Three Weeks, Eight Seconds Read online

  You get the sense that Alcalá has replayed that last lap of Spa-Francorchamps many, many times in his mind over the decades since, revelling in the beauty of his neat escape. ‘I was in the moment and in the right position,’ he recalls. ‘I attacked hard and they let me go. I went full gas, otherwise those guys would have beaten me. Jesper Skibby was faster than me in the sprint. I had two options: go alone, or wait until the uphill sprint. So I went on a longer attack and that was the right moment to do it.’

  When the peloton powered home less than a minute after Alcalá, the massed spectators really got a sense of the sharpness of that final descent. Like the cars of a rollercoaster, the pack flew down the downslope of the parabola, touching speeds of around 50mph, before being fired up the slope on the other side towards the line. ‘Even on a bike, it was amazingly fast,’ says Sean Kelly.

  Kelly had put his ambitions – whether for a stage win or for an improvement on his position in the GC – on hold for the day. So had the other main contenders, who broadly kept their overall positions, aside from having to now accommodate Alcalá, who moved up from 26th to sixth. Fignon was on the move too, albeit dropping out of the top three. His replacement? His team-mate Thierry Marie, who now led his leader by 40 seconds.

  Stage 3

  1. Raúl Alcalá (PDM/Mexico) 6:34:17

  2. Jesper Skibby (TVM/Denmark) +5”

  3. Patrick Tolhoek (Superconfex/Netherlands) same time

  4. Thierry Marie (Super U/France) +6”

  5. Marc Madiot (Toshiba/France) same time

  General classification

  1. Acácio da Silva (Carrera/Portugal) 11:02.34

  2. Søren Lilholt (Histor/Denmark) +24”

  3. Thierry Marie (Super U/France) +1’57”

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

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

  ***

  4 July

  Stage 4, Liège – Wasquehal, 158 miles

  On the fourth day of January 1989, Bjarne Riis was contemplating life, the universe and everything. The Dane’s problems couldn’t quite be defined as an existential crisis, but he was certainly analysing his future as a professional cyclist, having spent the previous season as an anonymous – and little-used – domestique with the Toshiba squad. ‘A disaster’ is his assessment of his time with the French team. ‘Nothing went well.’

  During the winter months, he was forced to take an office job in his temporary home of Luxembourg in order to pay the bills. No team had expressed a desire to hire his services. The sport appeared to have given him up. The feeling was mutual. Returning to Denmark and putting his bike into storage was high on his agenda.

  And then his phone rang.

  Six months to the day later, Riis found himself part of a three-man breakaway in the fourth stage of his first-ever Tour de France. That he was wearing the white, yellow and red of Laurent Fignon’s Super U team gave a clue as to who made his phone ring that January day.

  The previous September, Riis had been riding in the Tour de la Communauté Européene, the French stage race more often called the Tour de l’Avenir. It was his only ride for Toshiba since the Giro d’Italia that May. Fignon, still on the mend after the debilitating effects of that tapeworm, approached Riis and a couple of other riders as, according to the Dane, he ‘needed some help on one or two days. We gave him a hand – we had to earn some money! He seemed pretty impressed and I suppose he spoke to Cyrille Guimard about having me on the team.

  ‘I didn’t hear from him but then, suddenly, on the 4th of January, they called me. You should normally be sorted with a team for the new season by then. “We have a spot. Come on our training camp.”’ Accepting the offer of a monthly wage of 12,000 Danish kroner (around £1,000), Riis passed the audition and was selected by Fignon to be his faithful lieutenant, his bodyguard, his protector.

  ‘Guimard had originally picked out a different rider to be Fignon’s right-hand man,’ Riis once wrote, ‘but he had been forced to change his mind when Fignon himself told him that he wanted it to be me. Him choosing me meant that Guimard quickly gave me even more attention, keen to help me be as good a bike rider as I could be. And he didn’t hold back on telling me what I needed to do.’ Riis was a clear beneficiary of Fignon’s dual roles, those of team leader and co-owner.

  The partnership bore fruit very quickly. And rich fruit at that. ‘We won the Giro,’ he says, with some pride. ‘I was very strong and helped Fignon a lot. I was the guy sitting in front of him every day, guiding him through the peloton. Somehow I was good at that. I thought “That’s the job for me”. He was safe when he was on my wheel. Always in a good spot, always in the right position. That was my job.’

  And the faithful lieutenant even got his own moment in the sun when he took victory on the Giro’s ninth stage into the Umbrian town of Gubbio. ‘I’ll remember that day forever. I’d been sitting in front of Fignon for eight days, just riding and riding. That stage was long and tough, and at the end there was a long, long, long false flat. Everyone was attacking and I was looking around. Fignon suddenly came up to me and said, “Bjarne, go for it. Just go.” He didn’t need to say that twice. I ended up sitting there with Dimitri Konyshev and I beat him in the sprint.’

  The confidence that the Gubbio stage win gave Riis was now showing in the fourth stage of the Tour, where – in the company of his former Toshiba team-mate Martial Gayant and Federico Echavé of the Spanish BH team – he was powering along the narrow lanes of rural Belgium. While this might have been surprising terrain for Echavé, the winner of the Alpe d’Huez stage in 1987, the stage suited the more powerfully built Riis. Having ridden the Classics that spring in the service of Fignon, the stage from Liège into northern France returned the Dane to familiar ground, including nine sections of cobbles as the riders approached the Belgian border, nine opportunities to sample ‘the hell of the north’.

  The race most famous for these cobbles – Paris-Roubaix – offers a particular challenge when it’s held every April, its competitors often emerging soggy and mud-caked thanks to the dampness of early spring in northern France. The cobbles represent something different in the dry warmth of early July. Plus, the gladiators of Paris-Roubaix are all out for victory. It’s a one-day-only blast for individual glory. What it isn’t is a stage race, with one eye on tomorrow and the next day and the next…

  This partly explains why the cobbles on this particular stage didn’t offer up as much drama as the organisers might have been hoping. Aside from Riis’s breakaway group, whose attack was launched with around 30 miles left, the majority of the peloton was largely still together as it roared over the pavé. ‘The conditions were dry on the cobbles,’ remembers Sean Kelly, ‘so not an awful lot of surprises. It didn’t really break the race apart. We were still quite a big group. Wet conditions would have suited better a rider like me who was a Classics man, but then again it’s so dangerous when it’s wet. You can get taken out in crashes.’ Certainly, each and every directeur sportif, when they assessed the weather forecast that morning, would have been secretly pleased about what looked like being an anticlimactic day. Many of the peloton weren’t Classics riders, so survival for them was everything. There had to be a tomorrow.

  Not that the cobbled sections were without incident. Sean Yates might have been a contender for the stage win, especially as he knew the streets into the finish at Wasquehal very intimately, having won the individual time trial into the town the previous year, when he set a new record average speed for a Tour stage. However, hopes of a second Wasquehal win evaporated when he caused a heavy crash with about 20 miles left to race. Sporting a new haircut that day courtesy of a razor blade wielded by team-mate Jeff Pierce (‘I had a bit of a mohican going on. Marginal gains!’), Yates brought down himself and a couple of other riders, including Thierry Marie, while on domestique duties.

  ‘It was my job to look after Andy Hampsten as he wasn’t very adept at riding the cobbles,’ he explains. ‘I was probab
ly the best for that job – I was big and strong and could keep him out of trouble. This was doubly important as the next stage was the long time trial which, if you’re going for GC, is absolutely crucial.

  ‘I’m sure he would admit this, but Andy wasn’t the greatest at staying in the right place at the right time. You’d bring him up to the front, he’d stay there for five minutes and you’d look round and he’d be gone. So you had to go back and get him. That was quite frustrating. I distinctly remember being on the cobbles and I kept looking round – “Where’s Andy? Where’s Andy?” By the time I looked round, I touched the wheel in front of me, which belonged to Thierry Marie. I came down and cut myself big time, which wasn’t ideal. It made me curse Andy, but ultimately it was my fault.’

  Hampsten is certainly quick to concede his limits on this particular terrain. ‘Yates was super. He was so good. On that cobbled stage, I had armchair service. I felt terrible because he crashed thanks to me being so timid. With all the argy-bargy going on, I wouldn’t shout when I was on his wheel or off his wheel. In looking over his shoulder for me, he crossed wheels and fell. But to keep me out of trouble on the cobbles or in the cross-winds of the last few kilometres of a stage, he was a dream team-mate to have. He was funny, too. His family showed up and there were all these little girls, his sisters, hanging on him. We thought he was some ferocious, man-eating beast, but he’s just a big teddy bear.’

  The ferocious, man-eating beast had been tamed – admittedly, by his own mistake – but at the front the Riis group was still firing along. The Tour organisers might have expected a degree of caution and a slower day, with energy conserved for the individual time trial to come, but the race was half an hour ahead of schedule. Locals wanting to catch a glimpse as the peloton bolted and jolted past their farmhouses may well have missed the spectacle. The pace was relentless, the riders dropping into the shade of numerous copses and back out again in an instant. And these twisting lanes left barely room for two-abreast riding, with the very real prospect of a spill into the ditches running on either side. Helicopters distractedly added to the intensity, buzzing low over the flat, open fields, like giant, attention-seeking mosquitoes.

  Riis, Echavé and Gayant were still out in front, with an advantage of 35 seconds, as the race crossed the border and headed towards Roubaix. But then the Frenchman – a former national cyclo-cross champion who would have made this stage, with its uneven surfaces, his principal target for a victory in the entire three weeks – made his move. He shot away from the other two as they approached a railway bridge on the outskirts of the town, the bridge’s design offering the perfect chicane on which to attack.

  Echavé couldn’t respond but Riis, eager to hold onto any chance of a second individual Grand Tour stage win in the space of a couple of months, gave it a dig for a few hundred yards before being swallowed up by the rapidly advancing peloton. Gayant had around four more miles to survive. He was still in front as he took a six-second bonus in the catch sprint outside the factory of La Redoute, the sponsors of Stephen Roche’s team when he came third in the Tour in 1985.

  Then Søren Lilholt, second place in the GC since the first stage, bridged the gap to Gayant. This was a smart move, one not anticipated by Acácio da Silva’s Carrera team. By forming a Danish-French alliance, Lilholt could possibly stay clear of the peloton to the tune of 25 seconds or more. If he did so, he would be in yellow. And not just in yellow, but in the privileged position of being last man to go in the next stage, the individual time trial.

  However brave, the pact lasted little more than half a mile before the peloton absorbed them. But that wasn’t that. An even braver attack was then launched by the Dutchman Jelle Nijdam, the Superconfex rider who had struck out in similar solo fashion the previous year to win the seventh stage into another north-eastern France town, Liévin. Now, thanks to a dummy attack from his team-mate Gert Jakobs, Nijdam countered with his own on the other side of the road. It looked an impossible task, though. The run-in to the finish in Wasquehal, the neighbouring town to Roubaix, was along a wide, arrow-straight boulevard, and Nijdam would be a sitting target for the peloton to fix in their sights.

  But the snapping jaws of the pack didn’t capture their prey. Nijdam held on to win by three seconds, leaving the race’s speedsters gnashing their teeth, again denied a mass sprint thanks to individual endeavour. Jesper Skibby was second man home for the second day running, while the yellow jersey remained on da Silva’s back – for one more stage, at least. ‘I was afraid of this stage,’ he admitted afterwards. ‘It was very important for me to keep the yellow jersey. That will allow me to ride the time trial in yellow and also be the last man off. It’s a real honour.’ Da Silva sounded like a man who knew the game was almost up, who understood he had just one stage left in the maillot jaune. A realist.

  And while the sprinters were harrumphing about being unable to joust each other for the stage win, the GC contenders were expelling a long, collective sigh of relief. The cobbles were now in the rear-view mirror. Ahead of them, after a rest day during which they would transfer to Brittany, was the game-changing individual time trial. For them, the race would only then truly begin.

  Stage 4

  1. Jelle Nijdam (Superconfex/Netherlands) 6:13:58

  2. Jesper Skibby (TVM/Denmark) +3”

  3. Johan Museeuw (ADR/Belgium) same time

  4. Jérôme Simon (Z-Peugeot/France) same time

  5. Søren Lilholt (Histor/Denmark) same time

  General classification

  1. Acácio da Silva (Carrera/Portugal) 17:16:37

  2. Søren Lilholt (Histor/Denmark) +14”

  3. Thierry Marie (Super U/France) +1’57”

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

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

  SIX

  THE AMERICAN EXPRESS

  ‘When you see a rider do a time trial like that over 73 kilometres, you know they are in good form. Everyone noticed’ – Sean Kelly

  6 July

  Stage 5, individual time trial, Dinard – Rennes, 45 miles

  AMONG THE MANY thousands of fabulous photographs of the Tour in the archives of L’Equipe, there is one from the fifth stage of the 1989 race that’s particularly fascinating. Despite it capturing the long individual time trial, when its competitors hit the road at regular intervals, three riders are in the frame, all shot from behind.

  As the road curves to the left, in the distance is the blurred outline of an unidentified Panasonic rider. To the right of the carriageway is the Super U rider Christophe Lavainne. It’s unclear whether he’s out of the saddle because he’s powering towards the Panasonic man or because he’s struggling and has just been overtaken. Judging by his position on the road, it’s the latter; Lavainne is far from taking the racing line through the bend. In fact, it appears he’s heeded the line markings in the middle of the road, specifically the white arrow that normally compels motorists to keep to the right-hand side.

  Lavainne has moved across for a reason. For commanding the road – and commanding the centre of the photograph – is a juggernaut, an American express. This express wears the number 141. The number of Greg LeMond. His pace and momentum is palpable, even in a photograph shot from behind. Unlike the struggling Lavainne, LeMond is glued to his saddle, a fixed, unmoving position. He’s not looking across at the Frenchman, a former team-mate during their Renault days. The Super U rider is just another target that the charging LeMond has gobbled up on this time trial through Brittany. The Panasonic man 50 yards ahead is his new prey.

  Not only is the photograph a study in the respective form and fortunes of three riders, it’s also a study in the concentration of the spectators lining each side of the road. Their initial pleasure at seeing compatriot Lavainne coming round the bend has been usurped by even greater pleasure at seeing LeMond in full cry. They know this is a special performance, a pivotal moment in the Tour. Cameras are raised, flashbulbs pop. Illumination on a grey day. One spect
ator, on the nearside grassy verge, seems particularly taken by the scene. In his late fifties/early sixties – white shorts, tanned legs, orange cagoule – he’s perfectly aware that history is unfolding before his eyes. Slightly crouched and offering encouragement, he doesn’t bother reaching for his camera. He wants to soak it all in with the naked eye. The moment Greg LeMond became a contender.

  ***

  If heightened levels of relaxation are an indicator of the arrival of form for a cyclist, then Greg LeMond would have had a strong idea of what was coming next. After the finish in Wasquehal two days before, he took advantage of the rest day to follow by retracing his steps back into Belgium. Here he would spend the evening – and, of course, share a Mexican meal – with Kathy and the kids in Kortrijk, their hometown during the racing season, little more than 15 miles away across the border.

  The rest day was set aside to transfer the entire race across to Brittany and not even lengthy delays caused by a transportation mix-up could affect a relaxed LeMond. The Tour administrators had chartered two planes to fly the riders from Lille to Dinard on the north Brittany coast, but one had developed a fault on its way to Lille from Paris. A little before midday, a Boeing 727 took off with eight teams aboard, leaving 14 squads to argue over who could take advantage of a nearby 48-seater Fokker. Super U, Panasonic, RMO and, to LeMond’s satisfaction, ADR were the lucky ones. Although arriving several hours later than expected, the American did at least get to put in some practice on the following day’s course – unlike the remaining teams stranded at Lille, who were forced to wait for the arrival of a third plane, which had to come all the way from Toulouse.