Читать книгу Icons: My Inspiration. My Motivation. My Obsession. - Bradley Wiggins, Bradley Wiggins - Страница 11

Miguel in cap and sunnies at the 1996 Tour de France; he was undoubtedly one of the best descenders of his generation.

There were always copies of Cycling Weekly around the house. I’d never bothered with them, but after having watched Roubaix I started to devour them. I found the 1992 Tour de France editions, and started to read about the winner, this giant Spanish guy …

Then in June a new magazine appeared. It was a monthly called Cycle Sport, much glossier than Cycling Weekly, and much slicker. It focused almost exclusively on continental pro racing, as distinct from boring time trials in some far-flung corner of the British Isles that I’d never heard of. There was more photography, more history, more colour and more glamour, and I thought it was fantastic. I’ve an idea that the first issue, or at least one of the first, was a Tour de France preview. I’d never watched the Tour before, but now I couldn’t wait.

If there’s anything you ever want to know about the summer of 1993, I’m probably not your man. If, however, there’s anything – and I mean anything – you want to know about the 1993 Tour de France, I’m categorically your man. I tuned in religiously, thought of nothing else, and obviously bought the compilation video when it came out. It was the first cycling film I owned, and I’m fairly sure I watched it every night that winter.

Those riders became my heroes, and to this day I can still reel them off. The sprinters were Nelissen, Cipollini, Ludwig, Moncassin and Abdoujaparov. In the GC group you had Rominger (second), Jaskuła (third), Álvaro Mejía (fourth, for Motorola). Chiappucci won a stage, Armstrong won a stage, Skibby and Bruyneel won stages. The teams had mysterious names, like Chazal, TVM, Ariostea and Telekom. I had no idea what they did or where they came from, but wherever it was I wanted to go there. Those three weeks in front of the TV were, and remain, one of the most immersive experiences of my life.

And then there was Miguel.

1994 Tour de France podium maillot jaune

CYCLING IS A VERY HARD SPORT. As often as not you’re operating right at the end-stops of your physical and psychological capabilities, so it can be extremely uncomfortable. You’re also competing against people whose job, essentially, is to destroy you. Any sign of weakness and they’re going to bury you, because that’s the business they’re in. The business of suffering, and of enduring.

When I visualise guys like Marco Pantani, Tom Simpson and Luis Ocaña, I see pain etched into their features. That’s maybe because they’re synonymous with tragedy, but not so Museeuw, Jan Ullrich, even Eddy Merckx. They wore their suffering as well, because in cycling nobody is immune. The great champions aren’t successful because they’re talented per se (though talented they clearly are), but because they have the ability to hurt themselves a lot. Whatever your physical gifts, you’re not going to complete the Tour, let alone win it, unless you’re prepared to go really, really deep. And that’s why we need to talk about Miguelon …

Miguel Induráin was the same, but completely different. He won five consecutive Tours de France because he was freakishly engineered, but also because he was a tremendous competitor. Where he was different, though, completely different, was in the way he won his Tours. While his opponents seemed to be wrecking themselves, he gave the impression of being out for a bike ride. They were the best climbers in the world, right at the top of their form, and yet he made beating them look easy. As a matter of fact it was anything but easy, and still less so given that he was much heavier than them. He was six foot three and 82 kilos, and there are mountains – big ones – to get over in France.

Imagine how soul-destroying it must have been. Whatever you tried, this great man was going to be completely unflappable. His facial expression was never going to alter for three weeks, but come what may he was going to beat you, and he was going to make beating you appear the easiest thing in the world. The horrific, brutal days in the Pyrenees were going to seem entirely routine for him, the heat and humidity only minor inconveniences. He’d hammer you in the time trial, maybe demoralise you in a couple of the mountain stages, and for the other 18 days just ride alongside you, seemingly without himself.

That sounds horrendous, but it’s also entirely the point. Miguel was much, much better than the rest, but the key to the five Tours he won is that there was nothing at all gratuitous about them, or him. Where guys like Merckx and Armstrong seemed to want to crush their opponents, he killed them softly. He didn’t do it painlessly – it’s the Tour de France after all – but wordlessly and, in some way, mercifully. People say he was machine-like, robotic, all that stuff, and watching him race they are easy conclusions to draw. For me, though, he was the opposite of these things.

Miguel made sure he beat the guys that mattered when it mattered, but he wasn’t interested in winning stages for the sake of it. In fact, he never won a single road stage in those five Tours, just time trials. That’s because he had no ego, and he was more than happy for everyone to have a share of the cake. Now it could be said that they were fighting over the crumbs, but he took pains to ensure that there were plenty to go round. It’s no coincidence that he always won by around five minutes, because he only ever took as much as he needed.

That, I think, is what makes him unique among the five-time Tour de France winners.

On his way to gold in the 1996 Atlanta Olympics time trial – his last big win.

The first of them, Jacques Anquetil, understood that he needed friends in the peloton. He had a caustic rivalry with Raymond Poulidor, and the notion that Poulidor might beat him at the Tour was unthinkable. He knew that he needed as many allies as possible in the peloton, so he made it his business to ensure that the rank and file were on his side. Bernard Hinault understood this as well, but his methods were different. He was a patriarch or, in cycling parlance, a ‘patron’. His reign was built around psychology and strategy, and at times it was quite feudal. It’s inarguable that his wins at the 1982 Giro and the 1985 Tour were achieved more with his head than his legs. Tommy Prim and Greg LeMond were each stronger than him, but each was brow-beaten into settling for second place. Everything Hinault did was calculated and calibrated, and nothing happened by accident.

Miguel was much less calculating than either Anquetil or Hinault, though contrary to popular misconception he was anything but naïve. He understood that it paid to have friends in high places, but he was the polar opposite of someone like Hinault. He raced hard, but he wasn’t one of those who turned into an animal when he pinned a number on. The context changed, but he didn’t, and his innate kindness didn’t ever desert him. He didn’t generally do many interviews, but when he did he was humble, respectful and courteous. The other riders liked him because it was impossible not to.

I don’t ever remember him punching the air or shaking his fists when he won the Tour. The one and only time I recall him being demonstrative was at a race he didn’t win, the 1995 World Championships in Colombia. He’d won the time trial, and now he was away on the final lap with the Italians, Pantani and Gianetti, and with Abraham Olano, the ‘Baby Induráin’. When Olano attacked, the Italians didn’t respond, so Miguel was able to sit on as his countryman disappeared up the road.

Olano subsequently punctured, but famously managed to roll over the line on his rim. That left Miguel contesting a sprint for second with the two Italians, and when he won he celebrated as if he’d won the rainbow jersey himself. Of course he hadn’t, but that’s entirely the point. He was delighted for Olano in the first instance, and for his country in the second. Spain had been failing to win the Worlds for 62 years, and finally his friend had achieved it.

The bike ridden by Induráin in the TT stage of the 1992 Tour of Romandie, his last race before winning his first Giro d’Italia

With the Pinarello bike at the Tour de France, where his time-trialling ability did much to secure him his five victories.

Stories about Miguel are legion, but I think his character is best summed up by a couple that Juan Antonio Flecha told me while we were training together. One of Miguel’s sponsors was Sidi, the Italian shoe manufacturer. They had a rider-liaison person there, and if the riders wanted something she was their point of contact. She told Flecha about her dealings with Induráin, and he passed the story on to me.

The first story goes that Miguel, who had won maybe four Tours de France by that point, would ring the girl and ask, extremely politely, whether it might be possible for him to have another pair of shoes, on account of the others being worn out, or broken, or whatever. The girl would say, ‘Well, yes! Of course it is! You can have as many as you like! You’re Miguel Induráin!,’ but she said she never really felt as if she’d convinced him. Very obviously he knew he was Miguel Induráin, but he seemed to not have the faintest idea of what that meant.

When he finished he rang the girl again. It was 1996, he’d finally lost the Tour, and then they’d pretty much obliged him to do the Vuelta. He really hadn’t wanted to do it, but in the end he’d succumbed to pressure from the Spanish public, the team and the sponsors. He’d only just turned 32, but he was spent psychologically as much as physically. Alex Zülle beat him in the time trial, then dropped him on Monte Naranco, and the following day Miguel famously climbed off on the road to Covadonga and walked into a bar. He said not a word to anyone, and in truth he didn’t need to. He didn’t want to be a cyclist anymore, so he stopped. (The extraordinary thing is that the other riders stopped as well, to see what was wrong. This was a guy who had been hammering them for five years, and yet they were worried about his well-being.) Anyway, that was that. Career over.

Now this took place on 21 September. It was the fag end of the season, and in retiring he probably missed ten days’ racing, no more. Keep in mind that over the previous five years he’d delivered five Tours de France, two Giri d’Italia and goodness knows how many others, so sponsors like Sidi had gotten more than their money’s worth. Miguel being Miguel, however, picked up the phone and rang the girl again. He said, ‘I think I’m in breach of contract, so you need to tell me how much money I owe you, and I need to send the shoes I have back.’

The other story that springs to mind came from Txema González. He was a lovely guy, a Team Sky soigneur, who died during the 2010 Vuelta. He said it was one of those horrible wet days at the Tour of the Basque Country, and the staff were all sitting on the team bus waiting for the stage finish. It was belting down with rain, and the poor spectators were standing behind the barriers waiting by the finish. One of the guys on the bus looked out of the window and said, ‘There’s a guy over there in a green cape, and I’m sure it’s Induráin. He’s the spitting image!’ So Txema got off the bus and went over, and lo and behold it was – it was Miguel. He said, ‘Miguel, what are you doing standing here? Come in the bus and get dry!’

The issue here is that Miguel wouldn’t have dreamed of getting onto a team bus, for two reasons. First, he wouldn’t have wanted to intrude, and second, the last thing he’d have wanted was to be treated differently to the other people standing there. It was raining, so as he saw it that would have been rude.

We’re talking about a cyclist here, but he didn’t exist in a vacuum. Spain was in turmoil while he was winning the Tour, and ETA was waging a war. Miguel is from Pamplona, on the doorstep of the Basque Country, and yet in some way he was a unifying force. They may have tried to exploit him or appropriate him, but there was a sense that, even in conflict, he represented a line that couldn’t be crossed. It was as if everyone in Spain decided, subconsciously, that in some way he transcended the war. As if he were a deity.

Likewise the fallout from the doping scandals. It’s a matter of public record that he rode during the EPO years, and yet he’s the Tour winner that nobody – journalist, judiciary, former rider – has ever gone after. They’ve gone after Riis, Ullrich, Pantani and Armstrong, and history tells us they’ve been going after Tour winners (myself included) since Jan Janssen in 1968. There has to be a reason why only Miguel has been left alone, and to me it’s pretty clear what that reason is. Whatever the context and whatever was happening in cycling, Induráin’s morality is bomb-proof.

When I won the time trial at the 2012 Tour I did an interview for Spanish TV. I mentioned having grown up watching him smash them, and the journalists went to see him. Evidently he said nice things about me, and TVE said they wanted to revisit me on the second rest day, to show me the film. I said that would be fine, and when they came they had something for me.

They gave me this claret-coloured neckerchief with the Induráin family crest on it. To be perfectly honest I didn’t really understand what it was, but then they explained that it was from San Fermín, the summer festival in Pamplona where they run the bulls. Afterwards I showed it to the Spanish guys on the team and they were taken aback. They explained that for someone from a Navarro family to make a gift of something like that was extremely rare. It signified my being an extended part of the Induráin family, so it was just about the highest honour Miguel could have bestowed on me. As you can imagine, I was really touched.

The Induráin family neckerchief from San Fermín, gifted to me by Miguel

Two years later I went to the Gran Fondo Pinarello in Treviso, and Fausto Pinarello told me Miguel was coming. He’d always ridden Pinarello bikes, including the legendary Espada on which he broke the Hour Record after the 1994 Tour. He’d ridden it when becoming the first man to ride over 53 kilometres in an hour, and he’d remained a friend of the Pinarello family. So it was not unlike that Museeuw moment, me panicking about meeting one of my boyhood favourites and fretting about what I would say to him.

The day before the event we were wandering around the square looking at the sponsor’s stands, and Fausto spotted Miguel. He said, ‘It’s Miguel! Come on – let’s go and see him,’ but I wasn’t ready. I’d been building myself up for the moment, but the moment wasn’t supposed to be until the following morning. I said to Fausto, ‘Can’t we leave it until tomorrow?’ because I went into full panic mode. It sounds like a stupid cliché, but growing up on a council estate in Kilburn I couldn’t have imagined something like that. He was this perfectly calibrated cycling machine from Pamplona, and I hadn’t even known where Pamplona was!

The moment Fausto Pinarello introduced me to Miguel – one of my favourite riders as a boy. Hopefully not looking totally overwhelmed.

Anyway, he was everything that everybody had said he was, just a lovely man. He and I sat together at dinner that evening, having one of those European conversations. He spoke no English but a little bit of French, I spoke good French but no Spanish, and Fausto helped us because being Italian (and very smart) he understood a bit of everything.

I mentioned the fact that I was minded to attempt the Hour, and he asked me some questions about it. When I asked him how he’d trained for it he said that he hadn’t really, at least not specifically. That says it all, because he’d just ridden a time trial. He didn’t expand on that, because he much preferred listening to talking about his own achievements.

Then again, his achievements speak for themselves. Volumes. He’s Miguel Induráin.