Three Weeks, Eight Seconds Read online

  The morning was one for the chancers, for those seeking to capture a moment of glory while the big names all conserved their energy for the team time trial a few hours later. Søren Lilholt, a 23-year-old Danish rider on the French Histor team, clearly fancied his chances. After just eight miles, he made his move at the first catch sprint, an interim sprint offering those time bonuses Sean Kelly fancied bagging. Lilholt was gunning along. As a previous winner of the Tour of Luxembourg, these were roads he knew well.

  The response from the peloton to Lilholt’s attack was muted to the point of being non-existent. Erik Breukink’s Panasonic team fanned themselves out across the road to control the tempo of the pack, protecting their man in yellow from any other acts of insurgency from more serious contenders for the general classification. If the Dutch team thought Lilholt didn’t have the stamina to stay out front on his own, they might have underestimated his breakaway pedigree. The Dane had made a solo tilt at a stage win in the ’88 Paris-Nice race, holding off the peloton for 100 miles. This stage only covered 84. Well within his capabilities.

  Or perhaps the Panasonic team, wanting to conserve energy for the team time trial later, weren’t too concerned about losing yellow – at least, losing yellow to someone who wouldn’t be a contender in Paris. Had the break come from one of the main favourites for the overall title, their response would have been somewhat more energetic. Keep your enemies closest and all that.

  Lilholt built up an advantage of nine minutes over the lethargic peloton, making him the virtual maillot jaune on the road. But if the star-laden bigger teams didn’t want to know, a couple of other riders sprang out from the pack to hunt him down: Portugal’s Acácio da Silva, riding for the Carrera team, and the Frenchman Roland Leclerc from the Paternina squad, the newly renamed team led by the vastly experienced Spanish climber Marino Lejarreta.

  As the race traced the vineyard-heavy left bank of the Moselle River northwards, with West Germany a couple of hundred yards away on the opposite bank, da Silva and Leclerc caught their prey. But Lilholt didn’t slide back, instead clinging on to the latter’s wheel. The chance of the young Dane taking the stage win, and with it the yellow jersey, had been significantly slashed; da Silva would be the favourite if it came to a three-way blast for the line. But this would be offset by the cooperation of the trio to stay out in front, away from the hungry reach of the peloton, into whose anonymous depths each man would doubtless have otherwise faded.

  And evade the pack they did. With around 30 miles to go, the breakaway still held an 11-minute lead. They were going to survive. It was now simply a case of which rider most fancied trying on the yellow jersey for size. The effort required to bridge the earlier gap to Lilholt was a debt that Leclerc was now forced to repay and he slipped back when da Silva made a bolt for it on the same climb that had ended the previous day’s Prologue. It would take the Portuguese rider a second attack to also slip free of Lilholt’s clutches, before he took an ecstatic victory in the city where he spent many of his formative years. Having lived in the grand duchy for 14 years from the age of seven, this was nothing short of a triumphant homecoming for da Silva and was ecstatically received by his former neighbours.

  Not that it was a one-off stage victory on a Grand Tour for him. No stranger to wins in the Giro, da Silva was also actually recording his third Tour triumph in as many years. In 1987, during the race’s detour into West Germany, he held off the Swiss rider Erich Maechler to take the third stage in Stuttgart, while the following year he confirmed his appetite for first-week stage victories by taking the fourth stage into the Normandy town of Évreux, where he outrode the world’s top sprinters in a mass finish. More recently, he’d also won the second stage of the ’89 Giro, up the slopes of Mount Etna, just five weeks before.

  Those first two Tour victories were achieved while he was with the Spanish KAS team, where he was a team-mate of Sean Kelly. ‘Acácio showed unbelievable talent in the early part of his career,’ Kelly remembers. ‘He was an all-rounder. He was pretty good in the sprints, he was able to climb and he was able to put in a good time trial performance. He looked like a rider who could win a big Tour. He had the quality to do that, but he never achieved it. He was a rider who just enjoyed cycling and who was maybe a bit too relaxed at times. The performances that he should have achieved are greater than he has on his palmàres.’

  The Mexican rider Raúl Alcalá lived near to da Silva in Switzerland and the pair would go on regular training rides. ‘He was a tough rider and a good sprinter,’ Alcalá recalls, ‘but more suited to shorter races like the Dauphiné. To ride the Tour de France to win is difficult. Not so many guys have the capability of being in the top ten all the time. He was a rider for six or seven days.’ Alcalá’s assessment is completely consistent with da Silva’s three first-week Tour stage victories. In each year, he rendered himself invisible come the second half of each race.

  That third victory – in the colours of Carrera after KAS’s dissolution at the end of the 1988 season – was different from the first two. There was that additional prize. Coming home nearly five minutes ahead of the peloton, da Silva also inherited Breukink’s yellow jersey. ‘If you’re a rider who can keep within 15 or 20 seconds on the Prologue, you never know what can happen,’ says Kelly. ‘If you can get into a breakaway in the next day or so, then you can take the yellow jersey. That’s how it worked out for da Silva.’

  As da Silva was being mobbed by the media at the finish line, the peloton’s frontrunners were still jockeying for position on that final climb. The most notable protagonist was the lanterne rouge, the last man in the race – Pedro Delgado. Trying to use the sharp gradient to scrape a few seconds back overall, he found his attacks suppressed. They represented a pointless waste of energy when really he should have sat tight and been patient. Other stages, other opportunities.

  ‘I tried to break away towards the end,’ he acknowledges, the memory of the stage remaining crystal clear. ‘But it wasn’t normal for a rider like me to try that in that kind of stage. All you end up doing is losing your strength.’ Delgado’s sleep-deprived brain was making bad decisions. And a loss of strength is far from the ideal preparation for a team time trial just a couple of hours later.

  Stage 1

  1. Acácio da Silva (Carrera/Portugal) 3:21:36

  2. Søren Lilholt (Histor/Denmark) +8”

  3. Roland Leclerc (Paternina/France) +1’41”

  4. Etienne De Wilde (Histor/Belgium) +4’40”

  5. Sean Kelly (PDM/Ireland) +4’40”

  General classification

  1. Acácio da Silva (Carrera/Portugal) 3:31:44

  2. Søren Lilholt (Histor/Denmark) +13”

  3. Roland Leclerc (Paternina/France) +1’54”

  4. Erik Breukink (Panasonic/Netherlands) +4’26”

  5. Laurent Fignon (Super U/France) +4’32”

  ***

  2 July (afternoon)

  Stage 2, team time trial, Luxembourg – Luxembourg (29 miles)

  ‘It’s the cruellest, most nerve-wracking thing you can do.’

  Sitting at home in Colorado, the bright sunshine reflecting off the snow outside and filling his house with light, Andy Hampsten is recalling one particular horror from his riding days: having a team time trial on the same day as another stage.

  ‘You’re trying to conserve energy in the morning and stay out of trouble, but then people attack. You can’t over-estimate how extraordinarily difficult and chaotic those team time trials were.’ Not that, as Hampsten observes, they needed to be held on a double-stage day to qualify as a horrific experience.

  ‘I love the event, but more as a spectator than a rider. Professionals, in my opinion, are terrible at team time trials. They’re all so nervous and there’s probably some new bike or new wheels or new aerodynamic thing to try out. A nine-person time trial is so much different from the four-man ones we were used to as amateurs back in the day. The speed is so incredibly high. If you’re doing well, you have ten or 15 sec
onds to sprint at the front of the group and then sit up to get out of the way because your team-mates are all over the road, especially on the tiny roads the Tour likes to put us on. Then you have to sprint again to get on the back.’

  This was the theory, at least. No one told Pedro Delgado ahead of the afternoon’s team time trial. Just as Søren Lilholt took things easy on the back of the Histor bunch after his exertions that morning, Reynolds’ leader was also shying away from taking his rightful turn at the front of his team. But, aside from that attempt to slip away from the peloton in the final uphill mile or two of the earlier stage, Delgado couldn’t blame it on the effects of a Herculean effort a couple of hours earlier. Not helped by the lack of sleep the night before, his problems were psychological. And he was inadvertently putting an even larger dent in the defence of his title.

  Those problems manifested themselves very publicly. Around the halfway point of the stage – so only 14 or so miles in – Delgado began to slide off the back of his team. He was mightily fortunate that, in those radio-free times, one of his faithful domestiques, the Basque rider Julián Gorospe, had spotted the demise of his great leader. Gorospe, with all the instinct of the selfless servant, instantly dropped back, cajoling Delgado and offering him a drafting opportunity to bring him back into the bunch. This he managed. Job done.

  Or so Gorospe thought. Delgado remained at the back of the Reynolds pack but, as his team-mates fluidly negotiated a right-hand bend, he again dropped off. And this time there was a significant margin between him and his eight team-mates. The instinct of Gorospe, or any of the other domestiques, was much slower to kick in. When they finally realised Delgado had jettisoned himself, the scene was comedic. The team was in disarray – freewheeling, spread out all over the road, waiting for their man.

  The Reynolds team never recovered that afternoon. Having been treated to the indignity of being overtaken by Z-Peugeot, who had started out three minutes after them, they limped home in the slowest time of all 22 teams. Again, as he crossed the line, Delgado was the bait in a feeding frenzy. The Tour’s photographers, microphone men and notebook-clasping reporters still had an appetite for the Spaniard’s destruction.

  At the day’s end, he had only avoided still being in 198th position because two riders had been eliminated from the race for finishing beyond the time barrier. He was merely 196th out of 196 now. When they consider the champion’s demise in ’89, many observers simply believe Delgado lost the Tour on the Prologue. He didn’t. He lost the Tour on the team time trial. Stage 2 and he was already almost ten minutes down on the yellow jersey.

  Delgado admits it himself. ‘The real problem was the team time trial. I became very, very weak. I hit the wall. The team were saying “Oh Pedro, come on!”, but I lost another five minutes. I was still in last position. Everybody – Spanish journalists, people on the team – were saying “What do you want to do? Do you want to retire from the race?” But I thought that if I did that and went home, I’d feel even worse than if I stayed in the race. I understood I’d made big mistakes, but I needed to recover mentally. And it was better to do that in the race than at home. It was 100% mental.’

  It would have been the easiest thing to slip away quietly from the race, citing some phantom physical complaint that explained everything away. But Delgado – perhaps unwilling to play into the hands of those doubting his win the previous year – stayed in the race to save both face and reputation.

  His commitment impressed Paul Sherwen, the seven-time Tour rider who was by then co-commentating alongside Phil Liggett for Channel 4. ‘Psychologically, he’d lost it. He was gone,’ he remembers. ‘The whole thing was totally destroyed. He couldn’t stay with the guys, with the boys he was thrashing all year in road races. They had to drag him and nurse him along to try to keep him in contact with the race.

  ‘You’re last overall. What do you do? What can you do? Anybody would say “OK, let’s go home. Done. Finished.” But Perico never complained and he climbed up the general classification every day after then.’

  There was also some sympathy among the peloton. Sean Yates, the time trial specialist who’d recently jumped ship from Fagor to 7-Eleven, and who had powered the American team towards sixth place that afternoon, attempts to dissect the Reynolds team’s tactics to restore Delgado’s confidence and get him moving up the general classification.

  ‘These were the days before proper planning of a team time trial. Nowadays, you’d be thinking, “OK, we need to do it like this. Pedro’s not feeling great. He needs to sit on and we mustn’t drop him at any cost. We need to protect him blah blah blah.” But they must have gone out hell for leather with three or four guys in the red, and everything just went tits up. That just wouldn’t happen these days. Control the controllables. Think about what could go wrong and plan for it. In those days, it was a case of going out there and smashing it. There was no Plan B. If it went tits up, it was “OK, bad luck” – even though a team time trial could make the difference between winning and losing.’

  Some were reminded of that on that particular afternoon, Stephen Roche especially. Possibly because Sean Yates’s power and metronomic pacing hadn’t been satisfactorily replaced over the winter, Fagor only finished 15th, dropping Roche down to 95th position. At the end of the second day, he was already raising the white flag on his GC aspirations. ‘I’m not going to win this Tour,’ he freely admitted at the finish line. ‘I’ve got lots of doubts. I’ve not recovered from the Giro.’

  Steve Bauer’s slide down the general classification – aka the GC – was, on paper at least, quite dramatic, dropping from eighth to 56th. RMO’s Charly Mottet also departed the top ten for now, finding himself down in the anonymity of 35th place.

  While Sean Kelly also temporarily vacated the top ten, his PDM team would have been satisfied with fourth place, especially as their strengths would be truly revealed when the race reached the mountains. But the surprise performance of the day probably went to LeMond’s ADR squad who, sneered at for their weaker riders, came fifth. It was a performance that may have quietened a few doubters, although several pointed out how it wasn’t that surprising, bearing in mind the flat racing pedigree of the team’s six Belgian riders. The mountains remained LeMond’s true test, especially as he had only that single specialist climber in the ADR ranks to help him.

  The likes of Kelly, Mottet and LeMond may have dropped down the general classification, but most would find themselves rising back up in the coming days. Their respective demises were – as is usually the case after a team time trial, certainly after one won so comprehensively – a temporary statistical blip. The winning team finds all its riders accelerating into the upper echelons of the overall standings, an artificial amplification of their individual abilities and of where they should actually be in the rankings. Equilibrium would be restored in a few days’ time.

  Hence, at the end of this double-stage day, Laurent Fignon’s Super U team celebrated having five riders in the top eight places of the GC after their victory. The last team to set off, they flew along the course like an absolute juggernaut, their leader – as all leaders should – setting the mood and ambition of his team. And, as he keenly explained himself, setting the pace too.

  ‘Apart from a few fleeting moments,’ Fignon would later write, ‘on the final part of the loop no one was able to share the pace-making with me. I could feel the power inside me, the power that was there on my best days.’ Super U swooped back into Luxembourg City the most unified, purposeful and, most importantly, fastest of all 22 teams. The performance wasn’t so much a warning shot across enemy bows as a big, booming explosion of intent.

  If he wasn’t already aware, Bjarne Riis, Fignon’s recently recruited right-hand man, received confirmation that afternoon that he had joined a team that was both seriously talented and seriously ambitious. This was a team with the primary goal of winning the Tour by smashing the opposition. ‘With Gérard Rué, Thierry Marie and Fignon at the head of affairs,’ he recall
ed, ‘we hammered away from the start. We rode fast. Really fast. I was flying and was giving it absolutely everything every time I took my turn at the front of the line. Fignon and Marie were among the world’s best time trialists and could ride fast for long turns at a time. Every time they took over at the front, it was like trying to ride behind a rocket.’

  Riis had won a stage on his very first full day on the Tour. ‘That was fantastic,’ he remembers now. ‘These guys were phenomenal. Fignon was strong but Thierry Marie was – ahhh – exceptionally strong on this stage. It gave us a great boost and an advantage over the rest.’

  As the best-placed Super U rider, Fignon moved into third overall behind da Silva and Lilholt. And his advantage over his GC contenders was also a psychological one. With the likes of Delgado, Roche and LeMond all, in different ways, on the comeback trail, each was wrestling with a set of variables, whether mental (Delgado), political (Roche) or physical (LeMond). They had distractions. They had concerns. They couldn’t just simply get out there and ride.

  Fignon on the other hand – despite being on the comeback trail himself after five years of stuttering Tour appearances – had cured himself of his ills and injuries. He had neutralised his own variables. In fact, on the evidence of the team time trial, he had blasted right through them.

  It had taken him a long time to recover the form and condition of his early years in the professional ranks. In 1981, Fignon had entered the Tour of Corsica as an amateur and was delighted to find he could keep up with two-time Tour winner Bernard Hinault on one particular stage on the mountainous Mediterranean island. Hinault’s team boss Cyrille Guimard spotted the potential in Fignon’s 20-year-old legs and swiftly offered him a professional contract for the following season, one that would place him alongside Hinault and LeMond on the Renault team. (Fignon later referred to Renault at this time as ‘the Oxbridge of cycling’.)

  Having briefly led the Giro in his debut pro season, Fignon’s first Tour was the ’83 edition which, remarkably, he won, albeit in Hinault’s absence. There was, admittedly, a degree of good fortune about the victory. Long-term leader Pascal Simon broke his shoulder blade on the tenth stage and, after battling on with it for a few days, eventually abandoned and handed Fignon the yellow jersey. With the 1980 champion Joop Zoetemelk having tested positive, the 22-year-old Frenchman enjoyed a comfortable, pressure-free ride into Paris.