The clearest argument in favour of Indurain came at Luz Ardiden, the last great mountain stage of the race. Whilst Delgado flailed yet again, losing a minute and a half, Indurain was the only one of the potential GC contenders able to follow a blistering attack by LeMond. Despite suffering badly on the climb, Indurain not only clung on to LeMond’s back wheel, but was able to swing past at the finish for his second Tour summit victory in two years.
This victory provoked more comments of the ilk of Luis Ocaña’s, the 1973 Tour winner and later an influential commentator for Spanish TV. ‘Even if you start a race with one leader, when you have somebody so exceptional waiting in the wings, it’s only fair to give them a chance too.’
For others, what really justified Banesto’s caution in the Tour was Indurain’s failure to impact in the 1990 Vuelta, where he had been given the role of team leader ahead of Delgado. Indeed, Spain’s only weekly cycling magazine of the time, Meta2Mil, placed Indurain at the top of the ranking of pre-race favourites. But Banesto were – like the rest of the top names in the Vuelta that year – caught out when the underrated Marco Giovanetti gained time in a first week break then proved a far harder nut to crack than anticipated. Banesto placed Gorospe in the lead thanks to his participation in the same break, but the Basque cracked completely on the first mountain stage, whilst Giovanetti, with a string of top ten places in the Giro d’Italia to his name, then took over as leader.
Indurain and Delgado chipped away at Giovanetti’s lead but on neither of the set-piece key stages, a time trial at Valderazcay and a mountain-top finish in Cerler, could they really dent his lead. The writing appeared on the wall with a vengeance at a long, flat time trial in Zaragoza on stage twenty. Both Indurain and Delgado picked up time on Giovanetti, but it was a fraction of what was needed to oust the Italian: whilst Delgado gained thirty-seven seconds and moved into third, Indurain was only eighteen seconds ahead. The real Spanish challenger, in fact, looked to be Pello Ruiz Cabestany, winner in Zaragoza whilst Anselmo Fuerte, a gifted climber, also had some cards to play. After Cabestany cracked on the last stage, Delgado moved into second, but the harsh truth was that the defending champion had never been in a position to threaten Giovanetti. With Indurain only finishing seventh, it would have taken a brave manager to opt for Indurain as sole leader in the Tour.
In his defence, Indurain was – once again – suffering from a cold throughout the Spanish Grand Tour. Indurain’s underlying breathing problems were more severe than for other riders, too. In December of 1989, doctors at a clinic at the University of Navarre – where Echavarri and Unzué regularly sent their riders for analysis and tests – had diagnosed Indurain with chronic sinusitis, brought on by a deformed nasal septum that partially blocked the airways in his nose. Thus, and in keeping with their conservative approach, Echavarri and Unzué argued that in comparison with the tried and tested Delgado, Indurain should, after his setback in the Vuelta, have a secondary role in July.
Delgado himself argues that this was what Indurain wanted: ‘Maybe it was José Miguel’s fault, but it was certain that Miguel was very wary and he didn’t want to have responsibilities, no way. People always say that he should have not waited for me in Saint Étienne, but I said, OK, that’s what the fans think, but Miguel didn’t. He wasn’t acting under orders, but he stopped to bring me back up to the bunch anyway.’
‘The good thing about Miguel is that he is very generous, he’s going to respect the team plan even if it goes against him. But then there was also the thought in his head, “And if I fail? I don’t want that responsibility. Better I stay in the system, where I’m feeling more at ease with myself.” That’s why he preferred to do what he was told to, rather than look for his own solution.’
Certainly the public had not changed their minds about who they supported the most, as Juan Carlos González Salvador discovered when he signed with Banesto after his three-year stint in KAS. ‘The whole Perico-mania thing was completely crazy,’ he recalls. ‘He was so popular nobody wanted to go in the same team car as him after a race because you knew the damn car would be mobbed and followed all the way to the hotel. It was completely nuts.’
That public vote of confidence in Delgado acted as indirect pressure on the team. ‘We had Miguel, but we had the winner of the 1988 Tour and – in our eyes – the moral winner of the 1989 Tour,’ argues Arnaud. ‘On an individual level amongst the favourites, it was Delgado who had done the 1989 Tour the fastest. The idea that Miguel could have won the Tour in 1990 just didn’t come up, or if we ever talked about it, it was behind his back.’
‘He could have made it onto the podium on one stage after he dropped back to wait for Pedro [St. Étienne] and then afterwards there was an enormous media scandal about it all. And my answer to that question about whether Indurain should have been leader in 1990 is, he didn’t lose the Tour that year: 1990 was the year he won the following five. That year, seeing what he could do, win on Luz Ardiden and put in good showings in the time trials, as well as being the go-to rider for doing all the spadework on the flatter stages, you could see he had all the ingredients you needed to be a Tour winner. That was when it became clear, not before.’
Asked after Luz Ardiden if it would have made more sense if he had been race leader in the Tour and Delgado in the Vuelta, Indurain argued, ‘it would seem that way, looking at the results. But there’s no way of knowing that beforehand.’ He did not have an issue with the team hierarchy, either, arguing, ‘I’m happy with the way it’s worked out, because we share out the responsibility between us, and one of us doesn’t get all the pressure.’
The questions on the Indurain–Delgado handover of power, though, continued to echo through the sport for years. Delgado once told MARCA, ‘Could Indurain have won that year? Perhaps, although we’ll never know. But any team that’s worth its salt should begin a Grand Tour with clear ideas and at that point, I was the leader. At that moment, he could have won because the race was proving to be a very weird one and LeMond, as usual, was always in the right place at the right time, even if he wasn’t the strongest. Both Chiappucci or Miguel could have won.’
However, it is also certain that thanks to Delgado’s (and to a lesser but also important extent, Reynolds’) pioneering work, the belief in Spain that victory in a Tour with one of their riders was a real possibility had taken root again. This was not a once-in-a-lifetime triumph as it had been with brilliant but erratic racers of the ilk of Federico Martín Bahamontes or Luis Ocaña (whose cycling background was in any case as much French as it was Spanish). Rather it was Delgado and Arroyo whose racing in the 1983 Tour for Reynolds had re-created the belief that victory in cycling’s greatest Tour was possible more than once. The ‘voyage in the dark’ in the Tour for Reynolds that year had gone a long way to creating the team’s internal cohesion for major stage races, too. Then whilst Delgado’s victories in the 1988 Tour and 1989 Vuelta had ensured that the massive media interest created by the 1983 results and Spain’s ‘radio wars’ – such as José María García’s blanket coverage of the sport – remained intact, Indurain was able to continue to progress at his own pace. Without having any pressure to produce results, Indurain could come unscathed through Echavarri’s erroneous dreams of making him a Spanish Francesco Moser and prove his worth in week-long stage racing and the Grand Tours.
Delgado agrees that the removal of those inferiority complexes about the Tour was one important factor. But so too was his ‘being more of a rebel than Miguel, more restless. Miguel prefers to reach the finish with the other favourites in the same bunch rather than risk attacking and end up getting dropped by the rest. I helped push away those doubts, not just for Miguel but for Spanish cycling in general. In 1983, Reynolds was the only Spanish team in the Tour. But by 1985 or 1986 there were lots of Spanish teams there, and they were saying “heck, this is possible, these rivals are only human.”’
‘In the case of Miguel, it allowed him to be close to a rider who was winning the Tour without the resp
onsibilities. For a young rider, that’s a very different scenario to when you’re in a team that is simply going into the Tour to grab whatever they can. This way, I think Miguel was in a position to experience, inside a team, what had happened and then he could use those experiences, in his own way, to his advantage.’
There could be little doubt, though, that Indurain was ready to take on a greater role in Reynolds. Whilst the period following the 1989 Tour had been fairly flat in terms of results, Indurain made much greater gains across the board in 1990, as his rise in the FICP ranking – the international classification of riders’ all-round performance – would suggest. In 1989, he was twentieth in the classification; in 1990, he was fourth.
A second victory in Paris–Nice, this time crushing Roche on the Col d’Èze climb, confirmed that his previous year’s win had been no fluke. Indurain also picked up stage wins in the Vuelta al País Vasco and Vuelta a Valencia. Yet outside the question marks over Indurain’s role in the Tour and the doubts that had been created by the Vuelta a España, the most intriguing development was his continuing progress in the Classics. In August Indurain captured a stunning victory in the Clásica San Sebastián, Spain’s biggest one-day race, and in April he had taken an all but unnoticed fourth place in the Flèche Wallonne, later upgraded to third after Gert-Jan Theunisse tested positive.
Indurain’s victory in the Clásica made him the first Spaniard to win a one-day race in the recent World Cup series, which replaced the Super Prestige Pernod International, the unofficial points system. But as Unzué puts it, ‘there was a lack of interest, of cycling culture, about those kinds of races outside Spain. We didn’t see that we could really achieve something in them and at the same time, it has to form part of the team’s culture. But back then we were pretty green, and still discovering the top events. The Vuelta took place at the same time, more or less. Back then, Spain didn’t have the riders for it as we now do, with Alejandro [Valverde] and we weren’t obliged to take part in them as we are in the WorldTour. Now, it’s different.’
The ongoing debate of what Indurain might have done had his team been more focussed on the Classics was overshadowed by the imperious necessity to give the Navarran a much more important role in the Tour de France. After 1990, not even the perpetually cautious Echavarri and Unzué could deny him that. ‘I don’t know if that was the Tour he didn’t win,’ Unzué says, ‘but I do know that the 1990 race was the one that made him see that he had a Tour victory in his legs. He wouldn’t say I want to win this, that or the other. Ever. You had to interpret his silences, but a lot of the time it was so evident that he didn’t need to say it.’ What was evident, too, when compared to Delgado, Unzué says, ‘was that the student had now begun to be better than the teacher.’
CHAPTER 6
Neither Monk Nor Martian
Halfway up the Tourmalet ascent in 1991, José Miguel Echavarri and Miguel Indurain had the conversation that would – finally – start the process of removing the last remaining obstacle between Indurain and victory in the Tour.
In a group that was already shredded to less than a dozen and which was lacking Pedro Delgado, Indurain’s role as Banesto’s leader for the Tour was, at long last, beyond all doubt. But the issue now was, with Indurain in sole command, how far the Navarran could go in his new position – and how soon? Indurain’s question to Echavarri as the favourites inched their way up the Pyrenees’ toughest climb went very much to the point on that score. The twenty-seven-year-old wanted to know how well his rivals were faring.
Referring to the race leader, Echavarri’s first answer was ‘[Luc] Leblanc’s not looking great.’ But then he added the key phrase, ‘and neither is LeMond.’ That was all Indurain needed to hear to head to the front of the pack and, together with his key ally of that day, Claudio Chiappucci, step up the pace as much as he could. As they did so LeMond, the leading favourite, found himself carved out of the group, then slowly but surely shed behind.
One of the best photos of those crunch moments that saw Indurain move into top gear for the 1991 Tour was taken on a sweeping left-hand bend on the Tourmalet’s upper slopes. To the right of the road, a white stone cliff gleams brightly in the intense heat, on the left there is a steeply dropping precipice. On each side of the broad, smoothly surfaced tarmac in between there is a long, thick line of fans, many dressed in singlets and shorts and waving Basque ikurriña flags as they cheer the riders on. In this improvised, swelteringly hot arena, as the riders strain forward, there is nowhere to go but upwards, nothing to face but pain.
The photo was taken just as the race was splitting apart, from behind LeMond’s right shoulder, looking ahead at the backs of Chiappucci and Indurain as they lean over their bikes to force the pace on a group of six or eight riders. At the back of the group, visibly struggling, are yellow jersey Luc Leblanc and his compatriot Gerard Rue. But behind them – and presumably struggling even more – is LeMond, separated from the group by a mere five metres of shiny, graffitti-spattered grey tarmac, his head craned slightly to the left as he tries to look round the group to see exactly who it is causing him to suffer.
To judge by the photo, the distance between LeMond and the rear end of the group looks minimal, a pedal stroke at most. Yet it was the first time in the race that LeMond, winner of the 1989 and 1990 Tours, was in serious trouble. That pedal stroke that would have brought him back into contention might have lasted just a fraction of a second but there was no way LeMond could dig any deeper to resist. The last time Indurain had made a move like this, at Luz Ardiden the year before, the American and Spaniard had launched a joint attack for LeMond to take the yellow and Indurain the stage. This time, the boot was truly on the other foot.
By the summit, LeMond had lost seventeen seconds on this group of favourites. A fast descent on the first, toughest, hairpin corners of the Tourmalet was enough to let the triple Tour winner regain contact. But by then, Indurain had disappeared from the front group, attacking alone and riding the last stretch of the long road from Villava and his green, nameless, first bike of the late 1970s, all the way to the pinnacle of cycling’s greatest race – and the maillot jaune.
That LeMond was the last obstacle Indurain needed to sweep aside to stake a claim on the yellow jersey had become very clear by that point in the 1990 Tour.
Two of the top contenders, Raúl Alcalá and Erik Breukink, had already headed for home after their team, PDM, was struck by what was first treated as a case of mass food poisoning, although rumours that the case was to do with something altogether different have circulated ever since. LeMond, on the other hand, had gained nearly two minutes on Banesto early on in the Tour and then had been the rider that resisted Indurain’s first time trial win in Alençon the most tenaciously, losing only eight seconds. Thus whilst Indurain was lying fifth overall when the Tour reached the Spanish town of Jaca the night before the Tourmalet, LeMond was the only pre-race favourite still ahead of him. On top of that, LeMond had won the two previous Tours de France. Gambling it all on winning in the final time trial in Mâcon would have been too close a call for Indurain.
The latter, on the other hand, had not started the Tour as a top contender or even as a lone leader in the Banesto team. Instead Indurain had been designated co-leader alongside Delgado, whilst a new signing for Banesto, Jean-François Bernard, was waiting in the wings. Echavarri, the Diario de Navarra reported, said that a final decision on who received top protected status would only be taken after two stages in the Pyrenees.
Bernard’s semi-privileged status in a team that seemed to have decided on its successor had several explanations. Firstly, after 1987, when he took third overall, Bernard had been considered France’s most promising young Tour rider. Then in 1991, he had finished fourteenth in the Giro d’Italia, ahead of Delgado and with two second places on stages. Neither rider had truly shone in Italy, but Bernard’s better performance confirmed that after two difficult years, the Frenchman – who had performed well in the 1988 Giro d’Italia too be
fore crashing out injured – could be back on track.
It wasn’t quite as simple as that, though. Bernard had specifically asked Echavarri when he broke his contract with Toshiba at the end of 1990 to join Banesto that, after years of pressure in the French team, he should not be considered a leader. But at the same time, should Bernard suddenly have found himself in a top position overall, Echavarri was hardly likely to have told a former Tour podium finisher to squeeze on the brakes.
Coincidentally or not, following Bernard’s signing, Indurain had stepped up his Grand Tour game in the Vuelta a España that spring, taking second overall. That surely merited the Navarran a top position in Banesto’s game plan for the Tour – except that bizarrely, the 1991 Vuelta showed that making Indurain an outright leader might well have been risky.
For Indurain, second in the Vuelta was his best ever Grand Tour result by a long chalk. The problem was that he had been clearly beaten in the 1991 Vuelta by a rider who, to put it mildly, had come out of nowhere. At the time of the race, Melcior Mauri was a promising twenty-five-year-old time triallist from Catalonia. But Mauri’s Grand Tour record – with a best placing, out of five starts, of 71st in the 1990 Vuelta, and with no stage wins to his name – hardly suggested that he would suddenly leap into contention in 1991.
Yet Mauri’s sudden rise to the top of the Spanish cycling hierarchy was by no means entirely fluky. Mauri was part of the formidable ONCE team, a Spanish squad created in 1989 and which was rapidly gaining a name as one of the most forward-thinking, cohesive outfits in professional cycling. ONCE manager Manolo Saiz’s meticulously planned team time trial efforts – one area where Reynolds-Banesto had traditionally been weakest – saw Mauri move to the top of the leader board in the 1991 Vuelta on the race’s first stage, a time trial formed by three-man teams. Then matters improved even more for Mauri after the Vuelta’s first full team time trial on stage two netted ONCE another 1–40 over Banesto. The race had barely started, and Indurain was already nearly two minutes back. ‘We are the best in the world at this,’ Saiz argued, and it was hard to disagree.
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