On each subsequent time trial, Indurain lost ground to Mauri: 56 seconds in Mallorca on stage eight, 42 seconds at Valderazcay’s hill-climb, 66 seconds on stage eighteen in Valladolid. The only points where Indurain could pull back time on Mauri, in fact, were in the mountain stages, such as Cerler, where he regained a minute, and the Lagos de Covadonga, where he clawed back 28 seconds. The suspension of the key mountain stage in the Pyrenees to Pla de Beret because of snowstorms meant a loss of a day’s racing that might have turned the tables in Indurain’s favour. But in terms of Indurain’s strongest suit, the time trials, he had been defeated throughout.
According to Saiz, Banesto had underestimated Mauri, basing their strategy instead around trying to beat Marino Lejarreta, the far more experienced ONCE pre-Vuelta leader. ‘There was never a battle between Mauri and Indurain, it was between Lejarreta and Indurain,’ Saiz observes. ‘Indurain had a huge amount of respect for Marino. So the only time that the Vuelta was in danger for ONCE in 1991 was when Indurain got ahead of Lejarreta overall, after the Valladolid time trial. And the only time Mauri was in difficulty in that Vuelta was the next day’s stage. But whilst Lejarreta was second Mauri was never in danger. We all thought that Mauri would crack under the pressure. But he didn’t.’
Indeed, Saiz had himself played a part of keeping Banesto overly interested in Lejarreta, by arguing mid-way through the Vuelta that Mauri would crumple on the climbs. Instead, Mauri’s tenacity proved enough to deprive Indurain of the Vuelta victory in what turned out to be his best ever chance to win the race, and his prowess in time trialling saw him beat the unrivalled master of racing against the clock for the next five Tours de France.
How did what was to be Indurain’s last defeat in a Grand Tour for three years actually happen? Part of the problem was Banesto failing to give Indurain the mountain support he needed. ‘We’d done the Giro as well as the Vuelta, and I think the Vuelta team was weaker as a result. If you only have twenty riders in a squad, it’s not possible to have two strong separate Grand Tour teams,’ Dominique Arnaud observes. ONCE’s ultra-strong start to the Vuelta and having two leaders in the GC battle was another factor in Mauri’s favour. The rough winter weather in the Pyrenees and northern Spain, with 34 riders abandoning or outside the time limit on the Cerler stage alone, was a third reason, given Indurain’s aversion to the cold and wet. The cancellation of the Pla de Beret stage was a fourth.
A fifth factor may well have been that Indurain had had an exceptionally difficult start to the season, being forced to stop training for three weeks with flu in February, and could have lacked some base form. But Indurain’s fourth place in Liège–Bastogne–Liège – his best ever result in a Monument Classic – just before the Vuelta hardly suggested he was in poor shape. That was even if, with Ariostea team-mates Moreno Argentin and Rolf Sorensen dictating events in the front group in La Doyenne, Indurain had no chance of taking the victory in Liège.
Indurain put it very simply, as ever: ‘Mauri was going really well, and on top of that, ONCE had options with Lejarreta.’ Essentially, Indurain had been outgunned by a team as much as by a rider – a lesson that few, if any, other squads apart from ONCE appeared able to grasp in the Tours to come.
Delgado’s analysis also sheds extra light on such a puzzling defeat: ‘In theory the Vuelta was the best Grand Tour for Miguel – short climbs, not too many days in the mountains at that time, and long time trials. But, and I don’t know why, there are some races that take a liking to you, others that don’t, and the Vuelta was a race which never liked Miguel, right up to 1996.’
With Bernard now waiting in the wings should Delgado and Indurain both crack, Indurain started the 1991 Tour with a point to prove as much to his team as to the world in general. But his urgent need to define his role once and for all in the Tour was overshadowed by another near-disastrous start for Banesto. Just as in 1989 where Delgado’s prologue delay was followed by a weak team time trial, the first two days saw Banesto experience a double whammy of potentially devastating proportions.
The first setback came on a seemingly inoffensive, 110-kilometre circuit round Lyon, the first part of a split sector stage. That Djamolidin Abdoujaparov, the Uzbek sprinter, should win on a flat circuit would have been viewed as normal. But that Abdoujaparov should only have seven riders with him, rather than leading home the whole bunch in a mass dash for the line, was unusual. And that two of those seven riders with ‘Abdu’ were GC contenders LeMond and Breukink was even stranger. The main bunch, including all the Banesto riders, completed the stage nearly two minutes down, representing a lot of egg on the Spanish team’s face, a huge blow to their morale and a significant dent in their chances overall.
The usually laidback Echavarri was furious, to the point where whenever riders came back to the team car for water on the morning stage, he reportedly yelled at them, ‘Your bidon’s just been dropped on the ground, it’s two minutes down!’ The GC damage then worsened even further when Z, LeMond’s team, gained a further sixteen seconds on Banesto in the afternoon’s team time trial. In less than 48 hours, Delgado, Indurain and Bernard were all at nearly two and a half minutes down on the American.
Indurain’s first time trial victory, at Alençon, by eight seconds on LeMond, did little more than limit the previous damage inflicted by the American. Gaining a minute on Breukink looked promising, but Breukink’s exit with the rest of PDM did nothing to resolve the main issue, which was LeMond. On the first stage through the Pyrenees to Jaca in Spain, featuring two first category and one third category climb, Banesto failed to put in any attacks of importance and two potential outside threats, Luc Leblanc and Charly Mottet, gained ten minutes. After LeMond’s triumphant first week, that this happened on the day a Tour stage finished on Spanish soil for the first time in fourteen years just added insult to injury. Indurain managed, with a timid late attack, to regain eight scant seconds on LeMond. But the American, whilst 2–35 down on the new leader Leblanc, still had more than two minutes on Indurain. After Delgado’s disaster of 1989 and having the ‘wrong’ leader in 1990, Banesto, it seemed, were once again staring into the sporting abyss.
‘The terrain didn’t suit us,’ Indurain argued afterwards. ‘I think that Val Louron is a much better stage.’ El Mundo Deportivo, one of the less belligerent newspapers in Spain that evening, argued that ‘we have to give Banesto the benefit of the doubt’ but still accused the team collectively of being ‘apathetic’ and ‘exasperatingly passive.’ ‘They had five riders in the front group,’ the paper pointed out. Although El País stated that Echavarri had already warned that he would not be firing off his heavy artillery, it added that, ‘It was hardly wholly acceptable for there to be no big battle, just because the last climb is thirty kilometres from the finish.’ Behind the scenes, elements of Banesto’s upper management circles were so worried that, MARCA’s Josu Garai claimed, Echavarri’s position ‘was hanging by a thread … and an internal communiqué was doing the rounds asking for him to be sacked.’ Even the Spanish minister of sport, Javier Gómez Navarro, turned up at the Banesto hotel and told Echavarri to his face, ‘I’ve been listening to the radio and you wouldn’t believe what they [the Spanish media] are saying about you … how’s Perico? Going well?’ Echavarri’s answer was much quoted afterwards. Indeed, most reports of the stage would probably now precede it with a couple of imaginary drumrolls for added effect. ‘Perico’s going well,’ Echavarri said, ‘but Miguel is going really well.’
Indurain was indeed going so well that after the descent to the foot of the Tourmalet, his advantage on the chase group was up to forty-five seconds and counting. For the third year in a row, first on the Marie-Blanque in 1989, then the Madeleine in the Alps in 1990, and now the Tourmalet, Indurain had attacked on the downhill of a major Tour climb – but on this occasion the stakes could not have been higher. It was at this point, at the foot of the Tourmalet, that the man who would prove Indurain’s key ally in his dash for glory reached his side: Chiappucci, who ha
d taken off after Indurain. Aware that he had both the Aspin and the ascent to Val Louron left to tackle, and with Chiappucci more than four minutes down on Indurain overall, Banesto’s directors instructed Indurain to wait until the Italian reached his side. The working alliance that was to lead to Indurain’s taking over the maillot jaune was about to form and it immediately began working well. By the summit of the Aspin, the lead was up to 1–45 on the favourites, but crucially, LeMond was at three minutes. A major power shift in favour of Indurain was on the point of taking place.
Intriguingly for a rider frequently slated for being over-calculating in the five Tour victories that followed, this time there had been no prior plan to Indurain’s downhill attack. It was only after Echavarri’s conversation with Indurain on the Tourmalet that the wheels began to be set in motion. Indurain later commented, simply, that at the moment after the Tourmalet summit where the rest of the top names had eased slightly, to take on board food and newspapers to protect themselves from the chill factor on the descent, he had thought: ‘I’m not stopping. Whoever wants to, can follow me.’
‘Tranquilo, va como Dios,’ commented José Miguel Echavarri to the rest of the management, a phrase that can only be translated badly, but clearly, as ‘Relax, he’s riding like he was God.’ Certainly if Indurain needed some divine protection, it was arguably on that blistering downhill attack. Unzué recalls that in the team car behind Indurain he was driving at speeds of up to 100 kph and they took the corners so hard, one of the bikes on the roof rack loosened its stays and went flying into a ravine. Once Chiappucci had arrived, though, the tension in what was one of Indurain’s most dramatic episodes ever in a Tour subsided and the alliance between the two was easy to form: the classic dividing up of the spoils was clear – the stage for one, the overall lead for the other. It was a strategy that was often to be repeated in the Indurain years.
At the finish at the top of the ascent of the Val Louron, Indurain’s swinging, one-handed, uppercut punch in the air as he crossed the line a few yards behind Chiappucci – taken in some quarters as an ‘up-yours’ gesture to the Spanish media for their criticisms of Banesto – indicated he knew full well what he had achieved. Not only did he have the first yellow jersey, but also, with the exception of Gianni Bugno who had the strength to react in time and who only lost 88 seconds, this was a knock-out blow. With everybody from sixth downwards on the stage more than six minutes adrift, LeMond finally tottered across the line more than seven minutes behind Indurain. Indurain’s overall advantage on his closest rival now stood at three minutes on France’s Charly Mottet: a Tour-winning margin.
From this point onwards, Indurain’s team, rather than his individual performances, were responsible for maintaining the status quo. By and large, the team held up. Jean-François Bernard gave him vital support on the mountain stages, both on the ascent to Alpe d’Huez, where the Frenchman rode most of the climb in the front of the group and again at Morzine two days later. To judge by the way RMO, looking to protect Mottet’s second place overall, were willing to ride so hard for Banesto when LeMond went on the attack on the road to Gap, Indurain’s lead was viewed as a solid one by his rivals, too.
It was not just the time advantage, as Arnaud and Delgado both saw it, that played in Reynolds’ favour. There was also Indurain’s tenacity and his seemingly limitless ability to handle almost all situations when under pressure. ‘Miguel’s only problem was getting the overall lead. Once he’d got it, he’d never let it go, because mentally he was very strong,’ Delgado argues. ‘I remember once in a Paris–Nice when he was leading, he was isolated from his team and he had Stephen Roche to handle, but he came through absolutely fine.’
‘I tried to make the team see that once Miguel took the lead in Val Louron, then he wouldn’t lose it afterwards,’ Arnaud confirms. ‘It wasn’t just his strength, it was how incredibly serious he was about it all. He couldn’t lose it. We had the sense that if he lost it afterwards, it would have been his team’s fault, not his.’ In that sense, fortunately, ‘The 1991 Tour team was very strong. There had been a bit of a doubt over whether to send the riders belonging to Perico’s generation, to which I belonged, or whether to send in the newer, younger, riders, like Armand de las Cuevas. Finally they sent the experienced side of the team: older riders like Bernard, Magro, me, Julián, Delgado. It was a very powerful back-up.’
Whilst LeMond fell apart in the Alps on the stage to Morzine, the most dangerous moment for Indurain after grasping the lead in Val Louron came on the following stage, to Aix-les-Bains. ‘It wasn’t an exceptionally difficult stage, just a couple of minor Alpine climbs, but it was one which had seen a lot of attacks go clear,’ Delgado once recalled. ‘On one of the ascents, which we were going up using the big chainring so it wasn’t so difficult, it was lined out, and first Bugno, and then Chiappucci managed to go clear. I went haring after them, but there was no sign of Miguel. I looked round for him and he was quite a way back, maybe twentieth or thirtieth in the line.’
‘“I’m in trouble,” Indurain said when I got to him, without moving a muscle of his face, but it was clearly a tricky situation. ‘So I went up to Bernard, told him to go at a steady pace and only to follow Bugno and Chiappucci as best we could. Which we did and we fortunately pegged them back. When somebody starts to claim that Indurain didn’t suffer on the bike, I always remember that.’
Indurain signed off from the Tour in decisive style, solidifying his already all but indestructible lead with another time trial victory in Maçon. Although Chiappucci began by running him close in the first provisional time check, Indurain inexorably opened up his advantage on the two Italians who would join him on the final podium, showing beyond all doubt that he had the endurance as well as the power to go the distance for a Grand Tour win.
From thereon, Indurain’s first Tour de France win, the one that he would regularly describe as his favourite, was a question of staying upright on the largely ceremonial final stage into Paris, en route to Banesto’s first victory as a sponsor and the team’s second in four years. Indurain was also Spain’s fourth Tour winner after Delgado, Bahamontes and Ocaña, the country’s youngest (at twenty-seven) and – one for trivia fanatics – at 1.88 m, the Tour’s tallest ever until Sir Bradley Wiggins (two centimetres higher) in 2012. But if Indurain’s progress to the top had been steady, there had been no sense, as there had been with Merckx and Hinault when they won their first Grand Boucle and whose Tour achievements he would eventually emulate, that he had been expected to win that July. Rather there was more talk, particularly internationally, of why more experienced riders had not been able to beat Indurain.
It was asked how it was possible that LeMond had failed to manoeuvre himself into a position of power as he had done in the previous two Tours. Another major topic of debate was how it was that neither Bugno nor Chiappucci were strong enough in the time trials and that Breukink, quite apart from the questions hanging over his PDM team, lacked the power to go clear of Indurain on the climbs. ‘Nobody in their right mind,’ argued one top director at the time, ‘would have said Indurain could have won a Tour in 1991 until he did it. Waiting to help Delgado and winning a stage like he did in 1990 has nothing to do with winning a Tour.’
After his two dazzling time trial performances in the Tour, few amongst the thousands of Spanish fans who acclaimed him on the Champs Elysées, amongst them around 500 from Villava, would have remembered how Indurain had suffered against the clock in the 1991 Vuelta, either. But abroad, Indurain’s win had been almost too opportunistic – the most memorable moment being attacking on a descent and gaining exactly the right ally that was needed to take the key mountain stage – for it to be given a huge amount of long-term significance. L’Équipe were probably the politest of the international media, calling Indurain ‘a new arrival in the international peloton’ and almost leaving it at that. ‘It was not seen as the beginning of an era, in the way that Ullrich’s win was in 1997 or Hinault’s in 1978,’ observes William Fot
heringham, one of a handful of English-speaking journalists who covered the 1991 Tour de France. ‘Instead, LeMond, with three wins already, was still seen as the big favourite for the following year’s Tour, and there were plenty of other top names – Roche, Fignon, Chiappucci – who had been around for longer and who were likely to give Indurain a run for his money in 1992.’ If the international press’s muted reaction seems surprising, it is worth remembering how hard it is to repeat one Tour victory the following year. Indeed, once Lance Armstrong’s results had been wiped, the next rider to do so in the Tour after Indurain would be Chris Froome in 2016.
There were also the criticisms – already – of Indurain for being too withdrawn, too inexpressive. L’Équipe even went so far as to cite a nameless journalist from Madrid who claimed that ‘after twenty years, Indurain’s wife would still have no idea of the man she shares her nights with … Apart from a polite smile on each finishing podium, the only sign of any kind of emotion was that gesture at Val Louron,’ the newspaper added. ‘He has such a great character that he has no need to express it,’ was Echavarri’s polite, if ironic, explanation.
As for the man himself? Indurain did not, by any means, overplay his achievement, preferring to call the Tour ‘a race like any other, except that it’s more important.’ Given Indurain’s fondness both for stating the obvious and his dislike of spending more time in the limelight than was absolutely necessary, perhaps that was only to be expected.
Indurain Page 12
