LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

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.

      ‘The Animal’ looking achingly cool in the British champion’s jersey and gold earring.

      As I became a rider in my own right, so my list of cycling idols began to take shape. Museeuw was a warrior, Gianni Bugno some sort of a magician, Induráin this serene, beautiful winning machine. Top of the list, however, was a guy who wasn’t a great champion. I’d never seen him win a single race, and yet somehow he was the very embodiment of everything I loved about bike racing.

      When Duclos and Ballerini slipped away at the previous year’s Paris–Roubaix, there was a chase group of seven or eight. Museeuw and Olaf Ludwig were in it, and so too were the classics specialists Edwig Van Hooydonck and Adri van der Poel. Then there was this other guy. He was wearing a white jersey with two horizontal stripes across the chest, a red one and a blue one. My mum explained that he was the British champion and that his name was Sean Yates. She also said he’d ridden for the Archer, just like me.

      My mum still loved cycling. She’d met my dad through it and had never really stopped following it. In the past I’d never given the sport a second thought, but this all changed after that Paris–Roubaix. Back then Cycling Weekly used to put a poster on the back cover, and on 15 April 1993 it was of

Скачать книгу