‘When you saw the strength he had, the details,’ Unzué says, ‘that made you think he was able to do anything. You could see that something indefinable, but something very great, was there. It was clear from the start that he was a great time triallist, but his physique made that something to be expected. I remember the way he raced in the Vuelta a Toledo on one stage, the way he handled the echelons in a Tour de l’Avenir [Tour of the CEE – as was]. You had to be there to appreciate it. At the same time, he was a rider that only improved slowly on the physical front. Until he toughened up, his bones, his chassis, if you like – the wrists, the knees – were not able to handle the power his motor was able to produce. So it took time. But he was always brilliant at reading a race. When a break came down to three or four guys, I’d tell him “Hey, keep an eye on that rider” and he’d answer, “No it’s that one we’ve got to watch.” And you’d say to yourself, “Fuck, he’s right, how on earth did he know that?”’
At the same time, Indurain’s loyalty to his family and to his roots never faltered: ‘I remember taking him home to his house in Villava when he was eighteen, we’d drop him off and normally he would take hold of his grandfather’s jacket, put it on, go through to the living room and just stay there. Anybody else, Pruden or whoever, would go off after the race to look for his friends. Not Miguel. He’d stay put, there in the living room with that jacket on.’
As teenagers, the two brothers were beginning to ride together regularly. ‘We’d go out for long, long training rides … up to ten hours. All the way to the Pyrenees, it’s only two hours away from here,’ recalls Pruden. ‘There were no pulsometers, no mobiles, no trainers, nothing like that at all, it was all on feelings, feelings, feelings. Sometimes you’d go out with the idea of doing two hours and do six, and sometimes you’d gone out to do six hours training and you’d do two. It was another era. We’d just go out, ride our bikes and then we’d come back.’
‘We weren’t going slowly: in fact, we’d barely talk, we’d be going so fast. But there’d just be the two of us. We’d both take a good long while sorting out the bikes, cleaning them up, getting them ready. We were both very meticulous.’ Whilst cycling books and magazines did not abound on the shelves, he confirms that the two of them were both ‘Bernard Hinault fans. Sometimes we’d go off to see the Tour, with our parents and cousins, sometimes on the Tourmalet.’
But even if there was less and less time for family outings when they turned professional, their unplanned training rides continued, with just the two of them riding their bikes through Navarre right the way through Indurain’s career. They would always start the next year’s training, Prudencio recalls, too, on exactly the same day – 1 December, come rain or shine.
Indurain’s first big breakthrough and indeed his first 1983 win for Reynolds came when he captured the Navarran amateur championship in late May. As Barruso recalls, ‘He was driven to the race by his dad in the same Seat 1,500 we’d used to get to Barcelona.’ But if Indurain’s mode of transport to the championships was an unintentional nod to his recent past, his victory was a clear sign of what to expect in the future. At the end of the championships, Indurain outsprinted three former breakaways, including the arch-rival of his teenage years, Javier Luquin. ‘He beat me in the last metre. I thought I was going to win and he came past me like he was riding a motorbike,’ Luquin later told the Diario de Navarra. ‘Whenever he wanted to, he’d beat us. It wasn’t a surprise that he stood out so much later on. After that, you could see it coming.’
Indurain expressed the hope that he would then be able to take a stage win or two in the upcoming Vuelta a Navarra. As the biggest local race on the calendar, no event mattered more to the amateur squad: as Eduardo González Salvador put it, ‘For Eusebio, the Vuelta a Navarra was like the Tour de France.’ However, Unzué’s decision was to exclude Indurain because of his academic commitments. If Indurain was disappointed, he showed he knew how to bounce back at the Spanish Nationals.
Riding so well in the blazing heat in inland Alicante was an indication of Indurain’s future ability to handle extremely high temperatures. But what truly stood out was his ability to read a race well, even given his relative inexperience in a category, as a first year, where many riders would spend up to three or four seasons. There was no stopping Indurain from getting on the right wheel, following Orbea’s Jokin Múgica as the Basque broke away, then beating him comfortably in the final sprint. ‘The youngest ever amateur national champion there’s been,’ recalls Unzué proudly. ‘Spectacular. Something I’ll never forget. We were seeing things about Miguel in that first year that made it very clear that he was going to be a really big name.’
‘It was a really hard race, a tough little circuit in the mountains of Alicante,’ Eduardo González Salvador, who raced that day, recalls. ‘It was the first big warning to everybody about what he could do, particularly because of the way he’d won. Before that he’d just been some big young kid from Navarre, who was a bit hesitant, a bit scared, because he’d just come up from the previous category.’
‘They spelled his name wrong in at least one national daily, Indurian not Indurain,’ observes Pepe Barruso, who still recollects – and appreciates – the phone call he received from Unzué to ‘tell me Indurain had won it.’ The race radio commentator, too, gave out the incorrect name for the winner, as one Fernando Pacheco, which underlined the surprising nature of Indurain’s victory.
The results in the second half of the season were patchier, with an unremarkable performance at the World Championships complemented by a stage win in the Vuelta a Toledo in August – organised by none other than Federico Martín Bahamontes, Spain’s first ever Tour de France winner – and an outright victory in another top event, the Vuelta a Salamanca in September. But that unevenness was only logical, given that Indurain was finding his feet in the category, albeit in some races much more quickly than in others.
Yet there were already strong indications that Indurain’s directors did not believe it would be long before he shifted up the final, definitive rung in rider categories and turned pro. In January 1984, as Eduardo Gonzàlez Salvador had done in 1983, Indurain attended the Reynolds professional team pre-season training camp before linking up with the Spanish national amateur team for their equivalent camp, with a focus on the Olympics.
The Vuelta a Navarra was, understandably, the centre of the amateur team’s summer again, and on this occasion, there was no question about Indurain’s selection. Apart from taking two stages himself and the King of the Mountains prize, Indurain’s team-mate, the late Alvaro Fernández, took the overall, with Indurain in second. Stages in the Vuelta a Toledo, the Vuelta a Vizcaya and victories in a string of one-day races made it clear that it was only a matter of time before Indurain turned professional: the only question was when.
‘He was always a good racer, won a lot of stuff, but being a pro wasn’t something we’d really expected,’ recalls Prudencio Indurain. ‘He never really said “I want to be a pro”, partly because in that time in Navarre there were only a very few pros round here. So it wasn’t an objective, and nor was standing out as an amateur. We just wanted to have fun on the bike.’ Their lack of long-term planning was such that they had not, Pruden says, ‘heard much about the pro team, just the amateur team that signed him. That was where we started to have a relationship with Reynolds.’
Abroad, Indurain was not so successful, with an unremarkable performance in the Peace Race that May. Indurain’s participation in the 1984 Olympic Games did not work out so well, either. In a whistle-stop six-day trip to the far side of the USA, the four-rider Spanish amateur squad arrived far too late to adapt to the time differences. The photos of the riders in Los Angeles show them all looking bleary-eyed and Indurain abandoned the road race. ‘We only got to see the word Hollywood on a signboard in the distance, a long way away,’ Indurain later recalled. Only one Spanish rider, the future national coach and Vuelta a España course designer Paco Antequera, managed to complet
e the course, in 13th place. Indurain and the other two riders abandoned with two laps left to go: ‘I would have finished an hour down. It wasn’t worth it,’ Indurain later explained.
If Indurain’s Olympic participation was not a particularly satisfactory way of bringing down the curtain on his amateur career, Reynolds remained more than keen to bring Indurain into their professional team, even before the end of the season. But before he switched, Indurain did have one last opportunity to pay unintentional homage to one key component of his amateur squad. Just a few days before he took part in his first professional race, the Tour of the CEE/de l’Avenir, Indurain took part in the amateur event in Zegama during the village’s annual festivities for its patron saint, St. Bartholomew, placing second. Twenty-one years later, Indurain would be back again, with his former team-mates from the amateur squad, remembering Zegama’s key place in their past.
CHAPTER 3
Le Tour de la CEE
After turning professional for Reynolds in September 1984, the first two and a half years of Miguel Indurain’s career are bookended by his success in one race: the Tour de l’Avenir, at that time briefly renamed as the Tour de la CEE. For whilst 1984 saw Indurain take his first professional win in the ten-day stage race, 1986 saw him win it outright. The Tour de l’Avenir was Indurain’s first major international victory, the one which confirmed his amateur success could be matched at professional level, and which Indurain later recalled as his favourite race win too – even more than the Tour de France.
Then as now, on paper the Tour de l’Avenir has – as its longer-standing name suggests – a specific role: to act as a showcase for promising top-level amateurs and young, up-and-coming professionals. It is currently open to riders aged 19 to 22 and raced in national teams in France. But in its 55-year-old history, the criteria for participation and its geographical location have fluctuated wildly.
Originally designed by organisers L’Équipe as a mini-Tour de France, up until 1967 it was initially run on an identical route over the second half of each actual Tour stage but two hours ahead of the main event. Then, having moved to a September slot in 1968, the race still used many of the Tour’s usual climbs. But for six years, from 1986 to 1991, the l’Avenir changed its name to the Tour de la CEE and massively broadened out its geographical limits to become an EEC-wide event. Parallelling, perhaps intentionally, the well-established amateur-only Peace Race in the Eastern Bloc nations, stages were held across Western Europe from Portugal and Belgium to Austria and Italy. All of this makes Indurain’s progression, from a single stage win in 1984 to two in 1985 and then the overall in 1986 – his last Tour de l’Avenir but the first under these new, much tougher, geographical conditions – even more impressive.
From 1981, too, the amateurs-only regulation disappeared and for the next three decades, trade teams could take part and the age restriction was briefly dropped as well. The consequences for Indurain were mixed: on the plus side all of his three participations were with Reynolds; on the downside, he was fighting against a dauntingly varied mixture of national and trade teams and riders, ranging from hugely experienced East European pros to greenhorns like himself.
It’s true, even now, that only five Tour de France winners – Indurain, Felice Gimondi, Laurent Fignon, Joop Zoetemelk and Greg LeMond – have won the Tour de l’Avenir. But that one of them, Fignon, won it in 1988 four years after taking the Tour de France for a second time, suggests just how difficult the l’Avenir was. Indeed the host of major names that makes up its stage winners and final podiums is an indication both of its toughness – only one rider, Russian Serguei Soukhouroutchenkov, has won it twice – and its usefulness as a reference point for future greatness in the sport. This was perhaps never so true as in the 1980s, when during its short-lived spell as the Tour de la CEE, the young guns of Indurain’s era were taking on a much more challenging range of opposition over more varied terrain than ever before.
When Indurain joined the Reynolds professional squad at the end of the 1984 season, his success in the Tour de la CEE parallelled a new, and very recent, upsurge in Spanish cycling across the board, much of it to do with his team. As Pedro Delgado puts it, ever since the decline of Luis Ocaña began in 1974, ‘Spanish cycling, on an international level, didn’t exist.’ By the early 1980s, things had reached such a low point that, ‘In modern-day terms, us going to the Tour de France would be the same as if a really small Portuguese team suddenly found itself in the WorldTour. There were years when nobody wanted to go to the Tour. Since the era of Ocaña, everybody had ended up abandoning.’
Dominique Arnaud, who turned pro in 1980 with Reynolds and was later to be one of the most important figures in the team, recalls that ‘In my first years as a pro, when the Spanish teams came to France, they were very scared. For example,’ he says, citing the case of one middle-ranking Spanish rider of the era, ‘Jesús Blanco Villar was a very good racer in Spain but in France, it didn’t work out for him. I didn’t see why that had to happen.’
Echavarri, however, was determined that this inferiority complex about racing the Tour had to end. ‘If we hadn’t gone, then nobody would have done,’ says Delgado. ‘It was Echavarri who went to find [Tour boss Félix Lévitan] and said, “Hey, there should be a Spanish team in your Tour.”’
Echavarri and Unzué struck paydirt beyond their wildest dreams on their first ever Tour. In fact, Reynolds suddenly went from being the token Spanish squad to being the team that, to judge by results at least, had come closest to challenging winner Laurent Fignon. There had been a kind of precedent: in the 1983 Vuelta, Julián Gorospe had offered a spirited, if ultimately futile, resistance against five-time Tour winner Bernard Hinault. But for Reynolds to do so well in the Tour de France represented a considerable raising of the bar. The team returned to Spain with a first and second for Arroyo and Delgado in the time trial at the Puy de Dôme, four further runners-up spots on stages, and last but by no means least, a Tour de France podium finish in second place for Arroyo. In the process, Reynolds confirmed that the ten-year Spanish drought on Tour success was at a definitive end.
As Delgado sees it, all that held Reynolds back in that year’s Tour was their almost complete lack of experience. ‘I always said the problem we had with our first ever Tour de France, in 1983, was that we went there to see what happened and to finish the race. As the race progressed we should have adapted. Instead, it was “Oof, look what we’ve done, it can’t get any better than this.” We were running scared.’
‘The whole team was learning, the same as us. And we’d gone from being nobody to being real protagonists on the Tour.’ As a way of indicating how Reynolds were walking a tightrope between disaster and success, Delgado points out that ‘On the same day that I turned in a really strong ride in the Pyrenees, three of our riders abandoned.’
The most outstanding example of how Reynolds were doing it all by trial and error, though, was surely their purchase of hospital patients’ food in a mushy, baby-food-like format, which Reynolds bought for their riders to eat on the Tour with the theory that it’d be more easily digestible: ‘The team bus had a fridge, but it only had space for two bottles of water, not for all those bottles. It was very hot, the food spent over a month in the bus but not in the fridge …’ Riders consequently fell severely ill with food poisoning and as Delgado jokingly puts it, ‘it was pretty weird that none of us died!’
‘My riders had talent and were able to take on riders at an international level,’ Echavarri claimed. ‘It wasn’t as straightforward as all that, France was not an important market for Reynolds, but they felt the sporting interest of the Tour should take precedence over everything. Those that claimed to understand cycling laughed at us and said our presence was an insult to the Tour. Those who did not wish to recognise Arroyo’s talent were forced to do so on the Puy de Dôme and when he stood on the podium in Paris.’
Delgado points to one hugely beneficial long-lasting effect for Reynolds of racing the Tour in such an adven
turous way: ‘Riding on instinct and with zero experience brought us together as a squad. It really united us. The other teams at that time were always very envious of how well we got on in Reynolds.’ That close-knit feel to Reynolds was something Indurain would particularly appreciate. ‘You go to Italy and the soigneurs switch teams every year, but Reynolds commanded a huge degree of loyalty from its staff,’ says one rival Spanish director. ‘They were always something of an old-fashioned squad, but if there was one thing I could have taken from Reynolds, it was that.’
Delgado and Arroyo’s Tour success created the start of a huge spike in media interest in cycling which – after later events caused this interest to increase radically – reached the point where television stations like Antena 3 would organise Vuelta ‘launches’ across Spain to show the public just how many vehicles and journalists they were taking to the race. (When one reporter from a rival media outlet, Cadena Ser, was informed that Antena 3 had their own helicopter to film the event, the journalist responded, ‘Huh, so what? We’ve got a plane!’)
But what was really vital for Indurain’s objectives in the years to come was that thanks to Arroyo and Delgado, the Tour had begun to feature once more on Spain’s sporting radar. It no longer felt as if the Tour was an area where the Spaniards would automatically lose.
In 1982, Reynolds had already hit the jackpot on a national level, taking the Vuelta al País Vasco with José Luis Laguía. The team also won the Vuelta a España thanks to Ángel Arroyo (later to be stripped of his title because of a positive dope test) as well as five stages and the King of the Mountains prize. ‘Teams like Zor and Teka were better, on a man-to-man level,’ Eduardo González Salvador says, ‘but then each year Reynolds was getting a bigger slice of the cake.’
Indurain Page 5
