Three Weeks, Eight Seconds Read online

  Fignon’s 1984 win was much more of a test, and therefore offered much more glory. Going head-to-head against his former team-mate Hinault (now leader of Bernard Tapie’s La Vie Claire team), Fignon saw off the older man, his winning margin of more than ten minutes secured thanks to five stage wins.

  He was a rider at the very top of his game – and with another ten years or so of potential glory stretching out before him. ‘In 1984,’ he later told Cycle Sport’s Edward Pickering, ‘I wasn’t far from perfection … Sometimes I spoke with my team-mates, who told me their legs hurt all the time. During races, during training. I didn’t understand it – they had never gone a day when their legs did not hurt. I can say that, during the 1984 Tour de France, my legs pretty much did not hurt the whole way round.

  ‘In fact, at the start of 1985, I was much stronger than the year before. If I hadn’t had the injury which stopped me then, I can promise you that my career would have been a different story. I was incredibly strong, and it was easy. Then it stopped, just like that.’

  That injury – an Achilles problem that required major surgery – then introduced Fignon to more barren times in the Tour, a period when he would finish the race only once in four years. Having missed the ’85 race, the following year he retired in Pau after the team doctor’s thermometer recorded Fignon’s temperature being 39 degrees. A seventh place in 1987 suggested a return to the days of glory could be imminent, but these hopes were dashed 12 months later when he again abandoned; this time he was suffering from the after-effects of a tapeworm.

  His anxiousness to record a third Tour victory were exacerbated by the fact that not only was Fignon Super U’s leader, he was also the team co-owner. In 1985, Renault had pulled out of all their commitments to sports sponsorship. But the response of Fignon and Guimard wasn’t to sail off into the sunset in search of contracts with other teams. Instead, they turned the traditional formula of cycling team ownership on its head. Rather than the usual arrangement whereby a sponsor owns the team, the pair set up their own marketing company that would own the team; the sponsors subsequently signed up would simply be buying advertising space on the team’s jerseys.

  This meant that they could operate without other personnel offering their opinions and advice on the way the team was being run. They weren’t employees subject to the whims of their paymasters. They were the owners who could choose their own path for the team.

  As long as the pair agreed with each other, of course. The Reuters journalist François Thomazeau explains that ‘there really was a father and son relationship between them. They were very close, much closer than Guimard ever was with Hinault. Both were headstrong and they made decisions together, but my feeling was that Guimard was really the mastermind. He was the first modern manager in many ways – very keen on scientific and technical improvements. He really knew what he was doing. But he wasn’t very diplomatic and his sponsors were getting tired of him. Super U left at the end of the 1989 season.’

  Fignon’s own lack of diplomacy was the stuff of legend, with him often portrayed as a fiery ball of impatience and volatility. ‘He was not very popular,’ says Thomazeau. ‘I saw him refuse to sign autographs to young kids in the rudest manner. I don’t think he was really a bad guy. He was a bit shy and I don’t think he liked the media attention that much.’ Thomazeau points out that Hinault too, despite five Tour wins, didn’t exactly unite the country behind him either. Instead, France retained a fondness for those who never won the Tour, riders like Jean-François Bernard and Ronan Pensec. ‘We were still partial to losers at the time…’

  Not that the lack of public or media support would have bothered Fignon. He simply wanted it from within the team ranks, that unflinching respect and commitment from his Super U riders. ‘Fignon would give instructions in a neutral and friendly tone,’ Bjarne Riis later wrote. ‘There was no shouting or swearing. He was always calm and a complete gentleman.

  ‘If he’d been an idiot, I doubt I would have been willing to sacrifice myself for him the way I did. You need to be as willing to fight for your team leader as you are to fight for yourself. And victory for your leader is good for your bank account, too. For every decent result Fignon attained, it meant a share of the prize money for me.’

  After five years of turbulence and misfortune, Fignon was the GC contender in the best position after two days of the ’89 Tour. He was strong and his team equally so. A deep, easy sleep would have come quickly that night, the Super U team dreaming of future glory – and quite possibly of prize money too.

  It was surely a different matter over at the Reynolds team hotel. Having had very little rest the night before, Pedro Delgado must have considered taking a sleeping pill after the further indignity of that afternoon’s team time trial. He would definitely have taken one had he known the newspaper headlines being printed at the very moment that he was turning in for the night.

  Stage 2

  1. Super U 53’48”

  2. Panasonic +32”

  3. Superconfex +49”

  4. PDM +50”

  5. ADR +51”

  General classification

  1. Acácio da Silva (Carrera/Portugal) 4:27:27

  2. Søren Lilholt (Histor/Denmark) +26”

  3. Laurent Fignon (Super U/France) +2’37”

  4. Thierry Marie (Super U/France) +2’41”

  5. Pascal Simon (Super U/France) +2’48”

  FIVE

  THE MAN FROM MONTERREY

  ‘ I attacked hard and they let me go. I went full gas’ – Raúl Alcalá

  3 July

  Stage 3, Luxembourg – Spa-Francorchamps, 150 miles

  THE MORNING NEWSPAPERS were brutal, spelling out the depth of despair that Pedro Delgado had brought on himself in Luxembourg. ‘FIGNON EXECUTE DELGADO’ shouted the headline in L’Equipe, stressing that Super U’s efforts the previous afternoon had effectively killed off any suggestion of the Spaniard arriving in Paris in yellow. The Spanish AS paper was a little less dramatic in its tone, but the message was unequivocal nonetheless: ‘PERICO, ADIOS’.

  The previous day’s tumult had recalibrated expectations over the identity of the future champion, forcing the continent’s bookmakers into action that Monday morning as soon as they unlocked their doors for business. Blackboard rubbers were reached for, and clouds of chalk dust created, as a new favourite was feverishly installed for the overall title. The name now scribbled in chalk at the top of their list was, of course, that of Laurent Fignon.

  The team time trial had dictated this rewrite. Not only had Delgado’s worries and woes cast doubt on his ability to even finish the Tour, but the Super U squad were displaying attributes in polar opposition to those shown by the faltering Reynolds leader. The power and resoluteness of Super U’s performance the previous afternoon was hard to bet against; it had worn an air of inevitability from the first time-check onwards. Accordingly, Fignon’s odds had dropped to 9-4, while Delgado found himself slipping to an undeniably realistic (in fact, possibly optimistic) 4-1.

  The third stage was a chance for the main GC riders to conserve energy and keep their powder dry for the long individual time trial later in the week. Accordingly, this lengthy stage into Belgium – one that would finish at the Formula 1 racing circuit at Spa-Francorchamps, having travelled through the undulating forests of the Ardennes – offered the chance for others to shine.

  There was one rider who took that chance with open arms and a big smile. His name was Raúl Alcalá.

  Alongside Sean Kelly, the Mexican was one of PDM’s new signings for the ’89 season. Until then, he had been one of the leading lights of the 7-Eleven team. At the ’87 Tour, he won the white jersey awarded to the best young rider, as well as placing third in the King of the Mountains. He was both a very useful and popular member of Jim Ochowicz’s set-up.

  ‘I liked having Alcalá on the team,’ says Andy Hampsten. ‘It was nice having more than one leader. The idea was to try to win the Tour de France and it was better to do
so having two climbers, not just one. We certainly understood that he couldn’t say no to going to a big team like PDM and getting a big salary. I missed having him around.’

  Sitting on his sofa at his home in Monterrey, with his partner Mercedes alongside him offering reminders of certain moments in his career, Alcalá remembers how 7-Eleven had been the perfect breeding ground during his formative professional years. ‘That was my first team and I tried to stay with them as long as possible. Those guys there – Jim Ochowicz, Mike Neel – gave me good protection.

  As a small team, we didn’t have any big responsibilities. There was less pressure. When you grow up in a small team, it’s nice to develop slowly – to take time to gain experience and to not have the same pressure that was on the big guys like Hinault and LeMond. In my third year there, though, I had more and more responsibilities. They gave me a schedule for the year. “Which one do you want to win?” I always preferred to win the Tour de France, but that was a difficult one for a young rider. But I always tried to win it.’

  As well as PDM offering a stronger foundation for a tilt at the Tour’s GC, the difference in conditions turned Alcalá’s head. ‘They had everything,’ he laughs. ‘When I was at 7-Eleven, I was always looking up at them. They had big trucks and a big bus. “Wow! I want to be on that team one year…”’

  It was small wonder Alcalá wanted to switch. He holds up his phone screen to show off a picture. It’s a shot of several professional cyclists bedding down in a school gymnasium when the Tour reached the Pyrenean ski resort of Superbagnères. But this isn’t a scene from the austere 1940s or ’50s. The presence of Pedro Delgado on a fold-up bed in the foreground of the picture confirms it actually to be of 1986 vintage. Other riders from Reynolds are identifiable, as are the teams of Hitachi and 7-Eleven. That these were the conditions that the world’s greatest cyclists were expected to endure as recently as the mid-1980s is a little shocking. And ‘enduring’ is exactly the right word. ‘Everybody’s snoring and coughing,’ laughs Alcalá. ‘Oh man! Cold water all the time. I couldn’t take a shower like that. Impossible. It was terrible.

  ‘With 7-Eleven, you would travel around in a small car all the time and you’d have to change your clothes in it after a race. We even did our own laundry. At PDM, we had our laundry collected and we had showers on the bus. That was a big difference.’

  Alcalá would have made a strong addition to any team at that time. He was a compact, deceptively strong rider who showed immense talent as both climber and time trialist. Beneath that easy smile lurked steely ambition, suggesting someone capable, with a year or two’s more experience, of a podium place in Paris. Indeed, several teams were making a play for him. But there was only really one destination. ‘I talked a lot with [PDM’s managers] Jan Gisbers and Manfred Krikke. Every day they’d talk to me like I was their son. They charmed me and that’s why I went there.’ Plus, the economics couldn’t be ignored. ‘I was on a bigger contract,’ he confirms. ‘I was earning four times more than at 7-Eleven. It was a lot at that time. It was one of the best contracts in cycling. It was close to a million dollars. Very close.’

  7-Eleven understood it was an offer Alcalá couldn’t refuse. ‘Jim Ochowicz and Mike Neel were very open about it. “Raúl, if you’d prefer to ride for them, that’s up to you. Go ahead. Whatever you want. You’re free to leave.” Things were always clear with those guys. It was always straight on, very honest. Nothing behind your back.’

  If 7-Eleven had been conspicuously laid-back, Alcalá’s PDM contract came loaded with expectation and pressure (‘they expected a lot of things, including winning the Tour de France one of the years’). And on Stage 3 of the ’89 Tour, a long stage somewhat surreally ending on a motor racing circuit, the young Mexican gave his new team reason to believe his signing had been extremely judicious. The race was barely 48 hours old.

  Despite the distance, the early parts of the stage were dominated by some notably aggressive riding, as Alcalá recalls. ‘The attacks started right from the gun, for 30 or 40 kilometres. It didn’t stop. It was just attack, attack, attack.’ These weren’t conditions that necessarily suited Alcalá’s team-mate Sean Kelly, who had been expected to challenge for the intermediate sprints in order to earn a few seconds here and there that would chip away at Acácio da Silva’s overall lead. Instead, as the race finally left Luxembourg and moved into Belgium, the Panasonic rider John Talen bagged the maximum time bonuses on offer at the first three sprints. Perhaps the Irishman had an ulterior motive. The sharp, uphill finish at the racing circuit certainly suited the power of a Kelly sprint.

  As the stage unfolded, though, it was the other new boy who represented PDM’s best hope for the stage win. Alcalá had been involved in one of those early attacks and went with the flow. ‘I was there at the front and I saw that nobody had come to close it down. That was a big break, with 15 guys or so.’

  As the break eventually got within a few miles of the Spa-Francorchamps circuit, it had slimmed down to a nine-strong group. And they were being allowed to get on with it. Back at the head of the peloton, both the PDM and TVM teams had spread themselves across the road and slowed the pace right down, giving their men in the break the strongest chance of both surviving and taking the stage win.

  By the time those first riders reached the tarmac of the circuit, they numbered only four. PDM weren’t the sole Dutch squad represented; TVM had the Danish rider Jesper Skibby, while Patrick Tolhoek wore the colours of Superconfex. The other rider was Super U’s Thierry Marie, later joined by his compatriot, Toshiba’s Marc Madiot, to make a five-strong group gunning for victory. What was most surprising was that there wasn’t a single Belgian among them, no one ready to take the win in the only stage this year on home soil.

  As Formula 1 circuits go, Spa-Francorchamps very much has its own identity – a combination of long, wooded sections and some serious gradients. The following month, defending Formula 1 world champion Ayrton Senna would tame the circuit in wildly wet and windy conditions; the day before the Tour arrived, Eddie Lawson had won the 500cc race at the Belgian Motorcycle Grand Prix. The Tour, however, unlike the two motorised races, chose to tackle the circuit in an anticlockwise direction.

  Alcalá had watched the motorbike race the previous day and, on television, the hills didn’t look so fierce. The effortless ease with which man and machine powered up the inclines seemed to smooth them out. Sean Kelly, resigned to sitting in the peloton on account of his team-mate’s presence in the front five, notes that he found anything but a mildly undulating circuit. ‘It was very, very difficult. When you see Formula 1 cars going round it at x miles an hour, you don’t realise how steep the bloody hill is. But when you go round it on a bike, that’s when you get a real feel for the circuit. When we came down the hill and into the finish area, even on the bike it was amazingly fast.’

  The stage finished with two laps of the 4.5-mile circuit and, as they approached the bell, the breakaway group got its first sense of how quick the descent 500 yards before the uphill finish really was. Alcalá – the main instigator of the break and the man who still looked the freshest – drove them through the bell and into the last few miles.

  The Mexican had two objectives for the last lap: to win the stage, of course, but also to take as much time out of the peloton in order to catapult himself up the GC. That’s why he was driving the group along and not simply hanging on the wheels of others, ready to dart out when the final sprint went into motion. A stage win was welcome, of course, but the longer game was also being played.

  As the group’s best-placed rider, Thierry Marie wouldn’t have complained about the pace and propulsion. It gave him the best chance of being in yellow that evening and was infinitely preferable to being part of a group that reduced its speed as riders played games with each other. As it was, though, the group’s lead was insufficient for Marie to take the maillot jaune from Acácio da Silva. The peloton was now charging around the circuit, a mass murmuration of riders swarming one w
ay and then the other, collectively trying to find the kind of racing line that the likes of Senna, Alain Prost and Nigel Mansell had done many times over on this circuit.

  While Alcalá and Marie were considering the bigger picture, for the other three riders – Skibby, Tolhoek and Madiot – it was all about the day, all about the stage win. As the mile count decreased, the kidology increased. Skibby invited Tolhoek to take a stint on the front of the group, to which the Dutchman blew out his cheeks and declined the kind offer, trying to suggest that the unexpected sharpness of the hills had emptied his energy reserves. Perhaps.

  As they began the long drag up the big hill, the group started to slow and to spill across the road. This was partially to do with geography, but mainly psychology. Glances were exchanged, minds were read, cards were kept close to chests. Who was going to show their hand first? Alcalá, still looking the freshest of the bunch, didn’t need a second invitation. As the road bore left, he nipped away on the inside – a perfectly timed attack, on which he was hotly pursued by the motorbike cameraman. The other four riders reacted, but didn’t sustain their effort, their response falling apart as they came off the pedals and pleaded for each other to maintain the chase. Their indecision and petty squabbling played into Alcalá’s hands who belted off down the long Kemmel Straight, his legs eating up the yards.

  Once under the Stella Artois-branded banner denoting one kilometre to go, the first Tour de France victory by a Mexican rider was all but assured. Alcalá hurtled down the final descent, careful not to touch the red and white striped kerbstones on the inside of the bend, and back up the other side to take the win. The belated response from the rest of the group had brought the gap down to five seconds, but the games they’d played earlier had deprived them of the stage win that their efforts on this long stage might have earned. Skibby took second, pipping the actually-not-so-tired-after-all Tolhoek.