Three Weeks, Eight Seconds

by Tassell, Nige;

  Back down the road, that group of elite riders was beginning to rupture. William Palacio put in an unlikely attack, trying to stretch the bunch, a manoeuvre from which his leader Delgado could profit. But everyone was wise to the plan. No one took the bait. Fignon and LeMond only had eyes for each other, although – sat on the Frenchman’s wheel for most of the day – the American was out of Fignon’s eyeline, much to the Super U man’s aggravation. ‘He sucked the wheels as best he could,’ he later complained of LeMond, ‘and made it obvious he was just going to be a spectator.’ His team’s attempts to test LeMond, including an impressive, hard-riding spell on the front of the bunch by Gérard Rué, couldn’t dislodge him.

  Once this group headed out of Cauterets and onto that last brutal climb, Charly Mottet flew off the front, the assassin in the mirror shades. It was as if he had been abiding by a speed limit when riding through the town centre and, once back on the open road, was permitted to floor it. His raw pace and distinctive out-of-the-saddle riding style, his hips shimmying like those of a ballroom dancer, saw him fly past Palacio at double the Spaniard’s speed.

  The lead of the rapidly tiring Induráin over the yellow jersey was down to four and a half minutes and dropping, thanks to the injection of pace from this elite group. Delgado hit the pedals to bridge to Mottet, shadowed by the vigilant Theunisse. Very shortly, though, just as the trio captured Murguialday, Delgado rode away from his companions. The other BH rider Fuerte was in his crosshairs.

  By now, Induráin’s legs were so tight and tired that the flag-wielding fans running alongside him barely had to break into a jog to keep up. In marked contrast, so sharp was Delgado’s attack that his admirers had to sprint with all their might. Would the leader catch his team-mate? And, if so, what was the plan?

  As the Cambasque’s inclines began to reduce in their severity, Induráin found something of a second wind. Passing the 2km banner, there was enough left in his tank for one last out-of-the-saddle effort. The crowd, delighted by the gutsiness of the young prince, were nonetheless even more ecstatic when the incumbent king Delgado made an appearance a couple of minutes later. Cameras flashed and Basque flags waved even more fiercely at the reigning champion, despite Induráin’s home turf being significantly closer than that of Delgado, the man from Segovia. The fact that the man splitting them, Fuerte, was also Spanish only increased the collective pleasure.

  With the comparative plateau of the last few hundred metres easing the pain, Induráin summoned sufficient energy to lift one hand off the handlebars and acknowledge his first Tour stage victory with a partial salute. He was spent after an astonishing individual effort that no one thought was within him.

  Paul Sherwen, from his vantage point in the Channel 4 commentary box, hadn’t foreseen Induráin’s potential. ‘He just looked like a big, strong domestique,’ he concedes. Andy Hampsten similarly didn’t think back then that the Spaniard would turn out to be a serial Tour champion. ‘I certainly hadn’t caught on to that, no. I missed it.’

  The journalist François Thomazeau, a man with the ear of Reynolds team boss José-Miguel Echavarri, had some inside information. ‘Echavarri told me in March at the Critérium International [which Induráin won] that he was a rough diamond he had been polishing for years. He told me that he still wanted Miguel to learn a bit in the 1989 Tour, but that he believed he would win at least five Tours. And he did.’

  Despite Induráin’s endeavours, the roars that accompanied Delgado’s last mile were even louder. It was as though he had won another precious Vuelta title. Instead, he had merely taken third place in the first mountain stage of a Tour de France in which he had started the day in 28th position and nearly seven minutes down on the yellow jersey. Not that you’d know the action was taking place on the French side of the Pyrenees. There wasn’t a tricolour in sight. The red, green and white of the Basque flag dominated.

  While there was obvious delight for Induráin’s maiden victory, the resurrection of Delgado had given the crowd even more pleasure. The Spanish retention of the ultimate crown in cycling could still happen. The key, though, was the extent of his time gap over the other GC contenders. What damage had Delgado done? How much time had he recouped that he could take off that self-made debt?

  The answer came precisely 27 seconds later. The group had rallied on the last climb and the green jersey of Kelly brought that group over, one that also contained Rooks, Theunisse, Fignon, Mottet and, most significantly, LeMond. The American, having fretted about the mountains all week, had passed his first test. He had matched Fignon pedal-for-pedal up and down a series of truly testing climbs and had found himself to be not wanting, even if the Frenchman was indignant about his refusal to respond to Induráin’s initial attack. ‘LeMond didn’t blink,’ he sniffed. ‘I was the one who was forced to keep them within reach. All he did was sit tight and take advantage of the work I put in. To be honest, it was extremely frustrating.’

  LeMond was resolute in defending his tactics, reminding reporters of the leaderboard. ‘It wasn’t for me to ride behind Induráin. He is more than seven minutes behind in the standings. It’s not for me to push. It’s for Laurent. I have to protect the lead I have on him.’

  Nearly three decades later, the LeMonds are still responding to accusations that Greg didn’t ride with style in the mountains in ’89. ‘It bugs me when people talk about the tactics,’ says Kathy, ‘when they say Greg didn’t attack. Well, if you’ve got no team and you’ve not climbed a Tour mountain in two years and you don’t really know your ability any more, you would be an idiot to ride in a show-off way. You’re not going to win! He rode the way he rode because he had to. He rode really smart.’

  As he answered questions at the finish on the Cambasque, LeMond was pleased about how his fitness had held up over four and a half hours in the saddle, much of which was spent going uphill. ‘Today’s stage shows that I am in better form than the Tour of Italy. I had a good day. That was reassuring for me. But that doesn’t say that the next stage is going to go as well. Now it is a problem of recuperation, for me and the others, too.’ The message? Ask me in the morning.

  For now, he would wear the maillot jaune for another day, for another blue-chip mountain stage. Two days into his leadership, LeMond appeared at ease in yellow. On the podium, Miguel Induráin was a little less comfortable. He looked a little lost, a little shell-shocked. Yet to master the art of publicly putting on a jersey with the world’s media watching him, he needed help getting the polka-dot jersey of the King of the Mountains leader over his head. Then the presentation women had to give him his first lesson in how to hold a Coca-Cola-branded bouquet to get maximum exposure for the sponsor. But he would learn. The future Tour legend had plenty of opportunities over the years to come to get it right.

  ***

  There was one notable absentee from the finish enclosure. More than five minutes after Sean Kelly had been presented with yet another green jersey, his compatriot Stephen Roche limped over the line, quarter of an hour after Induráin. As much as the stage truly announced the Spaniard’s arrival in the Tour, an injury to the Irishman effectively drew the curtain on this Tour grandee’s season.

  On a cold, crisp January morning in Antibes on the French Riviera, Roche – the silver-topped, 57-year-old version, the one more than double the age he was when he won cycling’s Triple Crown – has just returned home from a two-hour ride. He’s in better shape than he was on that July afternoon in the Pyrenees twenty-seven and a half years earlier.

  Having missed the ’88 Tour with a debilitating knee injury, his race hit trouble. It was all down to his ascent of the Marie Blanque. While his Fagor team-mate Robert Forest was the first rider to reach the summit, Roche was suffering back down the mountain. ‘I slipped a gear and hit my knee on the end of the handlebar. Boomf. It wasn’t too bad going over the climb and down the far side. But at the bottom of the next hill, it was so, so, so painful.

  ‘I got to the finish and the doctor looked at me. “Maybe to
morrow it will be OK.” I never abandon a race. You might not start the next day, but you never abandon. Once you climb off, you’re going to wonder what might have been. And I couldn’t have a Did Not Finish on my CV. A DNF wasn’t an option. I never wanted to cry off or pull out for a stupid reason. And you’re taking the place of someone else when you’re riding the Tour. As a mark of respect for these guys, you go to the limit. You push yourself over the barriers. You’re lucky enough to have a place on this Tour and you cannot justify not going until the finish.

  ‘And the next day could be better, you know?

  ‘But the next morning, I walked down the steps to breakfast and it was so painful that there was no point even thinking about getting on a bike. It was just such a stupid thing. It was that same knee again. Had it been the other knee, you never know. But it was the bad one, which was still fairly fragile. There wasn’t so much damage. But it was a bruise on an already damaged knee.’

  Roche’s team-mate and compatriot Paul Kimmage was riding alongside his leader at the time. ‘It was giving him fierce pain,’ he subsequently wrote in his book Rough Ride, ‘and we called the race doctor. The spray can was produced but we all knew that the solution was not to be found in an aerosol. He was cooked, it was over. The bête noire had struck again.

  ‘Stephen was in terrible pain and riding on one leg. We were quickly distanced by the leaders, but left a lot of struggling bodies behind us – men with two good knees. I stayed at his right shoulder, Eddy [Schepers] on his left. I never once put my bike in front of his, riding all of the time a half-length behind – I didn’t want to insult his dignity any further. Photographers and television crews surrounded us, like vultures waiting to be called to dinner. They all wanted to capture the moment when the great champion puts his foot to the ground and abandons the race. But he wasn’t going to give them that pleasure. Roche’s golden rule was that he never abandoned. He was riding to Cauterets.’

  The pain was heightened by the fact that the Aubisque had previously been a happy hunting ground for Roche. In 1985, in one of the most defining performances of the ten Tours he rode over the years, the Dubliner scored a terrific win on the mountain, a courageous solo ride that took a minute and a half out of yellow jersey Bernard Hinault and all but secured Roche a place on the podium come Paris. Four years on, his wounded struggle up the Aubisque’s slopes was a long way from that thrusting, almost cocky ride to victory.

  Roche’s problems ran deeper than a bang on the knee. After that Aubisque triumph in the colours of the La Redoute team, and the Triple Crown for Carrera in ’87, his second year with Fagor wasn’t panning out the way he’d hoped. After Roche’s injury and poor form in ’88, the squad had been severely weakened by a few departures, especially from the English-speaking quarter – the likes of Robert Millar, Sean Yates and the Sheffield sprinter, Malcolm Elliott. ‘To get a podium finish [in ’89], those are the riders I would have needed,’ Roche explains. ‘It wasn’t that the team wasn’t a good team, but if you’re riding for a leader who’s going to win a stage or the GC or a podium place that brings in a couple of extra dollars, you’ll always dig that little deeper. You know something’s going to be coming back from it.’

  Because Roche’s form wasn’t good, his influence when it came to recruitment had been weakened. Signing the riders he wanted on the squad, or even recommending them, was difficult to the point of impossible. ‘For ’88, I was able to bring riders in because I was world champion. But when you’re the wounded ex-world champion, you’ve no real power to impose someone you really want on the team. My power didn’t go very far. I was in the passenger seat.

  ‘You’re basically told, “Well, get results and you can talk. For the moment, it’s the way we want it. We know what we’re doing.” That’s the way a lot of teams worked in those days. Generally, when all goes well, everything is great and you can ask for a lot. When things start going wrong, you have to roll in with everyone else.’ The usurping of Roche ally Patrick Valcke as directeur sportif was a further measure of the team leader’s declining influence.

  ‘Equipment was also a big thing. When the management of a team goes to suppliers looking for equipment, if they know what they’re talking about and are respected, they get a lot more. But the Fagor management weren’t very highly respected and weren’t getting good deals. They were going for equipment that wasn’t the best. We had very heavy bikes. Nothing was going well for us.’

  It was a scenario that Yates would recognise from his first year on the team. ‘At Peugeot, there had always been a real sense of professionalism,’ he later wrote of his first pro team. ‘The mechanics at Fagor were gleefully free of that kind of responsibility.’

  Chaos seemed to seep into the workings of the team, from the top brass downwards. ‘The whole Fagor management had the potential to do a lot of good things,’ reasons Roche, ‘but everyone was fighting, looking for power. It was all about being seen, about putting the blazer on. They didn’t realise there was more to it than putting the money in. The equipment, the psychology…’

  The highest-profile exit thus far, Roche’s departure from the race the morning after Cauterets was swiftly followed by his departure from the turmoil of Fagor. Some sweet release after two years of sanity-shredding decisions. Out of the madhouse. A free man.

  That July morning, Roche’s name was removed from the general classification. The leaderboard was getting rewritten in other ways. After days of stagnation, as expected the first Pyrenean day had reordered its upper echelons, with time trialists like Thierry Marie and Sean Yates now banished into the murky depths of the peloton. Erik Breukink surrendered his fourth place rather meekly, down 14 minutes after trailing home in 75th position. The Panasonic assistant boss Ferdi Van den Haute put the underwhelming performance down to Breukink being ‘too nervous. This is his third Tour and each time he started with great hopes but his nerves let him down.’

  As well as seriously stretching his green jersey lead over the increasingly distant Etienne De Wilde and Søren Lilholt, Kelly’s fourth place on the stage also delivered him to fifth place overall, his highest position since finishing fourth in 1985. Could the Irishman dare to dream? Could he really make a credible challenge for that elusive yellow jersey?

  For that matter, could Pedro Delgado? At the end of the stage, he probably harboured some disappointment that his attack hadn’t yielded even 30 seconds on his main rivals. There was also the feeling that he’d not gone as full throttle as he might. ‘I didn’t know the Cauterets climb,’ he now reveals. ‘I thought it was going to be harder than we actually found it. It was easy. It wasn’t steep enough for long enough for me to really break away, except towards the end. But Miguel won the stage, so we were very happy. Plus, my mind was always focused on the next day into Superbagnères…’

  The first day in the mountains had offered intrigue and incident by the barrow-load. The second day would offer even more.

  Stage 9

  1. Miguel Induráin (Reynolds/Spain) 4:32:36

  2. Anselmo Fuerte (BH/Spain) +27”

  3. Pedro Delgado (Reynolds/Spain) +1’29”

  4. Sean Kelly (PDM/Ireland) +1’56”

  5. Steven Rooks (PDM/Ireland) same time

  General classification

  1. Greg LeMond (ADR/USA) 41:45:49

  2. Laurent Fignon (Super U/France) +5”

  3. Pascal Simon (Super U/France) +3’56”

  4. Charly Mottet (RMO/France) +4’09”

  5. Sean Kelly (PDM/Ireland) +4’52”

  NINE

  YELLOW PERIL

  ‘Our hand-to-hand combat had begun’ – Laurent Fignon

  11 July

  Stage 10, Cauterets – Superbagnères, 85 miles

  THE MODEST SKI resort of Superbagnères continues to be held in untarnished reverence by certain quarters of the cycling cognoscenti. This is despite the Tour not having visited its heights in nearly three decades. Quite possibly, its cherished position may actually be because of its abse
nce from the race’s schedule. As a stage finish, the mountain is effectively trapped in amber, a relic of a golden era of adventurous, gung-ho individual riding before team-focused defensive tactics – those of control and containment – became the dominant modus operandi of the Tour peloton.

  The race’s abandoning of Superbagnères was a remarkable state of affairs considering the excellent racing and multiple levels of intrigue it offered up the last time riders pushed themselves up its slopes. That year was 1989.

  Perhaps Superbagnères wasn’t beautiful enough. As the writer Edward Pickering has described, the resort consists of ‘a cluster of rickety-looking chalets, crêperies and shed-like hotels in a desultory semi-circle round a rocky, unpaved car park where puddles, once formed, last for weeks’. Or perhaps the geography of its ascent wasn’t sufficiently spectacular. Where Alpe d’Huez bewitches and beguiles its attendant masses with its 21 hairpin bends, the approach to the Superbagnères summit, certainly in its last couple of miles, is broadly a long, straight, unsheltered slog. But in 1989, it was the crucible of not one but two battles royal, providing one of the best days of the Tour de France in the entire decade.

  Not that the stages the resort previously hosted were remotely anonymous. First selected as a Tour finish in 1961, the following year Britain’s Tom Simpson wore the yellow jersey in a time trial up the mountain. It was the only day Simpson would hold the race lead in his entire career; he lost more than six minutes that day to stage-winner Federico Bahamontes and dropped out of the top five in the GC. Other Tour legends have climbed its slopes in the maillot jaune, among them Jacques Anquetil, Eddy Merckx and Bernard Hinault. Hinault was in yellow on the Tour’s penultimate visit in 1986, a day of attacks and counterattacks that climaxed with Greg LeMond taking his first-ever stage victory in the Tour’s mountains. It brought him within 40 seconds of his team-mate Hinault, providing the springboard for the American’s overall victory, in the infamous race where his biggest rival had been his allegedly double-crossing team-mate.