NON MARGINAL GAINS
The three minutes that separated Indurain from runner-up Armand De Las Cuevas in the 1992 Tour’s Luxembourg time trial did not form the biggest gap between irst and second in the race’s post-war TT history. Although the playing ield is slightly skewed by the huge distances common in the 1940s and 1950s, Indurain has also been eclipsed in the modern era by Jan Ullrich, who put 3:04 into second-placed Richard Virenque in the very hilly St Etienne time trial in the 1997 Tour. Here are the 10 biggest margins of victory in time trials in post-war Tour history. Portalet, Aubisque, Tourmalet, Aspin and the summit finish at Val Louron. The first big surprise of the race came when LeMond was dropped by the lead group of favourites just on the final approach to the top of the Tourmalet. Then on the descent, even more surprisingly, Indurain blasted away alone. By the time LeMond caught back on, the Spaniard had gone.
How unusual was this kind of attack for Indurain? The answer is simple: very. In all the Grand Tours that Indurain won after 1991 and indeed in the ones he lost in 1994 and 1996, he never again produced a comparable mountain attack to his downhill charge on the Tourmalet, though he had previously won Tour stages on long breaks in the high mountains when he was no threat overall. True, in 1994, Indurain ground out a high, but steady pace on the uphill finish at Hautacam that shook all his rivals bar Luc Leblanc off his rear wheel – a move that effectively gained him that Tour. But that winning strategy of 1994 looked more like he was time trialling uphill. Only in 1995, when Indurain went on the rampage in the Ardennes on the road to Liège, was there a similar kind of long-range attack, but it wasn’t as devastating as in the Pyrenees in 1991.
“Indurain had a superb ally that day in Claudio Chiappucci,” Bernard says. The Italian bridged across to Indurain shortly after the Tourmalet’s descent. “It was Claudio who toughened up the race early on, putting LeMond in difficulties. That burned out LeMond’s team-mates as well as LeMond.
“When Miguel and Chiappucci worked together after the Tourmalet, it was ideal. They could put more and more time into LeMond. By the finish, Indurain let Claudio win the stage, because he got the yellow jersey and above all, he’d eliminated LeMond from the running.” Indeed, while Gianni Bugno, finally second in Paris, only lost 1:29, nobody else survived the cull. The French pair of Laurent Fignon and Charly Mottet conceded 2:50 and 3:53 respectively, but nobody else was within six minutes. LeMond crossed the line a massive seven minutes back and Indurain had a three-minute cushion on second-placed Mottet. As well as blowing up, the American had suffered the indignity of getting knocked off his bike by the Gatorade team car on the Col d’Aspin, though he was already well down by that point. Although the American attempted a brief counter-attack en route to Gap and gained a scant 26 seconds, the Tour was effectively done and dusted. Indurain’s legendary tenacity was another factor. As Bernard puts it, “We knew that once Miguel took the jersey, it would hard for anyone to get it back.”
Indurain made an ambiguous gesture as he crossed the line at Val Louron behind Chiappucci. It could have been seen as an ‘up yours’ to the media for their criticism of Banesto, or even to Chiappucci for sitting in up the final climb, then sprinting past, even though the official line was that he’d gifted the stage to the Italian. Or maybe, in keeping with Indurain’s general unreadability, it was actually joy at having taken the yellow jersey, likely for good.
Bernard confirms that Indurain’s attack to Val Louron was improvised, not planned. It wasn’t just the absence of team meetings: “The lack of race radios meant that there wasn’t any point in having it all planned out on a whiteboard in the bus in the morning. We just did what our instinct told us. Miguel felt it was the right thing to do. It was a coup de panache - a classy, knock-out blow.”
Though the first half of the 1991 Tour had been an unpredictable free-for-all, the second half was Indurain’s first stab at shutting down the race following a big time gain, and he succeeded comfortably. In fact, Val Louron was stage 13, meaning Indurain only had to defend for one more week. One more crucial element of Banesto’s success in Val Louron was what Bernard calls the “divide and rule” policy. Indurain didn’t put up much of a fight over the stage win and in subsequent years he was equally generous to his rivals. “Chiappucci wasn’t our number one rival, so we used him to tip the race in our favour,” says Bernard.
It’s not by chance that Banesto never won a single stage of any of Indurain’s subsequent Grand Tour victories unless it was in a time trial by the Spaniard himself. The road stages were left to be fought over between the remainder of the teams, never for the riders in Indurain’s squad. It got the point where in Italy, Indurain was nicknamed ‘the Democratic King’. Not that it always went down well within Banesto.
“I was not pleased that I could not go for the win on Alpe d’Huez in 1991, where I’d done a lot of the work for Miguel, to support him on the climb,” Bernard says. “We’d pulled back Luc Leblanc and three or four kilometres from the line, I wanted to go for the win. The Tour was won.”
1991 wasn’t seen at the time as the beginning of an era of Indurain wins. It was seen as much as a defeat for three-time winner LeMond than the first of many wins for the Spaniard. “Indurain wasn’t considered the favourite for 1992. That was LeMond. He had three Tours in his palmarès already,” Bernard pointed out. “It was only after Miguel won the Giro d’Italia in 1992 that we could see he was going to be one of the greatest ever Grand Tour racers.” Then after Indurain’s stage win in Luxembourg that year, in what some see as the most accomplished time trial victory of the modern Tour, the sense that LeMond was no longer the Tour’s key reference point became unavoidable, and the sport settled into the Indurain years.
The 1991 Tour allows room for speculation that Indurain’s path to Tour greatness could have been different had he opted to go for more daring attacks of that kind rather than rely on his devastating time trial ability. He was certainly capable. But he never believed in racing spectacularly for its own sake. His attack on the descent of the Tourmalet came about because he had heard that LeMond was in trouble. From 1992 onwards, the mask came down, the Tour’s time trials became Indurain’s to lose and Indurain’s yellow jersey tally rose and rose. Given just how exciting the 1991 Tour had been in its opening two weeks, you can’t help thinking that it’s a pity that Indurain no longer had to resort to more radical tactics to win the Tour. But as the record books show clearly, too, nobody could ever say Indurain’s post-1991 strategy didn’t work.