhomme’s management, the total number of kilometres of time trialling in the 1990s Tours was way higher. But whilst Leblanc is a passionate defender of time trialling – unlike Prudhomme – he also points out that he ‘cut down on the amount of time trialling from the years of [former Tour de France boss Félix] Levitan, so the routes were never “made” for Indurain.’ Only in 1992, when the Pyrenees were all but eliminated from the Tour, could it really be said there was a lack of mountain stages.

  Furthermore, Leblanc believes, time trialling has become sorely underexploited in the Tour. ‘There’s something very moving, eloquent, about them, as an absolute value in the sport, just as they were in the era of Anquetil. They can be magnificent events as performances, as they were with Indurain and even, albeit over a shorter distance, with Chris Boardman. And we have to show that.’ Indurain’s legacy in time trialling, he believes, should not be so quickly consigned to history – and it is hard to disagree.

  Arnaud makes what is possibly the most valid criticism of Indurain: that is, not of the rider – whom he admired greatly – but rather that the Grand Tours are given far more importance than they deserve. ‘In my opinion, what Eddy Merckx did in Milano–Sanremo, winning it seven times, has more value than Indurain, Merckx and Hinault winning the Tour five times. You have a bad day in the Tour, you can recover. They say that Milano–Sanremo is a lottery of a race, so many chances of misfortunes, crashes and so on. How many people do you know that have won the lottery seven times?’

  As for L’Équipe, the semi-official newspaper for the Tour, ‘Jean Marie Leblanc called him THE champion of the Tour. To say that is too much of a reduction because of what else he achieved, but at the same time, the phrase has a real ring of truth to it because the rest was never anything but a way of reaching his big objective: the Tour,’ once wrote Philippe Bouvet, formerly L’Équipe’s most experienced cycling journalist. ‘He was never a born winner like Eddy Merckx because he never had the slightest taste for pointless victories but his absolute superiority in time trials put him at his ease in defensive racing, where he was unbeatable. So more than the memory of spectacular racing like the other icons of the sport, he leaves behind a palmares [which places Indurain] just behind the four greatest: Coppi, Hinault, Merckx and Anquetil.’

  Yet no-one could deny that manag
ing to remain on top of the Tour de France for five years, without once falling apart and with a limited series of skills, puts Indurain in a class of his own. ‘The merit was not getting there, the merit was to stay there,’ as Unzué puts it. ‘He wouldn’t engage in the race, because he didn’t need to, he had a defensive style that was very effective, not flamboyant or particularly interesting, but very effective. A bit like [pre-2016 Tour de France] Sky,’ observes Boardman. Indeed, Sir Bradley Wiggins, who took Sky’s first Tour in 2012, is a self-confessed huge Indurain fan.

  And where Indurain surely trumps almost everybody is how positive a legacy he leaves behind as a person, his acting as the living proof that the unpleasant, ruthless aspects that some claim are necessary for a top athlete to succeed can, in fact, be superfluous. ‘The peloton can’t make you win a race, but it can make you lose one,’ observes Boardman. ‘But people didn’t think “I’m not letting that bastard do that” because he and his team treated you with respect, they were nice, they did a good job and that makes a big difference. Did people feel intimidated? I think I’d call it frustration because his team was almost impossible to combat, as well as feeling a deep fondness for him.’

  ‘As a person, he’s the greatest Tour champion,’ comments Pedro Delgado. ‘Everybody would agree cycling’s greatest is Eddy Merckx and I myself have got a soft spot for Bernard Hinault for the way he raced. But as that son that every mother would like to have, or that sportsman showing a kind of dignity at all times who lets others have their moment of triumph … that sense of fair play, I think Indurain is the example to follow. Totally.

  ‘He wasn’t just a champion inside his sport, but he was a champion off the bike as well. That, more than the Olympic gold, the five Tours, the World Championships, was the best legacy he left. People felt proud he was Spanish. His modesty is very much appreciated, because it’s not normal that a top sportsman is so normal.’

  Prudencio is careful to precede his remarks with ‘he’s my brother’ but still calls Miguel Indurain ‘the sportsman who’s held in most esteem in Spain; him, Nadal and [basketball star Pau] Gasol.’

  The question of whether Indurain, ‘the most perfect human machine’ as El Mundo Deportivo once called him, left cycling too early is perhaps the greatest unanswerable question hanging over his career. But if Manolo Saiz would have loved to have had Indurain in his team for at least a year, and if seeing Indurain race in a different squad would have been intriguing, Indurain himself never seems to have looked back too hard in regret. ‘Am I sad? No,’ El País reported him as saying in the only question he appears to have answered after his 1997 retirement press conference. ‘No. I knew this was a day that was coming, and it’s finally here.’

  ‘I was pleased when he said he was quitting,’ says his friend and soigneur for many years Manu Arrieta. ‘A sixth Tour was possible, but five was enough. Because I’ve seen lots of champions dragging themselves along at the end of their career and he didn’t. The day he said he was retiring, I went round to his house afterwards. I was the first one to go there, and I told him, “Even if you think you’ve made a bad choice one of these days, it was the best thing you could do. You didn’t want to be dragging yourself along.”’ Arrieta concludes, ‘I’m very grateful for what he did, but the thing is, he’s irrepeatable.’

  Perhaps the person, though, who feels he has gained the most from Indurain’s career is not a fan or a Banesto staff member or a journalist: it is his brother Prudencio. ‘I was lucky enough to race in the best team in the world with the best cyclist in the world and on top of that he’s my brother,’ he comments, and then pats his chest. ‘Being together, eating, travelling, racing together, all of that – it’s all in here.’

  Afterword: A Face in the Crowd

  High above the small town of Estella in western Navarre, the basilica dedicated to the Virgin Mary of Puy does not get too many religious visitors. Masses are only held twice a week, on Saturdays at 7.25 a.m. and Sundays at 1 p.m. Sales of recordings of the basilica choir seem scant, too, to judge from the poster on the church door advertising ‘LP records at 1000 pesetas, CDs and cassettes at 2000 pesetas’. Even for those faithful few still playing music in those semi-defunct formats, the peseta went out of circulation over a decade ago.

  Amongst any congregation, though, there will likely be a fair scattering of pilgrims walking the Santiago Way, the trail that crosses northern Spain, and through Estella, en route to the shrine of St. James in Santiago de Compostela, 800 kilometres further on. The historically minded might wish to see the plaque on the church’s outside wall, dedicated to a number of generals who were executed against it during Spain’s nineteenth-century Civil Wars. It’s a safe bet, too, that pupils from next door’s religious school are familiar with the basilica, formerly a medieval hermitage constructed when shepherds guided by a star – Estella in Latin, like the town’s name – discovered an image of the Virgin in a cave on the hilltop.

  And other visitors? Twice a year, in May and August, the local great and good of Estella will climb up the winding road from the town below to the basilica for local festivals in honour of the Virgin of Puy and Saint Andrew. But otherwise, the church is relatively quiet, with one notable exception: late each spring, when the basilica and the large stone-flagged courtyard immediately below it play host to a very different kind of spectacle.

  On a warm Saturday afternoon, on the far side of the courtyard, Fermin Aramendi, the longstanding cycling commentator for the Basque ETB television channel, is sitting in a lone mobile TV broadcasting unit. Aramendi, a grizzled, whippet-thin fifty-something-year-old kitted out in shorts, sandals and T-shirt, is commentating on Navarre’s top race, the Gran Premio Miguel Indurain. As Aramendi talks, the bunch are powering across the rolling, verdant farmland, en route towards the uphill finish in Estella – where Indurain, now approaching his third decade of retirement and still living near his home town in Pamplona, Navarre’s capital, is set to give the prizes.

  To judge by the finish line ‘atmosphere’ at 3 p.m., two hours before the riders are due, it doesn’t seem as if there will be a warm welcome for the crowds. The large courtyard itself, lined with centuries-old oak and beech trees, is all but empty. Besides Aramendi’s mobile TV unit, the only visible race-related structures are a finish line banner that looks as if it was built entirely out of white cardboard boxes (and is about as safe): a small field hospital tent that will be used for anti-doping tests; and next to it a mobile winners’ podium and canopy, incorporated onto the back of a flatbed trailer.

  A quick walk down some steps, past some backyards and onto a broad side road on the rear side of the basilica reveals why the courtyard is so deserted. The 191-kilometre-long GP Miguel Indurain consists of no fewer than four loops through Estella, each circuit completed when the peloton dashes along the Paseo de la Inmaculada avenue. This is Estella’s main arterial road, which runs from one bridge to another in a straight line over a gigantic, U-shaped meander in the city’s biggest river, the Ega.

  To reach Estella, though, the riders have to tackle one of the steeper suburban roads on the line of hills on its northern side. It’s here, on the unclassified Ibarra climb, that the bulk of the local fans are waiting. Standing in clumps of twos and threes and stretched along the roads, they are noticeably not wearing any of the usual diehard cycling paraphernalia – replica team jerseys or musettes being the most obvious giveaways. Instead the crowd is mainly parents with pushchairs, young couples with folding chairs and boxes of sandwiches, schoolkids on their way home after the 3 p.m. end-of-class siren has wailed out, or elderly folk easing back in the sunshine on some of the few benches. Perhaps as can be expected from a race ranked 1.1 – two categories lower than cycling’s top league, the World Tour – this is very much a local crowd and a local event.

  The 2016 line-up, though, does more than justice to a race named after Spain’s greatest ever rider. Amongst the seventeen teams taking part are exotic ‘minnows’ like the Kuwaiti team (albeit withou
t a single Kuwaiti rider): the Dominican Ineja-MMR squad; the Russian national amateur team; and a tonguetwister of a low-profile Latvian development squad, Rietemu-Delfin, which once boasted former World Time Trial Champion and longstanding Pamplona resident Vasil Kiryienka in their ranks. But at the head of affairs – and firm favourites – are Navarran-based Movistar, the latest incarnation of Indurain’s lifelong squad and Spain’s only WorldTour team. Then there are the top American, Russian and Australian teams in the shape of Cannondale, Katusha and Orica-GreenEdge and, in a late coup for the race organiser, the Tour de France defending champion’s squad, Sky.

  The list of former winners of the GP Miguel Indurain is a strong one, too. Known prior to 1999 by the rather unwieldy name of Trofeo Comunidad Foral de Navarra (The Trophy of the Chartered Community of Navarre), it is the region’s only professional one-day race, and most of Spain’s current top names have triumphed there. They include Olympic champion Samuel Sánchez, Movistar’s Alejandro Valverde, repeatedly ranked the world’s number one racer, and all-rounder Joaquim Rodríguez, whose team-mate Ángel Vicioso, a Giro d’Italia stage winner, is the joint record-holder with 1940s and 50s Spanish racer Hortensio Vidaurreta and Juan Fernández, the triple bronze medallist in the World Championships for victories: three.

  Also present in the roll of honour are numerous other riders who featured in Miguel Indurain’s career. Apart from Pedro Delgado, there’s Fernández, of course, a room-mate with Indurain in the Spanish national squad in the 1980s, and Julián Gorospe (not to be confused with his brother Rubén, also a racer) was a winner in 1992, whilst Marino Alonso clinched the race two years later. In 1996, Zülle, the runner-up in the Tour de France the previous year, won the Trofeo de Navarra in a spectacular long-distance break, triumphing with nearly two minutes’ advantage over Laurent Jalabert. It almost goes without saying that Indurain, too, won the event in 1987, as he slowly but steadily clambered towards the realms of cycling stardom.