RETRO: PARIS "NICE 1989

PARIS NICE IN 1989 AND 1990 PITCHED A FORMER TOUR WINNER, STEPHEN ROCHE, AGAINST A FUTURE ONE, MIGUEL INDURAIN. TWO CLOSE RUN RACES SHOWED THAT CYCLING’S BALANCE OF POWER WAS SHIFTING

Looking back at Miguel Indurain’s first major stage race victory

T he spring of 1989 was unseasonably mild, and revolution was in the air. France was celebrating its bicentennial that year, and a warm wind would move in across Europe and blow down the Berlin Wall in just a few months. Cycling also stood on the brink of its final steps into a new era. At the Tour de France that summer, Greg LeMond, wearing fluoro yellow kit with space age Oakleys, riding a bike with tri bars and less than half a year away from getting the sport’s first million-dollar salary, would overturn Laurent Fignon’s 50-second lead on the final day of the race and turn it into the first Tour of the modern age.

But a quieter revolution, every bit as significant as LeMond’s, was also taking place that spring. Paris-Nice would pitch a former Tour de France winner against a future Tour de France winner, and the result would provide the world of cycling with a sneak preview of the 1990s, before the 1980s were even up. A generational shift was in the offing.

Coventional wisdom has it that the great shift in cycling hierarchy that saw Miguel Indurain establishing himself as the dominant rider of the Tour happened in 1991. The Spaniard’s unbroken five-year run of yellow jerseys began in July that year, exactly as LeMond’s total stopped at three, and the apparent speed and suddenness with which Indurain toppled the American, turning the race on its head with a single attack in the Pyrenees, made it look like a coup d’état against the ancien régime. But Indurain had already been through the early skirmishes of intergenerational warfare in Paris-Nice. In 1989 and 1990 he came up against Stephen Roche, the 1987 Tour winner, in the ‘Race to the Sun’, and these

editions went beyond the simple issue of one man trying to beat another – the headto-heads were a clash of racing styles, of backgrounds, of personalities and of different eras.

In another life, you could imagine Indurain and Roche as a double act, or as the lead characters in a sitcom: the passive, herbivorous Indurain would be the perfect straight man for the wisecracking, fasttalking Irishman. Indurain was goodnatured to a fault, while Roche had more of an edge to him. The impression was that the sociable Irishman was good at making friends, but made enemies just as easily – his career was littered with fallings-out, barbed words in the media and occasional lawsuits. The press at the time always made much of the obvious contrast between city slicker Roche, from Dublin, and his country boy compatriot Sean Kelly, but you could have drawn the same comparison between Roche and Indurain, who’d been brought up on a farm in Navarre. In a bike race Indurain generally preferred control, defence and predictability, the better to make the most of his extraterrestrial time trialling ability. Roche was always looking for an angle, an opening – he was physically gifted and classy, but his greatest asset was his racing brain. His tactics were as bold as those of Indurain were bland and his ability to read a race and his rivals (and, in the case of the 1987 Giro d’Italia, his team-mates) gave him a yellow, a pink and a rainbow jersey.

In 1989, it had been two years since Roche’s Tour win, and it would be two years before Indurain’s first. However, as March came around and Paris-Nice gave the cycling world its first big race of the season, neither would start the event as a favourite.

OPEN RACE

Before the WorldTour made things a bit more homogenous, and before ASO bought up Paris-Nice as part of its wide portfolio of events (and unforgivably substituted the race’s iconic and stylish white jersey for a bland imitation of the Tour’s yellow), the ‘Race to the Sun’ was an independent event. It was owned and run by the Leulliot family, whose patriarch Jean Leulliot, a protégé of the Tour de France’s founder Henri Desgrange, had bought it in 1957 from the weekly magazine Route et Piste (which in turn had taken it over after the Second World War – before that it was owned by the Petit Journal and Petit Nice newspapers). When Leulliot died in 1982, his daughter Josette took over the reins, maintaining the race’s stubbornly independent ethos, booking the riders herself and using a persuasive streak as wide as the Rhône valley down which her race usually passed, to keep things going.

There were no international races in Australia or the Middle East in those days,

and the season eased itself in through the months of February and March. Cycling was beginning to show signs of the UCI’s future ‘mondialisation’ policy which saw the sport’s expansion around the world in the 1990s by then, however – both Roche and Greg LeMond had started 1989 not in the Mediterranean races, as was tradition, but at the Florida-based Tour of the Americas.

But Paris-Nice was the first real rendezvous for most of the stage racers, even if none of them were particularly enthusiastic about their chances as the 1989 event kicked off in Paris’s 13th arrondissement on Sunday March 5. The 1986 Tour winner LeMond, still in recovery from the hunting accident which wiped out 1987 and 1988 for him, notwithstanding a soft third overall in the Tour of the Americas, had opted for TirrenoAdriatico. Roche, the 1987 Tour winner, had lost 1988 to a knee injury and surgery. The defending Tour champion, Pedro Delgado, had his eye on targets further ahead (the Vuelta, where he was not the strongest rider, but would win, and the Tour, where he was the strongest rider, but would not win). The 1983 and 1984 Tour winner Laurent Fignon was in form – he’d won the Ronde d’Aix-en-Provence and come seventh in the Tour du Haut Var which was won by his teammate Gérard Rué. However, Fignon had spent the last four years careering between brilliance and mediocrity and while his third place in the prologue was consistent with the former, his withdrawal two days later with gastrointestinal issues would be entirely consistent with the latter. And to underline the open and unpredictable nature of the competition, Sean Kelly, who had won every edition of Paris-Nice between 1982 and 1988, had gone to TirrenoAdriatico instead. Nobody even mentioned Indurain. At the start of 1989, the best that could be said of the Spaniard was that he had hidden talents. So well hidden, in fact, that his Reynolds team management, who’d worked with him for seven years by that point, had told him to focus on the Classics the previous year, feeling that he was better suited to the one-day events than the grand tours. And so, typically of Miguel Indurain, his big breakthrough in professional cycling would come by stealth. UPHEAVALS Super U rider Thierry Marie won the prologue, one second ahead of Indurain and two ahead of team-mate Fignon, with Roche in fourth. And so, the race went south in fits and starts, with as much distance covered in team cars (another sign of the times – no team buses in those days) as on the bike. Stage 1 started a full 150km south of Paris, in Gien, but that was nothing – there were 300km to drive between Saint-Étienne, the finishing city of stage 2 and Vergèze, location of the stage 3 TTT.

Etienne De Wilde, the Belgian champion, had been the rider of the year so far. He’d won three stages and the GC at the Étoile de Bessèges, two stages at the Tour of the Med, and Omloop Het Volk. The sprints he won in Moulins and Saint-Étienne in Paris-Nice were wins number nine and 10 for the year, all taken within 23 days of each other.

The GC underwent two cataclysmic upheavals on the stage to Moulins. As the peloton raced through the outskirts of the town, a huge crash cleaved it in two. 50 riders went down, including seven from one team, Z. Two of the French team’s riders, Philippe Casado and Olaf Lurvik, stayed down. De Wilde won the sprint from the survivors, while most of the overall favourites crossed the line in a large group 40 seconds after the Belgian. However, the one Z rider not to have been caught up in the crash, Eric Boyer, fifth in the Tour de France in 1988, had been in the front group with De Wilde and had therefore sneaked into an extremely strong position.

Less than an hour later, Boyer was rueing his luck as the race director announced that the crash had been so close to the kilometre-to-go mark that the second group would be credited with the same time as the first. Boyer was livid – “I won those 40 seconds fairly. I lost two team-mates in the crash, and therefore I have already lost Paris-Nice, because in the team time trial we will be six against eight,” he said.

The race organisers had booked accommodation for the teams near the finish in SaintÉtienne, with everybody making the 300km transfer the next morning in advance of the team time trial. However, the Toshiba team slipped through the net and had been booked into Nîmes, doing the long transfer that evening. This meant they spent a leisurely Wednesday morning having a lie-in, then making use of the extra time to recce the 58km team time trial route. These logistics had been a 23rd birthday present for Toshiba rider Laurent Bezault who was catapulted into the race lead when the French team inevitably won, 41 seconds in front of Ariostea and over

In another life, you could imagine Roche and Indurain as a double act. The passive, herbivorous Indurain the perfect straight man to the fast-talking Roche

a minute ahead of the third-placed team. Roche’s Fagor outfit conceded 1:18, after having suffered four punctures in the course of the team test. The result also put Marc Madiot, Toshiba’s leader in the absence of the crocked Jean-François Bernard, in a very strong position: second overall.

Roche, by this point, was not in a bad place. He lay eighth overall, 41 seconds down, and he’d already made his presence felt on the Saint-Étienne stage, surging on the Col de la Charme and putting the ill Fignon more or less out of the race. He talked up his chances of putting time into Madiot on stage 4, which finished on Mont Faron, the steep climb above Toulon overlooking the Mediterranean. “Why not?” he asked the press rhetorically in the morning. Sure enough, Roche put time into Madiot on the climb. However, the race had taken an unusual shape when an eight-rider group, including Indurain and Z rider Bruno Cornillet, attacked with 50km to go, about three quarters of the way through the stage, and gained almost two minutes. It took a tailwind-assisted chase by the peloton to bring them back to touching distance as the race arrived in Toulon, but the junction to Cornillet and Indurain was never made. The Frenchman took the stage win, Indurain was second, and when the GC dust settled, Madiot had inherited his team-mate Bezault’s white jersey, Roche was up to second, 23 seconds behind and Indurain, still nobody’s idea of a race favourite, was in fifth, a further 22 seconds behind. It still looked good for Roche. To understand stage 5, to Saint-Tropez, it’s necessary to understand the dynamics of inter-team rivalry in the French peloton at the time. The Super U team, hitherto led by Laurent Fignon and managed by Cyrille Guimard, had not only endured a disappointing race themselves, but had also watched Marc Madiot, a Toshiba rider, go into the race lead, with a strong chance of winning overall. Toshiba had formerly been La Vie Claire, the team set up by French businessman Bernard Tapie and then-four-times Tour de France winner Bernard Hinault in 1984. Hinault had won four Tours with Guimard’s Renault team (which morphed into Système U in 1986 then Super U in 1989), then not only done the dirty on Guimard by setting up a new team along with three more Renault riders,

but then poaching Greg LeMond the following year. The last thing Guimard wanted was for Madiot, yet another ex-Renault/Système U rider, to win, and he had a more personal motivation for success – he was coming up to 500 wins as a team manager, and so far in Paris-Nice, he’d drawn a blank.

Super U attacked from the gun the next morning. And they weren’t the only aggressive ones. Indurain’s team-mate Pedro Delgado also went for it. Off the back of Delgado’s attack, Super U’s Gerard Rué attacked with Indurain on the descent of the Col de Vignon, the final obstacle of the day, and set about building a lead of a minute. With Toshiba unable to chase, it was left to Roche and Fagor. Rué outsprinted Indurain in Saint-Tropez and the Spaniard took the white jersey, 45 seconds clear of the Irishman. Guimard had got his stage win, and while the GC was out of the question for Super U, the important thing was that Madiot was also probably out of the reckoning – he was still ahead of Roche, but not by enough to hold him off in the final day’s time trial on the Col d’Èze.

Roche threw everything at Indurain in the next two road stages – he attacked the Spaniard on the descent of the Col de Tanneron in the Mandelieu stage, and was thwarted by congestion caused by the team cars, and the strong Reynolds team rode defensively on the morning stage of the last day, a hilly route around Nice.

There was only the Col d’Èze left, and the 45 seconds that still separated Indurain from Roche looked like they favoured the Spaniard, given that he was climbing well.

By halfway on the 10km climb out of Nice, Roche had taken 19 seconds, but Indurain was riding with the level-headed

It was a lesson in consistent racing. The Spaniard had made fewer attacks than Roche - two - but he gained signi icantly each time

tranquillity which was the hallmark of his career. Roche took more time by the summit, but Indurain came out in first place by 13 seconds. It had been a lesson in consistent stage racing. The Spaniard had made far fewer attacks than Roche - two, to Mont Faron and Saint-Tropez, but he’d gained significantly each time, more than compensating for the Irishman’s own superiority that year against the clock. He’d come second on four different stages – the prologue, the summit finish on Mont Faron, the flat finish in Saint Tropez after a hilly stage, and the uphill TT on the Col d’Èze.

Paris-Nice was Indurain’s first major professional victory. He also won Critérium International that spring, and took a debut Tour de France stage win in the Pyrenees later in the year while LeMond, Fignon and Delgado fought out the podium. The following year saw a re-run of the Indurain v Roche battle at Paris-Nice. Again, Roche was coming back from a frustrating year. Again, the Irishman was visible in attacking throughout the race (and also built his challenge on the dominance of his new Histor team in the TTT stage). Roche held the white jersey, but Indurain was too strong on Mont Faron, winning the stage a minute ahead of Roche. Going into the Col d’Èze TT, Indurain led Roche by 15 seconds, less half the time that Roche had put into him on the same climb the year before. But the Spaniard was a year older and stronger, and Roche could put only seven seconds into him. After the finish, Roche complained that Indurain had spent most the race hiding in the field: “He’s the strongest on any one hill, but I’ve been riding on the front all week. He’s been riding in the bunch, and that’s his way – it’s good until the day he gets flicked and left behind…”

The 1990 Paris-Nice was one of the last hurrahs of the 1980s generation of Tour champions. The field had included LeMond, Roche, Fignon, Delgado, Charly Mottet, Jean-François Bernard and Claude Criquielion, all top-five finishers in the Tour, but Indurain had beaten them all. It would be another year before he won the yellow jersey, but the groundwork for that win in the Tour, and the four that followed, was laid in two increasingly confident victories in Paris-Nice.