‘José Miguel had put Miguel in there as a leader because little by little that idea he’d had about Miguel being a Classics rider was fading,’ recollects Delgado – although to judge by his comparison with Moser after Indurain’s Paris–Nice win it still endured as far as that spring. ‘He thought the Tour was too hard for Miguel, but he wanted to give him a test as a Grand Tour leader to see if it could last.’
‘He’d had his big crack at the Classics in 1988 and it hadn’t gone well at all, so he put him in the Vuelta in 1989 as co-leader. I wasn’t that bothered, I’d won the Tour the previous year. So José Miguel told me to stay calm and not try to make any big moves because it was all on Miguel. The only problem was that I was going absolutely brilliantly right up until the moment when Miguel fell on the Fito and then after that, all the problems I could imagine turned up at once. But I got through.’
Ultimately, the Vuelta could not have gone better for Reynolds, with outright victory for Pedro Delgado, the first for the team – discounting Arroyo’s in 1982 – in their home Grand Tour and the second for Delgado. For Echavarri and Unzué Delgado’s victory represented a welcome addition to their team’s credibility, too, given that the squad, despite its outstanding success, was on the point of losing its main sponsor.
The reason was essentially that Reynolds the team had outgrown itself, with its annual budget soaring from 15 million pesetas to 300 million by 1989. Supported only by the Spanish branch of the company, previous co-sponsorship with Seur had only lasted a year before Seur opted to form its own squad. However, the team’s main backer in Reynolds, Juan García Barberena, was able to establish contact with Banesto – one of Spain’s biggest banks – in early June. In what was a fast-moving operation that culminated fifteen days before the Tour, Banesto confirmed their interest in co-sponsorship of the team for the rest of 1989, providing an initial injection of 100 million pesetas into the team budget for that season, and taking over as main backer for a minimum of three further years.
Although the sponsor switch took place in record time, the solidity of the support from the bank could not be questioned, right up to the highest level. One of the driving forces behind Banesto’s interest was Arturo Romani, the bank’s vice-president, a keen cycling fan. Romani was responsible for persuading Mario Conde, the president of Banesto, to send the fax to Barberena that confirmed the takeover. When Conde’s son, another cycling fan, found out that his father’s bank would be supporting the country’s number one cyclist and team, he was equally delighted: ‘so you’ve signed Perico? Well, it was about time Banesto did something right, Dad.’
It was probably just as well that there was such a high level of support for Perico and the bank’s new investment, given the events that were to befall Reynolds-Banesto at the start of the 1989 Tour. After the team had been officially re-launched and the riders had appeared in their new, rapidly redesigned Reynolds-Banesto kit as part of the Tour’s team presentation in Luxembourg, a large number of bank executives stayed on to watch Perico and the rest of the team tackle the opening prologue.
Delgado’s performance could not have been worse. Due to roll down the start ramp as defending champion at 5.16 p.m., because of some kind of misunderstanding, Delgado turned up over two minutes later. With Echavarri yelling himself hoarse at Delgado to start pedalling, the 1988 Tour winner raced away, completing the course just fourteen seconds slower than winner Erik Breukink. The ‘only’ problem was the two minutes and forty seconds that had to be added to his time because of the disastrous delay, and which sent Delgado plummeting right to the bottom of the overall classification.
Given that he had gone from winning the race outright in 1989 to an unmitigated disaster in the next Tour almost before he had turned a single pedal stroke in anger, Delgado was understandably a nervous wreck. In the following day’s team time trial, the few Banesto executives who had opted to stay on would have witnessed a second debacle, this time collectively, as Delgado caved in mentally and was dropped on three successive occasions. ‘We were going brilliantly, I think it was the best team time trial Reynolds had ever done. But then, at twenty kilometres from the finish, he cracked,’ Arnaud recalls. Arnaud reveals that whilst the generally accepted history of the handover of power between Indurain and Delgado was that it took place in 1991, in fact, it could have occurred two years earlier, on the roads of Luxembourg. ‘Delgado’s head went because of the mistake he’d made the day before. We riders deliberated, for several minutes, whether we should leave Delgado behind and continue with Miguel, or wait for Pedro. And we opted for the second. The decision, though, was taken with Miguel’s complete agreement, right in the middle of the race.’
‘We knew that Miguel was strong, but Delgado was the defending Tour winner. And we waited. And after that it was all about Perico, Perico and Perico. Miguel went on working for another year, which he did very well.’
Reynolds finished the stage last. As a result Delgado was now seven and a half minutes down on Laurent Fignon, the leading French favourite after winning the Giro d’Italia. In terms of sporting disasters, Delgado’s situation was truly memorable, but for little else. ‘The prologue looked really bad, but where he lost the Tour that year was in the team time trial,’ observes Arnaud.
However, in terms of comebacks, Delgado proved he had plenty to offer as well. Second place in the stage five time trial (Indurain placed a distant twelfth) behind LeMond – although there was an unwelcome near-repeat of Luxembourg when the Reynolds-Banesto team car was delayed in traffic waiting to cross a river and Delgado had to reach the start on foot, his bike slung over his shoulder – allowed Delgado to regain over 100 places overall. Then on the race’s first stage through the Pyrenees, Reynolds-Banesto – their collective morale boosted enormously by a fax sent from the bank’s Arturo Romani, promising them his full support – opted to go on the rampage. But not just with Delgado, with Indurain as well.
Well before the final ascent to Cauterets, Indurain romped away from the main peloton on the descent of the Marie-Blanque, overtaking all those ahead of him in earlier breaks by the foot of the next climb, the Aubisque. He then soloed over three Pyrenean passes – far easier written than done – before tackling the final ascent alone to win at Cauterets. All this at the end of a 91-kilometre breakaway.
‘I’ve never suffered so much, in my five years as a pro,’ Indurain said about his first ever Grand Tour stage victory. ‘If the climb had been three kilometres longer, I probably wouldn’t have won. I paid a high price for doing the whole of the Aubisque alone.’
It only emerged much later that one of Indurain’s least known skills – brilliant descending – had prevented anybody from getting across and ruining what was his only major solo break in a mountain stage of the Tour. ‘Fede Echave tried to follow Miguel on the descent of the Marie-Blanque, and we told him not to bother, that there’d be no way he’d catch Miguel, but he tried anyway,’ Delgado recalls. ‘We next passed Fede on the descent, standing on a corner and trembling like a leaf.’ (Delgado himself finished third on the stage: a position in the overall he would ultimately hold in Paris).
This mountain attack of Indurain’s was not in any way an act of rebellion against the established hierarchy in Reynolds-Banesto. Although not preconceived prior to the stage, Indurain said he had directly followed Delgado’s orders to attack on the Marie-Blanque’s descent and the idea was ‘probably that he would bridge across to me on the last climb.’ On an ascent as comparatively gentle as Cauterets, though, Indurain recognised that ‘probably the gap between the two of us was too big for that to happen.’ That gap, though, was another sign that Indurain’s strength in the mountains was far greater than even Echavarri had estimated after Paris–Nice.
With hindsight, Indurain’s success in Cauterets is notable for its rarity. Together with Luz Ardiden in 1990, it was the first of only two summit finish wins he would ever take in his career in any Grand Tour, both preceding his overall reign in the Tour de France. Cauterets wa
s also the first and only day that Indurain ever led in the Tour’s King of the Mountains competition. These mountain stage victories have come to symbolise Indurain’s continuing rise towards the summit of world cycling – rewind twelve months and as Delgado had soared towards outright victory, his role had been a much more anonymous one.
‘There’s always the doubt whether we should have gone on with Indurain at that point in the team time trial [in 1989], but – no,’ says Arnaud. ‘The race went the way it did. And in terms of Miguel’s progress, it’s always much easier to do that when you’re racing in somebody’s shadow. Why did LeMond win the Tour that year? He didn’t have a strong team, but he didn’t have the pressure either. In a sense, we were LeMond’s best team after we’d messed it up in the prologue. Whenever there was a breakaway, who worked hardest to bring them back? Reynolds-Banesto. LeMond was very intelligent, he sat on Delgado’s wheel for most of the race and finally, on the last day, he won the Tour.’
Nonetheless, something that spoke volumes for his potential role as designated successor was that Indurain’s stage victories both at Cauterets and the following year at Luz Ardiden were the only ones for a Banesto rider in the Tour. The competition to succeed Delgado as Banesto’s leader, at least inside the team, was diminishing. Neither Ángel Arroyo, who retired from racing mid-way through 1989, nor Gorospe, long seen as an alternative leader to Delgado but four years Indurain’s senior, had similar roles or opportunities. Yet with Perico a Tour winner in 1988 and third overall in Paris despite his disastrous debut and still only twenty-nine, it was not yet clear how long it would be before Delgado allowed Indurain, Seventeenth both in the final stage and overall, to take over.
‘Banesto, quite simply, got the wrong leader,’ was how L’Équipe later analysed the team’s collective performance in the 1990 Tour de France. The sight of Miguel Indurain sacrificing his own chances for Pedro Delgado in the Alps was not one that was easy to forget, particularly when Indurain subsequently produced the squad’s one stage win in the high mountains – for the second year running. The issue still produces much debate, and when I visited Dominique Arnaud, he spent the first hour of the interview saying repeatedly, ‘I know there’s one question you’re going to ask, everybody does it, all the journalists ask me the same.’ Sure enough, the question is – did Banesto make an error of huge proportions, opting to have Delgado as sole leader in the Tour when it was so clear that Indurain was stronger than his leader? Although Indurain himself has never sought to create any controversy about Banesto’s Tour hierarchy that year, his family were more outspoken. ‘I always say Miguel won six Tours, not five,’ his father once told me.
The controversy took a while to reach boiling point, given that although Indurain gained time on his leader in both the opening prologue and the time trial at the end of the first week at Épinal, this result could be explained by Indurain’s natural ability against the clock combined with his being a year older and stronger. In the same way, whilst Indurain’s excellent second in the 61-kilometre time trial in Épinal behind Raúl Alcalá was logical enough, it was Delgado’s fourth place, a mere forty-four seconds slower than his team-mate despite such a long effort against the clock, that made it seem as if Echavarri and Unzué were right to designate him sole leader. That said, had Echavarri and Unzué looked at the previous Tour’s long first week time trial results – in 1989 Delgado had finished second and Indurain twelfth – they might have perceived that in comparison, Delgado was actually more off the mark. Surely those results made the question of a leadership change more pressing, not less?
At the same time, Banesto – as of 1990 the team’s sole sponsor – must have been afflicted by a sense of déjà vu given that just like in the Vuelta that April, an early break had gained far more time than anyone could have anticipated – and contained some potentially dangerous challengers. ‘It wasn’t a mistake on our part,’ argues Arnaud, ‘it was more that none of the teams, at that point, wanted to work.’ Of the four riders who reached Futuroscope on stage one a massive ten minutes ahead of the bunch, Frans Maassen, the stage winner, was unlikely to cause much trouble, but Ronan Pensec had a sixth and seventh place overall in the Tour in his palmares – and was a team-mate of Greg LeMond’s to boot. Canada’s Steve Bauer, too, had finished fourth in the Tour one year. As for Claudio Chiappucci, at twenty-seven already the winner of the Giro’s King of the Mountains jersey that spring and twelfth overall, the Italian was in the prime of his career and clearly on the rise. To cap it all, Banesto then lost between one and two minutes in the stage two team time trial to most of their main rivals. What did it matter if Delgado or Indurain led when after ten stages of racing and one massive individual time trial, both of them were over ten minutes down on race leader Ronan Pensec?
The answer to that was: a lot. and not just because whilst Maassen and Bauer quickly faded from the running as soon as the roads started to steepen in earnest, Pensec and Chiappucci managed to hold onto the main group of favourites in the first Alpine summit finish stage to St. Gervais/Mont Blanc. Rather, the problems for Indurain and Delgado arose as soon as the Tour began its assault on the race’s first Hors Catégorie climbs – the Madeleine, Glandon and Alpe d’Huez – the pre-race favourites began to make serious inroads, for the first time in the race, into Chiappucci and Pensec’s sizeable lead.
Spearheading the bounceback was Greg LeMond, defending champion and second behind Gianni Bugno – of whom much more later – on Alpe d’Huez. Erik Breukink, twice a podium finisher in the Giro, staked a claim on the final podium by clinching third on the ‘Dutch mountain’. The one rider who had failed to garner big benefits was Delgado, eighth at forty seconds in what was, in theory, the terrain that favoured him the most, and after driving up most of the Alpe at the head of the favourites.
Banesto could draw scant comfort from the fact that the rider who had shown himself to be the strongest on a fair percentage of the climbs and the flat that day was Indurain. Their strategy with the Navarran had proved to be totally erroneous. His attack on the descent from the Madeleine had set the cat amongst the pigeons with the GC favourites. But, crucially, Delgado’s failure to bridge across to him on the Glandon had made it clear that the 1988 Tour winner was not on his best day. When Delgado did finally reach his team-mate on the descent, he had both LeMond and Bugno tailing him. Instead of Banesto unleashing Indurain in his own right, they were effectively playing their rivals’ game, and sacrificing Indurain in the process.
Indurain’s subsequent spectacular drive up the valley road to the foot of Alpe d’Huez made it plain to see that he was in great shape, despite losing nearly twelve minutes afterwards as he paid for the massive effort he had made previously. But Delgado’s failure to finish off the spadework, coupled with Indurain’s earlier effort, made Banesto look like they had done nothing more than lay the foundations for the opposition – and opened up the question of whether it would have been better, as L’Équipe argued later, with Indurain as the Spanish team’s top GC contender.
‘If we had had Indurain as sole leader from the start of the Tour, people would have said we were nuts,’ Echavarri later retorted. But Indurain could, others countered, have been a co-leader, or a plan B. Then when Delgado failed to live up to his 1988 and 1989 form, Indurain could have been let off the leash.
The argument continued to bounce back and forth on the next stage, an uphill time trial to Villard-de-Lans, where Delgado only lost thirty seconds to the winner, Breukink, despite needing a bike change. Yet Indurain’s magnificent third place, following his monumental effort of the previous day, showed that the Navarran could hardly have been discounted from the GC either – were it not for those twelve minutes he had lost the previous day.
What raised an armchair debate to one of far greater intensity came on the stage to St. Étienne, where LeMond ambushed Delgado when he made it into a late breakaway. Indurain had made it into the same move as LeMond, but once again dropped back to prevent his leader from facing a c
omplete disaster. Thanks to Indurain, Delgado only lost thirty seconds, but as Unzué observed on the line, it could have been a loss measured in minutes had not Indurain’s chances been sacrificed.
The press, meanwhile, were having a field day slating Banesto’s failure to recognise that Indurain should have been given co-leader status. ‘If things go on like this and Delgado ends up winning the Tour, he’ll have to gift Indurain a flat on the Mediterranean, or build him a monument outside the aqueduct in [Delgado’s home town of] Segovia,’ observed Javier de Dalmases acidly in El Mundo Deportivo. ‘Indurain’s no longer an errand boy, because that would be a waste of talent … Delgado can never be grateful enough for what Indurain has done for him,’ said MARCA. Yet in reality, Banesto’s decision to oblige Indurain to wait at St. Etienne was common sense, given that he had no chance of impacting overall by that point: the real damage to Indurain’s chances had been done on the stage to Alpe d’Huez.
The evidence in the case for Indurain continued to pile up in the final two key stages, Luz Ardiden and the Lac de Vassivière time trial, where Indurain finished fourth, 1–41 ahead of Delgado. It emerged that Delgado had been suffering from an upset stomach, which explained his lack of apparent attentiveness at St. Etienne and later en route to Bordeaux, an error that would cost him a fourth podium finish in Paris in a row. But that, in turn, only gave more ammunition to those arguing that Indurain should have been the Banesto co-leader, at the very least, from the start, and that Echavarri and Unzue should have made a better call much earlier in the race.
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