Three Weeks, Eight Seconds

by Tassell, Nige;

  Robert Millar was second to LeMond that day in 1986 and fancied his chances of going one better on his return visit three years later. His two Tour stage wins to date had both been in the Pyrenees. In 1983, he pipped Pedro Delgado at the finish in Luchon, just down the mountain from Superbagnères, while in 1984 his solo attack outfoxed and outpowered everyone on the climb up to the Guzet-Neige ski station.

  A hat-trick of Pyrenean wins was what Millar had in mind in 1988 when the race returned to Guzet-Neige – and it looked likely to happen before he and Philippe Bouvatier took a wrong turn 300 metres from the finish. Bouvatier had misinterpreted the signals of a gendarme who was actually directing the team cars, not the riders. Millar followed the Frenchman into a side turn, allowing third-placed Massimo Ghirotto to coast to victory. In 1989, Millar needed to erase the embarrassment of the previous summer, to correct an injustice. The previous day’s puncture – when he had had to wait on the roadside for assistance for quite some time – had denied him a tilt at a stage victory. So, in his happy hunting ground of the Pyrenees, this second and final day would need to be the one.

  The route from Cauterets to Superbagnères took in some totem climbs: the Col du Tourmalet, the Col d’Aspin and the Col de Peyresourde. Millar was champing at the bit and, together with Charly Mottet, launched an early attack as they approached the Tourmalet. The pair worked together well, similar builds but different styles. The ponytailed Millar was largely hunched over his bike letting his legs do the work, while the faster that Mottet pedalled, the more his body bobbed up and down. The Scotsman led the Frenchman over the summit, gratefully accepting a spectator’s offer of a copy of that day’s L’Equipe to put up his jersey to keep out the cold wind on the descent.

  As Millar and Mottet gained some respite on the Tourmalet’s down-slopes, something was afoot on the other side of the summit. In a group containing most of the main GC contenders, Laurent Fignon, so imperious thus far in the race, was struggling on the first stiff climb of the day. For all his bluff and bravado, he couldn’t disguise his weakness – even if he thought he had.

  ‘I felt as if I was having a massive off-day,’ Fignon later wrote, ‘particularly on the Tourmalet where the attacking was brutal and I had no answer. I was going nowhere. But as I put on a bit of a show as I went along and didn’t give any sign that I was in trouble, my rivals didn’t notice my real state.’

  Fignon was wrong. His rivals had noticed he was in trouble, the first of just a handful of public displays of weakness from the Parisian throughout the entire three weeks of the race. It was crystallised by one particular incident on that first climb, an episode noticed by both LeMond and Andy Hampsten. It involved one of the motos, the motorcycles on which cameramen and photographers ride pillion.

  ‘Theunisse and Rooks were doing a super-hard tempo on the Tourmalet,’ Hampsten remembers, ‘and a photographer on a motorbike, Graham Watson, was just trying to get by. There were eight of us taking up the road. The race director’s car, with the head commissaire in it, was the first car behind us. It couldn’t be more front-seat, all-eyes-open. Fignon was hurting. I was watching him, LeMond was watching him. “This is great. He’s having a really bad day.” But Fignon then put his hand on Graham Watson’s forearm. LeMond and I exchanged looks. “Are you seeing what I’m seeing?”

  ‘It wasn’t for just a second. It was 20 seconds, half a minute. It was a long, really helpful pause. Yes, it wasn’t that Fignon then attacked and won the stage, but it was more important than that to him. He was getting dropped and hung on to not get dropped. LeMond and I both looked back at the race director’s car, four metres behind us. They must have seen it. We both thought that we didn’t need to attack because he’d be thrown out of the race. It was so obvious, so blatant. But nothing happened. Nothing. Maybe Greg could have held on and not got thrown out. But I don’t think so. It was a very telling moment in a French sporting event.’

  ‘If Andy says he saw it,’ says Graham Watson from his home in the northern reaches of New Zealand’s South Island, ‘then for sure he saw it. But I don’t recall this incident at all. Riders grabbing hold of motos back then was commonplace. But it rarely happened when the going got tough and officials could see more clearly what was going on. When it did happen, and when I was aware of it, I tended to look away from the cyclist, as if by doing so I was pretending to be unaware of the illegal tow. It would have been hard to penalise the driver – and certainly not the innocent passenger! – as he was hardly offering his moto as a catapult for Fignon. But back then, the Tour would have looked the other way if its French race leader had taken a tow. That’s how it was.’

  You didn’t need to be a soothsayer to know Pedro Delgado’s intentions that day. Everyone knew he would make his move at some point, buoyed by the phenomenal levels of Spanish support on the roadside and vexed by the fact that his efforts at Cauterets had gained him fewer than 30 seconds, a small reduction in that sizeable time deficit. He couldn’t delay his move until the Alps in a good few days; the second and final Pyrenean stage had to be the time and place for a performance that he hoped would make a serious dent in the GC.

  Aided by his faithful domestique Julián Gorospe – the bodyguard who had brought his leader back into the fold at that fateful team time trial – Delgado bridged the gap to Millar and Mottet on the descent of the Tourmalet. With nothing more than a nod and a glance, an alliance was formed, an unspoken acknowledgement that, at least until the final climb up to Superbagnères, all three riders would work together and not attack each other.

  With Mottet and Delgado’s shared objective being to recover as much time as possible on LeMond and Fignon in order to catapult themselves up the GC, Millar led the trio over each of the day’s summits, unheeded and unchallenged in his collection of the maximum King of the Mountains points. Things were working out very nicely for all three of them. As the gap back to LeMond, Fignon et al rose and rose, Mottet – four minutes and nine seconds off the yellow jersey at the start of the stage – now found himself the new race leader on the road.

  ‘I’d had an idea that I might have been maillot jaune virtuel,’ he explains, ‘but there were no radios and, anyway, these were the first mountain stages of the Tour. We still had many kilometres to go. I wasn’t particular interested in making the maillot jaune anyway. I was among the favourites but I wasn’t the favourite and this gave me more freedom to go on the attack. Fignon and LeMond were marking each other. It was their responsibility to control the race, so I and others could take advantage of that situation.’

  For a man in such mental turmoil just a week before, Pedro Delgado looked every part the keen-eyed optimist in control of his own destiny. He was at absolute ease with the situation, even dropping back for a toilet break at one point before calmly coming back into the fold. No panic. And no one taking advantage. The mutuality was clear; at one stage, Delgado offered a thirsty Millar his water bottle.

  And, were anyone in any doubt about the stage’s proximity to the Spanish border, Delgado was being roared on by a partisan crowd. The names painted on the narrow roads further confirmed the main nationality in attendance. ‘Pedro’, ‘Miguel’, ‘Pablo’, ‘Marino’…

  And then the end game. On the final climb up to Superbagnères, the exuberant, vociferous support began to overwhelm and annoy Delgado. There was a constant stream of fans who felt the need to run alongside him at extremely close quarters, crowding in and invading his space, their faces inches from his. On a stage where his temper had been even, he cracked. Reaching down to pull his water bottle from the down tube of his bike, he hurled it at a pair of runners keeping pace on his right-hand side. Despite the bottle reaching its target, they continued their pursuit – until, that was, the less athletic one stumbled to the ground, his legs unable to cope with the steep gradient. The commissaire’s car just avoided making contact with his head.

  In anger, Delgado pushed hard on the pedals and took off around a steep left-hand bend. Maybe, just maybe, the whole
incident was an elaborate conceit – throwing a bottle to distract Mottet and Millar, before flying off towards possible glory. Whatever the motivation, the move finally did for Mottet, the man who, in the early stages of the break, had asked Millar just why he was riding so fast. He had finally run out of gas.

  Desperate to avoid a runners-up spot in successive years, the Scotsman managed to reel Delgado back in. The higher the pair climbed, the more they gasped for air, and the more the neighbouring peaks were smudged by clouds of mist. At the kite banner signalling the last kilometre, they caught the first glimpse of the Grand Hotel beyond the throng of spectators, a vast L-shaped affair that seemed to cling to the very side of the mountain. Its out-of-season eeriness was immediately reminiscent of the Overlook, the hotel whose underpopulated corridors were prowled by a psychotic Jack Nicholson in The Shining.

  With the finish line just in front of the hotel, Delgado knew what was left to do. He started to pull away from Millar again, not with any sudden injection of pace but with purpose nonetheless. The stage win looked on. But the crowd again seemed to distract the Spaniard, the sporadically placed gendarmes unable to cope with a tag-team of young men eager to demonstrate their athletic prowess by charging up the mountain on foot. When he should have been rocketing to the finish line, Delgado’s mind seemed to get diverted from the task at hand, unaware that Millar had ghosted up behind him. The two riders came together again with 800 metres to go, a nervous glance from Delgado finding his rival on his shoulder. The pair rode under the resort’s ski lift, which was motionless and silent in high summer, like a fairground ride in an abandoned amusement park. But it signalled that the ski station summit was imminent.

  As the climb bent right into the home straight, Millar made his move, ripping around the outside to skewer the Spaniard and to take that overdue third Tour stage win. Channel 4’s chief commentator Phil Liggett put the victory into context, describing Millar’s ride – where he had led over all four major climbs – as ‘one of the great performances in post-war times in the Tour de France’. Not that Delgado would lose sleep over missing out on the stage win. The greater reward would be the minutes he was taking to further cross that divide to LeMond and Fignon. The clock had started ticking.

  Back down the mountain, that inseparable PDM pair – Steven Rooks and Gert-Jan Theunisse – had broken away from the elite group, placing additional concern on the shoulders of LeMond and Fignon, the riders with most to lose. Earlier during the stage, Fignon’s team-mate Pascal Simon had furiously driven the group’s response to the break of Millar and Mottet. Now the Super U leader was forced to take up the running himself, putting in an impressively lengthy shift at the front of the group, dragging the tired legs of many GC rivals with him.

  Unsurprisingly, Fignon dropped to the back of the group in the final kilometre, an understandable manoeuvre after such a Herculean effort. It was now up to one of the others to make their move; Andy Hampsten, in particular, appeared to be riding strongly. Fignon had other ideas, though. After a quick breather, and with the sight of the hotel his lure, he attacked down the blindside in an attempt to catch LeMond unawares, to snatch the few seconds he needed to put himself in yellow for the first time in five years. The yellow jersey streaked after him and looked like he’d done enough to stay with Fignon. But his legs couldn’t maintain the pounding and he sank back into his saddle, a spent force just 500 metres from the line. While Fignon used the central white line as his guide, his equilibrium, LeMond could only dream of keeping his bike on that kind of straight and narrow. He was weaving all over the left side of the road and the Parisian was away.

  Crossing the line in seventh place (Marino Lejarreta had jumped ahead to take sixth), Fignon didn’t need to wait for LeMond’s arrival to know he was now the leader of the pack. He didn’t raise his arms in triumph, but he did puff out his chest as he came home. Based on his efforts on the climb to Superbagnères alone, the yellow jersey was deservedly his.

  LeMond’s front wheel rolled over the line 12 seconds later. Fignon’s lead was almost as narrow as the ADR leader’s had been that morning; just seven seconds. LeMond’s soigneur Otto Jacome wrapped a snow-white towel around his rider’s shoulders, like a boxing trainer consoling his fighter at the end of a tough, full-distance bout. No knockout blow. A narrow defeat on points.

  ‘I made a mistake in trying to catch him too fast,’ he told Samuel Abt, the cycling correspondent of the New York Times. ‘I tried to bluff him by getting right back on his wheel so that he’d think he’d never be able to get away, but I blew up.’

  LeMond remained philosophical about, rather than angry at, the stage result. If, before the race had reached the Pyrenees, he had been told he would ride two stages across some of the most punishing mountain passes in Europe and emerge only seven seconds down on the yellow jersey, he would have grabbed hungrily at that. Both hands and a tight grasp.

  He also retained the foresight to shift the psychological burden onto the new yellow jersey during his post-stage TV interviews. ‘For me, the most important thing is I’m in a very good position and the pressure’s on Laurent Fignon. I think he made a very big mistake today letting Delgado go. He played the race all against me, but he has to realise that Delgado is probably the most dangerous rider now. As we approach the Alps, Delgado’s getting closer to Fignon. So, for me, the race is between Delgado and Fignon, with me a…’ He paused to pick his words carefully. ‘…close contender.’

  Beyond LeMond and his entourage, Jacques Goddet, the octogenarian race director-at-large, prowled the finish line in his trademark khaki shirt and shorts. A satisfied grin played on his face. This Tour, already packed with incident, was coming to the boil nicely.

  Fignon’s pleasure in securing yellow was tempered by the three minutes and 26 seconds that Delgado had retrieved from him. Not only that, but the inroads made by Charly Mottet made him a very real threat too; he was now only just over a minute behind his former Super U team-mate. Fignon’s extended stint driving the chase group up the Superbagnères slopes was arguably the deciding factor in whether Mottet, the virtual maillot jaune on the road that afternoon of course, leapfrogged him into yellow.

  Not that these concerns were going to wipe the smile from Fignon’s face on the podium, where he also expelled an exaggerated sigh of relief. He would be content enough that, with flat, relatively unassuming stages in the next few days as the race made its way across the south of France towards the Alps, he’d enjoy the sun on his face and the yellow jersey on his back. LeMond, Mottet and Delgado might have been circling, the scent of blood in their nostrils, but they were unlikely to make an imminent move. For the GC boys, it was now a time for recuperation and reflection after two days of phenomenal racing.

  Millar, always a slightly awkward, slightly shy figure on the podium, nonetheless also wore his happiness well. A ruffle of his own hair, a single-arm salute to the crowd and a smile of contentment. A Tour with a stage win was a good Tour for the Glaswegian.

  The podium smiles stopped there, though. The inscrutable Gert-Jan Theunisse had inherited Miguel Induráin’s King of the Mountains jersey and received his prize with the straightest of faces. Not a flicker of pleasure or satisfaction. Nothing. The taciturn Dutchman made Millar resemble the Laughing Cavalier in comparison. The pair were now only separated by 12 points in the competition. Without the previous day’s puncture, Millar could well have been getting reacquainted with the polka-dot jersey he won outright in 1984. With a stage win under his belt, it became his principal target for the rest of the Tour. ‘I’ll try and take it, yes,’ he told Cycling Weekly. ‘I don’t want to get involved in any sprints for points on the smaller climbs over the next few days, but if he goes for them, I’ll have to. If he doesn’t, then I won’t. I’ll try and take the lead in the Alps if I can.’

  For now, Millar was basking in the glow of his stage win. ‘I was OK on the early climbs, but in the end Delgado had me and Mottet hanging on. He was accelerating for 500 metres at a ti
me. If it had been 600 metres, I’d have been dropped. It was like he was one gear bigger than the rest of us. He has strength.’ But Millar refused to declare that the stage win avenged his defeat in the 1985 Tour of Spain, when an apparent collusion by various Spanish teams allowed Delgado to attack unnoticed on one particular stage, in the process taking the oblivious Millar’s overall lead. ‘No revenge,’ the Scotsman confirmed. ‘I’ve a short memory.’

  While Stephen Roche’s withdrawal might have been the highest-profile departure from the Tour that day, he was far from the only rider leaving the race on this second Pyrenean stage. A full 16 riders either failed to start, retired mid-stage or were eliminated because their time was outside the cut-off limit. The Panasonic team were the big losers, with three of their sprinters being timed out. One – Jean-Paul van Poppel – had received a substantial number of pushes over the day’s climbs. And this came after Panasonic leader Erik Breukink’s rather calamitous stage the day before.

  ADR had suffered, too. The Estonian-born Norwegian Jaanusz Kuum, the only team-mate LeMond had who was remotely close to being described as a climbing specialist, abandoned at the stage’s end, leaving the American to fight his own cause in those mountain-top skirmishes. ‘Greg was totally on his own in the mountains,’ confirms his team-mate, the Dutchman Johan Lammerts. If he were still in contention when the race reached the Alps at the beginning of the final week, LeMond would now need to ride even more conservatively. If so, that would provide Fignon, a man only too happy to articulate his views of his rivals, with even more ammunition.