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      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

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