Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Alasdair Fotheringham
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue: How Could it Come to This?
Chapter 1: Back to the Roots
Chapter 2: The Little Priests
Chapter 3: Le Tour de la CEE
Chapter 4: Invisible Robocop
Chapter 5: 1990: The One That Got Away
Chapter 6: Neither Monk Nor Martian
Chapter 7: 1992: Indurain Is Spain
Chapter 8 1993–94: A Strip of Sandpaper
Chapter 9: Le Tour du Record
Chapter 10: 1995–96: The House of Cards
Chapter 11: Exceptionally Normal
Afterword: A Face in the Crowd
Palmares
Picture Section
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgements
Copyright
About the Book
Miguel Indurain is Spain’s greatest cyclist of all time. He is the only rider to have won five successive Tours de France, as well as holding the title for the youngest ever race leader in the Tour of Spain. This is his story.
As the all-conquering hero of the 90s, Indurain steadfastly refused to be overwhelmed by fame. Along with his superhuman calmness, iron will-power and superb bike handling skills, he was often described as a machine. Yet 1996 saw Indurain spectacularly plummet, bringing his career to an abrupt end.
In Indurain, Alasdair Fotheringham gets to the heart of this enigmatic character, reliving his historic accomplishments, and exploring how this shaped Spanish cycling. Alasdair has interviewed family, teammates, coaches and rivals, including Pedro Delgado, Prudencio Indurain and Chris Boardman to create the definitive vivid account of Indurain’s career.
About the Author
Alasdair Fotheringham is a freelance journalist and writer based in Spain. He writes regularly on cycling for the ‘I’, The Independent.co.uk, The Express, ProCycling and Cyclingnews. He has been reporting on the Tour de France and other top road cycling events since 1992. His first book was The Eagle of Toledo, a biography of cycling’s greatest ever climber, Federico Martín Bahamontes. He has also written Reckless, a biography of the ill-fated Luis Ocaña, the 1973 Tour winner and considered Eddy Merck’s top Grand Tour rival, and The End of the Road, an account of the 1998 Tour de France.
Also by Alasdair Fotheringham
The End of the Road
Reckless
The Eagle of Toledo
For N., who knows why: 31.10.2002
Prologue: How Could It Come to This?
Back in the day, there used to be an urban legend amongst cycling fans that whoever led the Vuelta a España at the summit of the Lagos de Covadonga climb, deep in the mountains of Asturias, would be declared the outright winner when the race ended in Madrid. But on 20 September 1996, even before stage thirteen of the Vuelta had begun to climb the nineteen-kilometre ascent to Covadonga, it felt as if cycling had lost one of its most crucial battles.
The event that cast an enormous pall over what was in theory the Queen stage of the 1996 Vuelta – and in fact was to cast a shadow over the entire race – unfolded on the difficult ascent of the Fito, the first major climb of the day. A single attack by Tony Rominger, one of the 1990s’ most talented Grand Tour racers, began to split the peloton into pieces. In what was essentially a skirmish before the big battle on the slopes of Covadonga itself, the flurry of controlling moves and accelerations that Rominger’s attack produced had a single, devastating consequence: Miguel Indurain, five times winner of the Tour de France and arguably Spain’s greatest ever athlete, was dropped. He was not sweating unduly or swaying over the road as the single line of riders in the peloton drew away from him further up the climb. Indurain had simply run out of energy and rather than go so deep to try to keep up that he then cracked afterwards, he was taking the coldly logical path: eking out whatever scant strength he had left to minimise the damage and limit the gaps.
This, then, was no death-or-glory defeat. Utterly characteristic of his dislike of any kind of histrionic behaviour on or off the bike, Indurain was quietly laying down his arms. Racing in such an economical style was a simple recognition of a simple fact: despite not being ill or injured, his physical condition was such he had lost all chance of winning the Vuelta, and there was absolutely nothing he could do about it. As the other top favourites put minutes into Indurain in a matter of a few kilometres, it was a curiously dignified last act of the drama and controversy surrounding Indurain’s long-awaited participation, after so much Tour success, in the Vuelta a España.
Yet there was no getting away from the fact that Indurain, one of cycling’s most brilliantly calculating racers, had become the victim of a gross misinterpretation of his strength. Someone, be it the rider or the team, had made a serious error. In sporting terms, in this race, there was no possible solution.
Indurain’s getting dropped from the front group of roughly forty riders occurred exactly as the television coverage of the Vuelta briefly switched channels from the minority TVE2 over to a couple of minutes of live coverage and updates in Spain’s prime time early afternoon news on TVE. It was as if fate had decided these crucial moments of Indurain’s career should not be confined to viewing by Spain’s diehard cycling fans: this was something everybody should witness.
Indurain, who received messages of encouragement from ONCE’s directeur sportif Manolo Saiz as he drove past, then had a word with his own Banesto team car as it pulled alongside. The contents of the discussion quickly became clear when he gestured to Marino Alonso – the only Banesto rider to have supported him in all five of his Tour victories and now hovering just ahead of him, waiting for instructions – that he should make his own way to the finish, rather than support his team leader.
As Indurain rode over the top of the climb around five minutes down on Rominger and the rest of the main GC contenders, riders who had earlier been dropped began passing him again on the twisting, wooded descent. Spain’s Herminio Díaz Zabala, an ONCE domestique and former Reynolds team-mate, was one of the last to do so, clapping a hand on Indurain’s shoulder in sympathy before moving on. It was another recognition that the Indurain–ONCE battle in the Vuelta, it seemed, was over.
This was no rapid surrender, though. Indurain’s lengthy solo ride, lasting nearly half an hour before he finally pulled up, became an extended opportunity for fans and the cycling community to contemplate the Tour de France’s greatest star going through a sorry, drawn-out and public exit from his country’s biggest bike race. If Indurain was physically in good enough shape to stay with the favourites for most of the first two weeks of the race, how on earth had he found himself in this predicament and where was he going from here? How, to put it bluntly, had it all come to this?
For a few moments, the TV cameras lost sight of Indurain when he was caught by the ‘grupetto’ – the sixty or so non-contenders and sprinters who, with no option of fighting for the win, had dropped off the pace completely by the foot of the Fito. Two months earlier he had been battling for a sixth Tour de France; two days earlier, he had been the strongest opponent of the all-conquering ONCE in the Vuelta. Now, though, he was just making up the numbers.
And suddenly, as Indurain stopped on the roadside, waited for a gap in the race traffic, then pedalled across a hotel forecourt and out of the race itself, he was not even doing that any more.
CHAPTER 1
Back to the Roots
Turning the clock back en route to Villava is not so hard. Just like when I first went to scout out the home village of Miguel Indurain twenty-four years ago, it still takes fifteen minutes for the local bus to crawl th
ere in rush hour traffic from Pamplona, the capital of Navarre. And there is still very little of interest to look at on the way.
The view out of the bus window as the broad avenue out of Pamplona narrows into an A-road or carretera nacional remains largely unchanged: one weather-beaten, well-appointed high-rise block of flats after another passes by, their ground floors an interminable succession of single-room hairdressers, cafés and bakers, some announcing their services in crenellated Basque lettering. Look upwards and brighter colours of clothing on washing lines are briefly visible between the crumbling granite slabs of the balconies. There is an occasional glimpse of the few pieces of wasteland, too, and rough pasture between city and dormitory town upon which the local constructors have yet to encroach. Then the driver calls out that this is the closest stop to Villava’s centre, the bus’s glass doors hiss and glide back and you are there.
Just one square kilometre in size geographically, Villava is one of the smallest and – because of its location so close to Pamplona – most densely populated pueblos in Navarre. By the 1990s, whatever building space was available for those working in nearby Pamplona was already heavily exploited, and where the constructors could not build sideways, they built vertically. As the scaffolding and iron beam cages of embryonic blocks of flats rose steadily skywards, Villava’s population, some 3,000 in the 1950s, climbed to nearly four times that number in official record books, and probably higher in reality.
With age, the high red-brick tower blocks are all a shade battered-looking, and the same goes for the well-appointed paved squares, flanked with colonnades and archways to keep the inhabitants out of the region’s incessant winter rain. What is surprising, perhaps, is that Miguel Indurain’s first cycling club remains and looks exactly as it has done since 1994. Its offices-cum-storerooms are situated behind a large glass door on the right-hand side of a two-storey structure that houses the local frontón, the large hall with a court for Basque handball. The building is utterly functional, without any adornments. The lower half of the outer wall is white cement, the upper segment corrugated iron painted light green. Above the glass door is written its name in thick green letters: Club Ciclista Villavés.
The interior of the club’s downstairs room, perhaps eight metres square at most, is almost unchanged, too. Metal shelves packed with boxes of cycling equipment are jammed against the walls, along with photos of professional riders who cut their teeth in the CC Villavés. There is Miguel Indurain, of course, but also his brother Prudencio and Xavier Zandio, the former Banesto and Illes Balears rider grimacing as he comes within a whisker of winning a Tour de France stage in 2005. There is another of former club member Koldo Gil, briefly a minor star in Spanish cycling in the 2000s with Liberty Seguros. In another corner is a row of bike frames, with and without wheels, leaning together and hanging on walls. One of them, a green model without a particular brand name, belonged to Indurain in his teens, but – as if symbolic of the club’s attitude towards all its young riders as a whole, whether they are lacking in talent or a future Tour winner – whilst clean and in good nick, it doesn’t get any place of honour or plaque.
With a yell of ‘Come up!’, there, leaning on the railings of the stairs to his office above is Pepe Barruso, the heftily built, loud-voiced heart of the club, as he has been virtually since its inception in the mid-1970s. It was Barruso who, ironically enough, might have deterred a less determined Indurain from cycling altogether. In early September 1975 Barruso refused (rightly, let it be said) to allow the tall, gangly eleven-year-old with a shock of thick dark hair, accompanied by his father, take part in his first race, organised by the CC Villavés, because he did not have a racing licence. At the following week’s race, though, Indurain was back, his newly acquired licence in hand. After that, Miguel was in for good, remaining with the club for the next seven years. He only left when he had to, aged eighteen, the point where the CC Villavés, which did not cater for riders any older, would send its most promising riders up a level, to one of the top amateur clubs in the area.
Back in 1975, the Club Ciclista Villavés was, like Indurain, taking its first faltering steps in the cycling world. Formed just a few months before Indurain’s father knocked on the clubhouse door, the race Indurain had wanted to take part in, the I Circuito Miqueo, was actually the first event ever to be organised by the club.
Barruso, who worked as a welder building poultry barns and who has lived in Villava almost all his life, had dreamed up the idea of the CC Villavés one weekend afternoon of 1974 as he came home from the frontón – where the cycling club is located now – with two other local friends, José Ignacio Urdaníz and Juan Antonio Almárcegui.
To say the organisation was initially top-heavy with management is no exaggeration. Whilst José Ángel Andueza was a fourth early key supporter and the club’s first president, the club contained a single junior fourteen-year-old local rider, Juancho Arizcuren. The aim of its founders, in 1974, was purely to be sure he got a licence and thereby give the previously team-less Arizcuren a chance of racing. ‘We didn’t have any members,’ Almárcegui would later explain, ‘and we had a lot of problems finding them.’
There was a dearth of competitors too. ‘The first race we organised,’ Barruso recalls, ‘there were more race officials standing around than there were riders in it.’ Members and rivals weren’t the only thing the CC Villavés was lacking, either: with no official colours for the club, Arizcuren would race as a team of one, kitted out for races in a T-shirt with red, yellow and white stripes. He would get to events on his father’s Vespa scooter, his bike slung over the back. The first prize, in those times, was often food, such a rack of pig’s ribs. After a successful race, he must have made quite a sight riding home.
The first CC Villavés ‘team car’ was simply Barruso’s own family vehicle, the ubiquitous Seat 600 – nicknamed el ombligo (the belly button) in Spain because everybody had one – costing 29,000 pesetas (€200). It was not until 2 September 1975 that the club was officially registered with the Navarre Federation, becoming one of six amateur clubs in the region at the time, and opting for dark red and green as the club’s colours for all the riders’ kit. Money was tight, too, with an annual budget of just 100,000 pesetas (roughly equivalent to €700 today), and up until 1978, the entire organisation’s financial support came in the form of contributions of 100 pesetas (€0.70) from individual backers. ‘Even when we got sponsors, at first we couldn’t afford new jerseys with the new names,’ Barruso recalls. ‘We’d get one of the mothers [of a rider] to unstitch the lettering on the old ones and then sew on the new logo.’ Local support was limited, too, to the point where to fill all the club’s posts the Federation forms demanded, the four founders made use of the names of relatives and friends.
Having given Arizcuren a club all of his own – and he repaid the CC Villavés by staying with them right through to turning amateur – the club’s longer-term raison d’être, Barruso told the Diario de Navarra newspaper in the mid-1990s, was to show the kids of Villava the benefits of sport as a healthy hobby. ‘We never wanted to train champions, like Miguel, we wanted to help young people grow up the right way. It’s a very dangerous society for them, back when we were young there were only three bars in Villava, now there are twenty. What we’re doing is social work.’
But if their goals were clear enough, in the first few years the CC Villavés headquarters itself was permanently in transit. The first residence was a spare room lent to them by a local political party, the Carlists. (In one of the earliest photos of the club line-up with no fewer than five Indurain cousins, stuck on the wall behind them is almost certainly a Carlist poster, complete with silhouettes of figures with the party’s characteristic Basque berets.) Next to provide a temporary home was a Church association and when that agreement ended, the CC Villavés then occupied a room behind a bar – the Jaizki, where years later Miguel Indurain’s fanclub would be based. An agreement with an aunt of Indurain’s, to use a basement in a building s
he owned on Villava’s main street, looked like offering some kind of stability. But that deal fell through when the room was found to lack any furniture, although the aunt was good enough to give them back half of the rent already paid.
In the late 1970s, the CC Villavés took over a small backroom in the former knacker’s yard, best known in the pueblo as the improvised operating room for visiting vets to vaccinate local dogs. By this point, thankfully, rather than continue their nomadic existence, Villava town hall stepped in and provided the CC Villavés with a twenty-year lease on the same room in the knacker’s yard building – later to become the town’s frontón. That is where the club remains today, although the inside received a major overhaul in late 1994. ‘I’ll never forget the moment the town hall clerk told me that whatever happened, there’d be something for us every year in the annual budget,’ Barruso remembers.
A quick look at the club’s roster of riders shows that the Indurains were a key part of the CC Villavés from the outset. Of the seven riders registered in 1975, three – Miguel and his cousins Luis and Javier – were Indurains. ‘It was very much a family thing, my cousins with my parents and uncles and all the rest of us, we’d all go and race or watch the race, have a good time together’, recalls Prudencio Indurain, who joined the club in 1976. ‘My father liked cycling, took us along, and it was a way for us to spend our Sundays.’ The bike was not just for leisure, though. ‘As farmers, my parents worked outside on the land a lot, it’s not like now when your parents take you everywhere by car, you’d ride your bike to a lot of different places.’ A fourth in the photo of the young Indurain tribe of cousins in CC Villaves kit is José Luis Jaimerena, who, slightly older than Miguel, would go on to be a team-mate of his in the amateur category and then co-direct the professional Reynolds team. Indurain would also cross paths with others who would then return to his life later on, such as Javier Luquin, his key rival in 1981, his last as a juvenil. Luquin later became a team-mate and friend in Banesto. Pedro López, meanwhile, a rider who beat him in the gymkhana events in the infantil category, later became a Banesto mechanic, and was present, watching from the team car, on the last day Indurain ever raced in a Grand Tour, at the 1996 Vuelta.
Indurain Page 1
