Three Weeks, Eight Seconds Read online

  And that was how Kelly scored his first victory in PDM colours. ‘When I won Liège-Bastogne-Liège,’ he recalls, ‘I struck out early, maybe 30 kilometres from the finish. I had it in the back of my mind that if I waited and waited and left it down to the sprint, Rooks or Theunisse would go on the attack before then. It was a risky one. I didn’t say it at the time but I did admit, a number of years later, that that was why I went in an earlier breakaway, which is something that as a sprinter I wouldn’t have been doing.’

  In order to secure that fourth Tour green jersey, Kelly would need to put in some good performances in the Pyrenees and/or the Alps. Just how this would play with his hard-climbing team-mates remained to be seen. Fascinated observers who had a taste for a little in-house fratricide were salivating at the prospect.

  Stage 7

  1. Etienne De Wilde (Histor/Belgium) 7:21:57

  2. Jean-Claude Colotti (RMO/France) same time

  3. Patrick Tolhoek (Superconfex/Netherlands) +2”

  4. Steve Bauer (Helvetia-La Suisse/Canada) same time

  5. Jean-Paul van Poppel (Panasonic/Netherlands) +4”

  General classification

  1. Greg LeMond (ADR/USA) 33:19:39

  2. Laurent Fignon (Super U/France) +5”

  3. Thierry Marie (Super U/France) +40”

  4. Eric Breukink (Panasonic/Netherlands) +1’51”

  5. Sean Yates (7-Eleven/UK) +2’18”

  ***

  9 July

  Stage 8, Labastide d’Armagnac – Pau, 98 miles

  Father Joseph Massie was all smiles. It was a day he’d been waiting for for 30 years, 30 years of hopeless dreaming – and, presumably, rather a lot of praying. But, whether divine intervention or simply the work of the mortal race administrators, those prayers were being answered, those dreams were coming true. The latest stage of the Tour de France was departing from his village.

  Massie was no ordinary priest. Massie was a fanatic – a fanatic about cycling. And this fanaticism took him to extraordinary lengths. In 1958, he repurposed the 12th-century chapel in the small fortified village of Labastide d’Armagnac, turning it into a shrine-cum-museum that celebrated life on two wheels. A year later, Pope John XXIII made it official; the chapel would henceforth be known as Notre Dame des Cyclistes, a ‘national sanctuary of cycling and cyclists under the protection of the Virgin, Our Lady of cyclists’.

  The chapel became an extraordinary place of pilgrimage for the cycling community, its interior walls adorned with hundreds of cycling jerseys, many of which were donated by the sport’s biggest legends, among them Eddy Merckx, Jacques Anquetil, Luis Ocaña and Raymond Poulidor. The Tour had passed by the chapel five years previously en route to Pau, but 1989 was its crowning glory: to be the point of departure for the 188 riders still left in the race.

  Eighty-five miles south of the previous day’s finish in Bordeaux, the village was a hive of activity that morning. Brass bands played, drum majorettes marched. And, most importantly, Father Massie had an audience with some of his cycling heroes. Stephen Roche, Pedro Delgado, Luis Herrera and Greg LeMond were among those lining up to meet the bike-mad priest, with the American presenting him with a yellow jersey to add to the chapel’s collection.

  Not that everything went swimmingly that morning. Before the peloton departed, anti-nuclear protesters took advantage of the media circus that had descended on Labastide. They padlocked themselves together, forcing the riders to pick a single-file path through the protest to get to the start line, either pushing or carrying their bikes. From the back seat of the commissaire’s car, Bernard Hinault cast a weary eye over proceedings. A fiery Breton not known for his sympathy for Tour-delaying public protest (on occasion, he got decidedly hands-on with protesters during his riding days), the clothes of officialdom meant he was now a man with responsibilities, a man trapped in his job. Hinault stayed put in his car. The race left the village 15 minutes behind schedule.

  After the previous two marathon stages, the day’s itinerary – a much shorter route that broadly traced a due-south path – was warmly welcomed by those requiring recovery and recuperation ahead of the Pyrenees stages. While the GC contenders would still watch each other closely, moves by the race’s main protagonists were unlikely. So an open invitation was issued to the race’s lesser lights: this was a chance for someone who was likely to struggle at altitude in the coming days to etch their name into Tour history forever. Tomorrow would be a struggle, but today could be glory.

  With 50 miles of the stage left, there was a strong possibility that that lesser light would be one of four men who had combined to create a significant break. They included the RMO rider Éric Caritoux, wearing the jersey of the French national champion; Michael Wilson, one of two Australians in the Tour; Z-Peugeot’s Philippe Louviot; and the Irishman Martin Earley, another of PDM’s close-season signings.

  With the gap between the break and the peloton getting close to three minutes, ADR began to take action and stepped up the pursuit. Their nervousness was caused by the presence of Wilson in the lead group and they took action to reduce, or even extinguish, his position on the road. Of the four breakaway riders, he was the one closest to LeMond, starting the stage five minutes down on the yellow jersey. And he had pedigree that marked him out as a danger. He won the second stage in the 1982 Giro by outsprinting Fignon; he also took a stage in the Vuelta a year later.

  Elsewhere, teams took care of their leaders. Delgado was particularly well-protected, cocooned within the protective seal of his domestiques. The objective was to deliver him safely into Pau before he would unleash himself in the mountains the following day. Fignon, though, was his usual self, a mixture of playful and dangerous. He surprisingly attacked the first of the four fourth-category climbs, presumably with the aim of snatching enough seconds back to allow him to arrive in the mountains in yellow.

  Fignon’s attack meant the pace of the chase was high and the front group’s lead was reduced to just a minute with 12 miles left. Within three miles though, Louviot, riding his first Tour, made what looked like being the decisive break. Job done. But the other three, rather than surrendering to the approaching pack, instead pulled Louviot back in. As Caritoux slightly relaxed, presumably thinking that the four would slug it out in a sprint, Earley attacked with more than half a mile to go. As he arrived in the market square, the Dubliner glanced back a couple of times before raising both arms to take a famous victory. The smile admitted that this was his career highlight, the defining moment. Right here, right now.

  ‘I knew I had to attack because I was strong,’ the bespectacled Earley explained at the finish. ‘If I’m ever riding for fourth place, I like to think I can get first just as well. And they weren’t such great sprinters there, so my chances were as good as the rest.’

  Earley was a popular winner. The perennial third man of Irish cycling behind those high-achievers Roche and Kelly, it wasn’t his first taste of Grand Tour success, though. That came in the Giro in 1986 when, then riding for Fagor, he again showed his sharp tactical acumen, outfoxing LeMond and ultimate winner Roberto Visentini to take a stage victory in the mountains.

  ‘Martin was always a great rider,’ says Roche. ‘A great team rider. He was ambitious, but he knew where his limits were. He recognised he wasn’t going to win the Tour, but he knew that on his day he was capable of winning stages. But he wasn’t going to win a stage without looking after his team-mates and his team leader first. He was a guy that a leader – whether in the Classics or the Tour – could count on. Everyone was delighted for Martin when he won that stage. It was compensation for all of the other work he’d put in.’

  When he signed for PDM, Kelly had insisted, so strong a domestique was he, that Earley be brought across from KAS too. ‘They had a lot of riders already signed, so it was very limited for places. Martin was the only one I managed to take with me. Everyone within PDM was so excited by Martin winning. He was a helper in the team a lot of the time, but there were occasions whe
n he would be able to ride his own race, but that would be a minimal number of races throughout the year.’

  That day’s entry in the diary of the fourth Irish rider in that Tour, Paul Kimmage, also hinted at a sense of national pride at his compatriot’s success. ‘I knew he was going to win. I said it to Kelly about an hour from the finish. I just got this gut feeling he was going to do it. As we arrived in Pau, I strained my ears to the commentary of race speaker Daniel Mangeas. When I heard him shout M-A-R-T-I-N E-A-R-L-E-Y, I waved a triumphant fist in the air.’

  With four compatriots in the Tour, cycling in Ireland was in extremely rude health. And there wasn’t really a clear reason why it was so. As the author Ed Pickering has noted, ‘Irish cycling’s run of success in the 1980s was a statistical outlier. In Sean Kelly and Stephen Roche, Ireland had two of the best four or five cyclists in the world.’

  Certainly, those two cyclists have never been able to explain why the riches were so great in that particular era. ‘I don’t know,’ shrugs Roche, after being asked about it for the umpteenth time in his life. ‘Maybe it was the genes or maybe it was what we ate – potatoes and cabbage! Whether it’s in the water or it’s in the air, there’s definitely something in Ireland that breeds champions. We’re a small nation and it’s amazing that we do so well. It’s something that’s in the culture and the land and the mentality.’

  Kelly draws upon Irish success in other sports at the time to attempt to make sense of it – the Irish national football team under Jack Charlton or the medals won by the country’s distance runners, athletes like Eamonn Coghlan, Sonia O’Sullivan and John Treacy. ‘It was amazing that we had so many riders at the top level. We all just seemed to come along at the same time – it’s something that happens in sport. And when we finished up, there was nobody else there for quite some years. That’s just the way it goes. We had a number of very talented riders at the same time. Of course, if they see another Irish guy who’s doing well, it does motivate them a bit more.’

  The degree to which Earley’s victory in Pau was a result of success breeding success is moot. What it definitely represented was an acknowledgment that, within the domestique ranks, lived some riders of great guile and ability.

  For the next day, however, the focus would shift back onto the big boys, the stars, the GC contenders. Arriving in Pau, the gateway of the Pyrenees, unscathed and unharmed, the combatants were ready. It was time for those mountain-top battles to commence.

  Stage 8

  1. Martin Earley (PDM/Ireland) 3:51:26

  2. Éric Caritoux (RMO/France) +4”

  3. Michael Wilson (Helvetia-La Suisse/Australia) same time

  4. Philippe Louviot (Z-Peugeot/France) +6”

  5. Laurent Bezault (Toshiba/France) +8”

  General classification

  1. Greg LeMond (ADR/USA) 37:11:25

  2. Laurent Fignon (Super U/France) +5”

  3. Thierry Marie (Super U/France) +40”

  4. Erik Breukink (Panasonic/Netherlands) +1’51”

  5. Sean Yates (7-Eleven/UK) +2’18”

  ACT II

  THE SECOND WEEK

  EIGHT

  MOUNTAIN MEN

  ‘It’s not for me to push. It’s for Laurent’ – Greg LeMond

  10 July

  Stage 9, Pau – Cauterets, 91 miles

  FROM THE BOULEVARD des Pyrénées, in the hilltop city of Pau, look due south and the spiky, blue-grey silhouettes of the Pyrenees gaze back at you from the distance, gathering like sharp-toothed giants on the edge of the horizon, on the edge of oblivion.

  They’re a welcome, overdue sight for the slight, jinking mountain men of the Tour de France, those who had to suffer the wind and the rain and the miles of the last few stages as the race powered its way south. The only consolation was that those roads brought them to their preferred terrain. The foothills, the slopes, the summits.

  For many others in the Tour – the sprinters and the time trialists – the presence of the Pyrenees is a cause for questioning their own sanity. Two days of torture and torment, of agony and anguish, before the roads flatten again and equilibrium is restored. That’s if the torture and torment, the agony and anguish, isn’t so bad that they’ve gone beyond the stage cut-off time and are out of the Tour, asked to leave, surplus to requirements.

  Ever since the Prologue and the team time trial, and his decision to stay in the race where others might have gone to ground, Pedro Delgado had been wishing the days away to get to this point. And for a rider who was well known for going faster the harder the climb, the first day in the Pyrenees had served up a doozy. Two first-category climbs – the 1,035m Col de Marie Blanque and the 1,320m Le Cambasque – bookended the day’s absolute monster: the Col d’Aubisque. The Aubisque had been designated an HC climb – hors catégorie or ‘without category’. It was an ascent so severe that it was simply beyond categorisation, 12 miles (20km) of muscle-straining, lung-busting endurance. And all with the most spectacular, unprotected drops in the whole race just a matter of feet away.

  The first rider to show his hand was the Fagor domestique Robert Forest, who led the race over the Marie Blanque, 25 seconds clear of the Dutchman Adrie van der Poel, who himself was 25 seconds clear of compatriot Gert-Jan Theunisse. Forest’s undoubted career highlight to date was a stage win in the ’87 Giro, but the Frenchman had only secured that solo victory in the final kilometre, meaning that it couldn’t be viewed as a portent of what he might achieve over the rest of the day’s climbs. More than likely, he was sent off to stretch, and prematurely tire, the rivals of his leader Stephen Roche, a tactic that his still-fresh team captain could take advantage of on the stage’s later climbs. An elite group – featuring LeMond, Fignon, Delgado, Rooks and Kelly – were indeed keeping an eye on Forest (and on Theunisse), rolling over the Marie Blanque summit a minute and a half back. Markedly, though, the group didn’t actually contain Roche.

  Then the day’s true star emerged. Miguel Induráin, a 24-year-old domestique earmarked to be a Grand Tour team leader of the future, attacked at the bottom of the Aubisque. No one could doubt his ambition, striking out for home this far out and with huge climbs to surmount on his own. His star was certainly in the ascendancy within the Reynolds team; he had won Paris-Nice earlier in the year, holding off Roche by 13 seconds, when he had shown an aptitude for climbing. Until then, his forte was believed to have been the time trial, a discipline suited to his comparatively chunky build. Induráin’s physique certainly wasn’t that of the gravity-defying climber dancing on his pedals.

  Home for Induráin was a village on the outskirts of Pamplona, just 80 or so miles from the day’s stage finish. ‘This was his home territory,’ noted the Spanish writer Javier García Sánchez of that day’s Pyrenean stage. ‘He knew the landmarks, he knew that his people were waiting in Cauterets. The beech groves spoke to him once more, and history, too.’ Delgado had noticed Induráin was itchy that day, a restlessness to make an impression on the race. Perhaps, having followed his Paris-Nice win with a disappointing Vuelta, where he crashed on the 15th stage and broke his wrist, he had a point to prove.

  So, with the insurance policy of domestiques Abelardo Rondón and William Palacio taking care of their leader, Delgado allowed Induráin to slip his moorings and strike out. ‘This was his day,’ wrote García Sánchez. ‘That afternoon, he was really going to test his relaxed heart. He was relaxed himself, because he knew Pedro had Rondón and Palacio with him.’

  If he were to take the stage win, it would undoubtedly be the greatest climbing performance of Induráin’s career. And, heading up into the mists enshrouding the Aubisque’s peak, his attack was strong. Over the top, and pushing newspaper up his jersey to counteract the chill of the descent, Induráin was two minutes and 19 seconds ahead of the next two on the road, Luis Herrera and Theunisse. That elite group were in attendance a further ten seconds down. Robert Millar, however, the man with two Pyrenean stage wins in his palmàres, had punctured on the Aubisque’s slopes and f
aced a hefty challenge to bring himself back into contention.

  Induráin’s lead stretched as he put in a nerveless descent, before comfortably dealing with two lesser climbs. When he reached the valley town of Pierrefitte-Nestalas after 81 miles, a motorbike pulled alongside him, its passenger holding up a mini-blackboard onto which the latest times were scribbled in chalk. Induráin now had a six-minute hold on LeMond, Fignon and the rest. Another minute and a half, and the American’s yellow jersey would be his.

  Between Induráin and the elite group were two other Spanish riders, the BH team-mates Anselmo Fuerte and Javier Murguialday. While the pair looked strong and were confident of retrieving him, it was indicative that, such was Induráin’s imperious performance, it would take two riders to make an impression on his lead.

  But, content in his own company, Induráin kept pounding out that steady, metronomic cadence that would become familiar throughout the Tours of the early ’90s. That same pain-free facial expression. Those nutcracker thighs. That backside glued to the saddle, irrespective of the gradient.

  At the 10km banner, Induráin still looked strong. By the time Fuerte and Murguialday went under the same banner two and a half minutes later, it was down to a one-man pursuit. With his team-mate fading, Fuerte was handed sole responsibility to rein the Reynolds man back in.

  On arrival in the centre of Cauterets, the freshness was still there in Induráin’s legs. The only thing was that the stage wasn’t ending just yet. The finish was a few more miles up the road at the ski station – ‘up’ being the important word. It would take conquering another first-category climb to take the victory.

  But, with three miles left, Induráin was running out of juice. The climb was tightening – and so were his legs. Unusually, his mouth was open too, sucking up all the oxygen it could find. The grimace could be mistaken for a smile. But it wasn’t time for smiling. Not yet, at least. And, in another departure, he occasionally rose out of the saddle, desperate to find some elusive rhythm. ‘By that time,’ García Sánchez wrote, ‘Miguel could no longer see anything. All he wanted was to fly, even though he felt as if he were treading water.’