Three Weeks, Eight Seconds Page 5

  What was a simple case of miscommunication then turned into a game of Chinese whispers. At one point on the warm-up circuit, Roche had stopped for a wee in a temporary toilet. The story mutated into one where he had suffered a case of chronic diarrhoea and had got locked in the toilet, unable to escape. But whatever the circumstances, the outcome was the same: Roche was out of the race and, within days, had left the team.

  In 1989, though, he welcomed Delgado’s inaccurate timekeeping with a degree of glee. This didn’t mean that a major rival had been eliminated from the competition, but the whole episode had severely weakened Delgado’s campaign to become champion for the second successive year. The Spaniard was, after all, a tough nut to crack. He had been leading the ’87 Tour into its closing days, until Roche took yellow on the penultimate stage and overall victory the following afternoon. Charly Mottet, the newly anointed world number one eager to prove himself in a Grand Tour, agrees with Roche about how Delgado’s rivals would have viewed his misfortune in Luxembourg. ‘It certainly helped,’ he smiles. ‘It didn’t do me any harm.’

  Even though Delgado hoped he was only 40 seconds late in leaving, worries began to infiltrate his brain, internal whispers suggesting that the deficit could actually be so much more. He had to put maximum effort into this, his weakest discipline. Failure to do so might have seen his rivals out of sight by the end of the Prologue. A title defence surrendered after just five miles.

  Once riding and into his groove, Delgado looked good, glued to the road’s centre white lines on the straights and neatly taking the racing line on the bends. Judging him on speed and riding style alone, no one would have thought that there was a problem. But the gap between Kelly shooting past the local Luxembourgers gathered out on the course and Delgado’s eventual arrival hinted that something very wrong had occurred. That and the abnormally large flotilla of cars and bikes trailing in his wake. Hungry for the story, eager for blood.

  The photographer Graham Watson was, for once, not perched on the back of a motorbike. ‘I was about halfway round along the course. I’d chosen my spot somewhere on the big bridge that straddles the valley and separates old Luxembourg from new Luxembourg. Each of the 198 starters came by in one-minute intervals, but Delgado never came by, and being on foot for this stage, I had no radio to tell me what was going on. It took ages before a yellow-jerseyed dot came into view, followed by this enormous motor cavalcade of TV, photographers, officials and radio teams. I was pleased to see Delgado had actually started his title defence, but confused as to what had held him back. It seemed later as if his defence had ended there and then.’

  Delgado himself takes up the story again. ‘I did the time trial at the maximum I could and when I passed the finish line, a lot of people were waiting there. I was in fear. I didn’t want to stop. I went straight to the hotel to find out what really happened.’ He just kept riding. This was a man too confused – and possibly too embarrassed – to embark on a very public post-mortem in the full glare of the world’s sports media. He would learn of his error in the privacy of his team’s set-up.

  But there was further embarrassment to suffer privately.

  Despite Delgado’s success at the Vuelta, chief sponsor Reynolds, the aluminium manufacturers, couldn’t afford to completely fund the team. The team management was forced to find another benefactor who would part with cash in return for their logo being added to the riders’ jerseys. That benefactor was Banesto, the Madrid-based bank. ‘All the top personnel at the bank were flown to Luxembourg,’ recalls Delgado, with a visible shudder. ‘They said “We are happy to be here to see Pedro Delgado win the Tour de France again”. It was a disaster. They didn’t understand what had happened at the Prologue. We have an expression in Spain about when you start the day with bad luck. ‘Con el pie izquierdo’ – you start the day on your left leg. That’s what happened.’ (In the end, Banesto couldn’t have been too offended. They took over as the team’s principal sponsor a few months later, an arrangement they kept for many years.)

  There was no escape from the incredulous press corps for Delgado, either. If they weren’t preparing scathing headlines for tomorrow’s papers, they were entertaining themselves at the rider’s expense. ‘A close friend of mine is a Spanish journalist with El Pais, and he usually didn’t follow the whole race – he thought the first week was boring with sprints and team time trials. He usually joined the race in the Pyrenees because it was close to his home. But he came to the Prologue that year because the newspaper wanted him to. “What can I write about the first day of the Tour de France? There’s nothing. There’s no news.” Afterwards he came up to me. “So, Pedro. Did you do that for me…?”’

  Bemusement was the overwhelming emotion on the press benches. As the man from ABC Television called it, ‘in that handsome Spanish head are stories yet to be told’.

  And there was always a story around Delgado. The events of Luxembourg represented the latest entry in a catalogue of misfortune and/or controversy for him at the Tour – aside, that is, from the probenecid affair the previous summer. In his debut Tour in 1983, he sat in second position behind fellow rookie Laurent Fignon but, after the Alpe d’Huez stage, consumed a milkshake that caused him stomach problems and saw him lose 25 minutes the next day. The following year he crashed when on a breakneck descent of the Col de Joux Plane in the Alps, suffering a broken collarbone. Then, in 1986, he again retired on an Alpine stage after he was informed of the death of his beloved mother. And then came 1989.

  Even though the time Delgado had lost while he made his way to the start house was only a third of his winning margin the previous July, when he finished more than seven minutes up on second-place Steven Rooks, some of his fellow riders thought the writing was already on the wall for Delgado in ’89. Paul Kimmage’s contribution to the pages of the Sunday Tribune noted that the Spaniard had ‘presented the other race favourites with a gift voucher towards victory in the Tour de France worth two minutes and 40 seconds’. He was not alone. Admittedly writing several years after his retirement, Fignon mused on the effect of the incident on Delgado on the night of the Prologue, noting that ‘victory in the Tour was already a distant memory for him’. While possibly an assessment made through the prism of hindsight, it was almost certainly his take on things that very evening, so supremely confident/arrogant (delete as appropriate) he was.

  If, as Delgado’s El Pais pal suggested, the first week of a Tour is underwhelming when it comes to blood-and-thunder action, human error made sure that the first day of the 1989 race stood out from the pack. It may have even set the tenor of the three weeks to come.

  ‘Nowadays, it’s probably better for the teams and the riders to have radios,’ says Perico, ‘but for the spectator it’s a pity. Now there are no mistakes. It’s all controlled, blocked off. It’s another race altogether.’ A grin and another Delgado chuckle. ‘Mistakes are good for the race.’

  ***

  Before Delgado’s debacle, the other 197 riders had stretched their legs over the Prologue course, the first time the cobbles and tarmac of Luxembourg had been under the Tour’s wheels for 42 years. Five miles was way too short a distance on which to judge a rider’s condition and form, but psychological markers could be put down, a chance for the more demonstrative members of the peloton to carve out an edge over the more mentally fragile.

  Andy Hampsten, the gaze of North America focused on him, was a mixture of bullishness and caution beforehand. ‘We’re here to win the race but we know enough about racing to make too many plans. Right now, there’s nothing holding us back. It’ll be a real competitive race, which is good for us.’ As a man for whom the early days of the Tour – when the roads were flat, the racing fast – were an exercise in staying within an arm’s length of his main rivals for the overall general classification, Hampsten’s time of 10:12.01 fitted the bill. He was far from being cut adrift – and, crucially, had come through unscathed.

  LeMond, the man about whom attention had waned, was more wistf
ul. ‘What I’d like to do is start the Tour de France with hope and finish it strong,’ he had told one of the few television crews giving him attention in the days before the race. ‘If I can place in the top ten, I’ll be very satisfied this year.’ Anyone within earshot might have raised an eyebrow. Some might have raised both.

  But, as he waited in the start house in the last seconds before his departure, LeMond looked the part of the serious contender. In his wind-slicing teardrop helmet and trademark Oakley shades, he didn’t look down the avenue at what was before him – both in the next ten minutes and over the next three weeks. He tightened the fixings on his shoes and then backpedalled to get into the optimum position from which to push hard down, to catapult himself down the start ramp and into the race. As the countdown climaxed, the former champion stared intently at his handlebars and front wheel. One pedal stroke at a time. Play it by ear. Test whether that great final day in the Giro was indicative of anything.

  As a man who, with three Tours under his belt, had yet to finish outside the podium places, he was riding into the unknown. What was the final destination? Glory? Mediocrity? The abyss? LeMond wasn’t concerned with legacy, with keeping that phenomenal record intact. If that’s what he was after, he could have just never bothered returning to the Tour, quietly seeing out his days in Minnesota in all that snow and ice. That wasn’t Greg LeMond, though. This was a man living in the now, a man using the first week of the Tour as a measure of recovery.

  As he had declared, LeMond did indeed start the race with hope. His riding style on the Prologue was smooth and direct, his body generating plenty of power. Indeed, his speed suggested a man who had never been away. And so did the time he recorded over the bends and climbs of Luxembourg (a country helpfully put into context by ABC’s fabulously named anchorman Al Trautwig, who described it as ‘smaller than the state of Rhode Island’). LeMond was just nine-tenths of a second beyond the ten-minute mark, putting him in second place behind the standard set by Erik Breukink. LeMond had cut the Dutchman’s lead down to six seconds.

  In being the only rider that afternoon to dip under ten minutes, Breukink – unlike LeMond and Laurent Fignon – had decided to ride without his aero helmet, relying on his close-cropped hair to provide the streamlining. That seemed to suit him, as did the Prologue course, all five miles of it. It was a close fit with the Panasonic rider’s strengths. While he showed his out-and-out prowess on the flat section, when the road headed upwards for a 900-metre climb that sharply coiled around the Cote de Pabeiebierg hill (one that the man from the Guardian scathingly described as ‘a mere pimple compared to what awaits them in the Pyrenees and Alps’), Breukink was flying. His performance sent a message to all of those around him, those riders more fancied to take overall victory, those who’d forgotten about him wearing the leader’s jersey for five days at the recent Giro. Ignore me at your peril.

  Breukink wasn’t the only rider replicating his form from Italy. Fignon’s ten minutes on the serpentine streets of Luxembourg showed all the smoothness and form that had delivered him to glory 20 days earlier. He didn’t assume quite such a tucked position as LeMond, preferring a more upright profile, seemingly keen to scrutinise the approaching tarmac through those distinctive oval spectacles. But it worked, with the Frenchman knocking LeMond back to third, albeit by just four-tenths of a second. The pair’s proximity to each other on the Prologue seemed to set the tone for the race’s remaining 2,036 miles.

  Sean Kelly was also applying the squeeze. While the green jersey was the longer term goal, he also recognised how the first few days could reunite him with the overall race lead after his fleeting acquaintance with it back in 1983. As a sprinter,’ he recalls, ‘if I’d done a really good Prologue, I could pick up some time bonuses on the early stages and maybe get the yellow jersey for a period in the early part of the race.’

  And a really good Prologue is exactly what he did. While he couldn’t dislodge Breukink from his perch, Kelly did split Fignon and LeMond to take third. All three had finished within half a second of each other. As Cycling Weekly correspondent Keith Bingham noted in a delightfully era-specific observation, the trio recorded ‘a series of times only a good electronic watch could separate’.

  Not all Irish eyes were smiling, though. Stephen Roche, arguably the most consistent time trialist in the whole peloton, found himself 24 seconds down on Breukink, a significant loss over such a short distance. This was his first appearance in the Tour since standing atop the podium in Paris nearly 24 months previously and perhaps suggested that he needed to recalibrate his chances of a successful race. LeMond’s post-stage interviews suggested he was recalibrating his own expectations, although in the opposite direction to those of his old adversary Roche. ‘I said to myself if I could finish in the top five in the Prologue, I could finish in the top five overall,’ he beamed. After the dark, soul-searching days of the Giro, optimism was flowing fast through LeMond’s blood.

  And Delgado? He came in 2:54 down on Breukink, to whom he surrendered that yellow jersey. Most significantly, he found himself in the humiliating position of propping up the peloton. 198th of 198 riders – and a minute and a half adrift from the next man, Greg LeMond’s team-mate Philip Van Vooren. Had he left the start house when he was scheduled to, his time would have put him into 16th place. But, of course, without the mental strain coursing through his head, that Prologue position would likely to have been even better.

  The degree to which the day’s events not only defined his race but also his career is revealed in one particularly acute Delgado anecdote taken from 2002, the next time the Tour rolled up in Luxembourg. He had just landed from Madrid, ready to take up a three-week tenure in the commentary box for Spanish TV. ‘When I arrived, there were three television crews – Belgian, Dutch and French – in the airport.

  ‘Oh, who was on my plane? Maybe a famous person is here.’

  ‘Hey Pedro! Come over here and tell us about that start of yours all those years ago…’

  General classification

  1. Erik Breukink (Panasonic/Netherlands) 9’54”

  2. Laurent Fignon (Super U/France) +6”

  3. Sean Kelly (PDM/Ireland) +6”

  4. Greg LeMond (ADR/USA) +6”

  5. Steve Bauer (Helvetia-La Suisse/Canada) +8”

  FOUR

  DOUBLE TROUBLE

  ‘It was like trying to ride behind a rocket’ – Bjarne Riis

  2 July (morning)

  Stage 1, Luxembourg – Luxembourg, 84 miles

  ‘HEY PERICO! YOU still in the race? If I were you, I’d be at home, not here.’

  ‘Oh, thank you, Laurent. Thank you!’

  After the debacle in the Prologue, the first full day of the Tour brought further humiliation Pedro Delgado’s way, this time from within the peloton, from among his own kind.

  Three decades on, it clearly still smarts as he recounts how a gloating Laurent Fignon, wearing the points competition green jersey bequeathed to him by Erik Breukink who was busy wearing the more prestigious yellow, dropped back through the peloton to take a toilet break. There he spied the Spaniard who’d opted for the anonymity of the peloton for the first stage proper. Fignon couldn’t resist having a pop. ‘I liked him as a rider,’ Delgado says, ‘but he was disagreeable as a man. He did this not just once, but on two or three stages.’

  Whether intended as fraternal teasing or, as seems more likely, a heartless attempt to further weaken the Spaniard’s mental stability, Fignon’s words achieved the latter. ‘I was very, very down,’ Delgado admits. ‘I was in last place. My morale was…’ He pauses, then shakes his head. ‘I had no morale. Below zero!’

  Delgado could have studied the time deficit with a rational, scientific brain. For a rider with such phenomenal climbing abilities as he, not to mention the prospect of those seven mountain stages stretching out ahead of him, retrieving the three minutes he trailed by was eminently possible. Indeed, that morning he appeared to have made peace with his predicament, at le
ast for the cameras. ‘It was only the Prologue,’ he insisted to the media tracking his every pre-stage move. ‘The whole Tour de France lies ahead and I’m fine. It was just a setback for me but not my hopes for this first day. I think the rest of this Tour will be very much better.’

  But privately Delgado couldn’t see the woods for the trees. His brain had refused to do the maths; it wouldn’t tell him that there were still three weeks to go.

  There was a reason why his brain couldn’t rationalise it. ‘I was hating myself after the Prologue,’ he now admits. ‘“It’s my fault, it’s my fault. Why did I do that?” And my mistake was not taking a sleeping tablet. I normally sleep very well and don’t need anything. I had only taken a sleeping tablet once before – when my mother died in 1986. But that night, all night long, I turned left in my bed and I turned right. Maybe I got one hour’s sleep.’

  And one hour’s sleep proved to be anything but ideal preparation for a day’s racing, particularly when that day contained two separate stages – an 84-mile anticlockwise circuit of Luxembourg’s south-eastern quarters, followed by a post-lunch, high-velocity 28-mile team time trial.

  Not only did Delgado opt for the anonymity of the peloton for the majority of this first stage, but back at the start line – on L’Avenue de la Liberté, scene of his blunder the previous day – he had even chosen to roll out from right at the back of the bunch in an attempt to avoid the stares and finger-pointing of both media and fans. Perhaps it was also to punish himself a little.