Icons: My Inspiration. My Motivation. My Obsession.

Now this took place on 21 September. It was the fag end of the season, and in retiring he probably missed ten days’ racing, no more. Keep in mind that over the previous five years he’d delivered five Tours de France, two Giri d’Italia and goodness knows how many others, so sponsors like Sidi had gotten more than their money’s worth. Miguel being Miguel, however, picked up the phone and rang the girl again. He said, ‘I think I’m in breach of contract, so you need to tell me how much money I owe you, and I need to send the shoes I have back.’

The other story that springs to mind came from Txema González. He was a lovely guy, a Team Sky soigneur, who died during the 2010 Vuelta. He said it was one of those horrible wet days at the Tour of the Basque Country, and the staff were all sitting on the team bus waiting for the stage finish. It was belting down with rain, and the poor spectators were standing behind the barriers waiting by the finish. One of the guys on the bus looked out of the window and said, ‘There’s a guy over there in a green cape, and I’m sure it’s Induráin. He’s the spitting image!’ So Txema got off the bus and went over, and lo and behold it was – it was Miguel. He said, ‘Miguel, what are you doing standing here? Come in the bus and get dry!’

The issue here is that Miguel wouldn’t have dreamed of getting onto a team bus, for two reasons. First, he wouldn’t have wanted to intrude, and second, the last thing he’d have wanted was to be treated differently to the other people standing there. It was raining, so as he saw it that would have been rude.

We’re talking about a cyclist here, but he didn’t exist in a vacuum. Spain was in turmoil while he was winning the Tour, and ETA was waging a war. Miguel is from Pamplona, on the doorstep of the Basque Country, and yet in some way he was a unifying force. They may have tried to exploit him or appropriate him, but there was a sense that, even in conflict, he represented a line that couldn’t be crossed. It was as if everyone in Spain decided, subconsciously, that in some way he transcended the war. As if he were a deity.

Likewise the fallout from the doping scandals. It’s a matter of public record that he rode during the EPO years, and yet he’s the Tour winner that nobody – journalist, judiciary, former rider – has ever gone after. They’ve gone after Riis, Ullrich, Pantani and Armstrong, and history tells us they’ve been going after Tour winners (myself included) since Jan Janssen in 1968. There has to be a reason why only Miguel has been left alone, and to me it’s pretty clear what that reason is. Whatever the context and whatever was happening in cycling, Induráin’s morality is bomb-proof.

When I won the time trial at the 2012 Tour I did an interview for Spanish TV. I mentioned having grown up watching him smash them, and the journalists went to see him. Evidently he said nice things about me, and TVE said they wanted to revisit me on the second rest day, to show me the film. I said that would be fine, and when they came they had something for me.

They gave me this claret-coloured neckerchief with the Induráin family crest on it. To be perfectly honest I didn’t really understand what it was, but then they explained that it was from San Fermín, the summer festival in Pamplona where they run the bulls. Afterwards I showed it to the Spanish guys on the team and they were taken aback. They explained that for someone from a Navarro family to make a gift of something like that was extremely rare. It signified my being an extended part of the Induráin family, so it was just about the highest honour Miguel could have bestowed on me. As you can imagine, I was really touched.

The Induráin family neckerchief from San Fermín, gifted to me by Miguel

Two years later I went to the Gran Fondo Pinarello in Treviso, and Fausto Pinarello told me Miguel was coming. He’d always ridden Pinarello bikes, including the legendary Espada on which he broke the Hour Record after the 1994 Tour. He’d ridden it when becoming the first man to ride over 53 kilometres in an hour, and he’d remained a friend of the Pinarello family. So it was not unlike that Museeuw moment, me panicking about meeting one of my boyhood favourites and fretting about what I would say to him.

The day before the event we were wandering around the square looking at the sponsor’s stands, and Fausto spotted Miguel. He said, ‘It’s Miguel! Come on – let’s go and see him,’ but I wasn’t ready. I’d been building myself up for the moment, but the moment wasn’t supposed to be until the following morning. I said to Fausto, ‘Can’t we leave it until tomorrow?’ because I went into full panic mode. It sounds like a stupid cliché, but growing up on a council estate in Kilburn I couldn’t have imagined something like that. He was this perfectly calibrated cycling machine from Pamplona, and I hadn’t even known where Pamplona was!

The moment Fausto Pinarello introduced me to Miguel – one of my favourite riders as a boy. Hopefully not looking totally overwhelmed.

Anyway, he was everything that everybody had said he was, just a lovely man. He and I sat together at dinner that evening, having one of those European conversations. He spoke no English but a little bit of French, I spoke good French but no Spanish, and Fausto helped us because being Italian (and very smart) he understood a bit of everything.

I mentioned the fact that I was minded to attempt the Hour, and he asked me some questions about it. When I asked him how he’d trained for it he said that he hadn’t really, at least not specifically. That says it all, because he’d just ridden a time trial. He didn’t expand on that, because he much preferred listening to talking about his own achievements.

Then again, his achievements speak for themselves. Volumes. He’s Miguel Induráin.

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‘The Animal’ looking achingly cool in the British champion’s jersey and gold earring.

As I became a rider in my own right, so my list of cycling idols began to take shape. Museeuw was a warrior, Gianni Bugno some sort of a magician, Induráin this serene, beautiful winning machine. Top of the list, however, was a guy who wasn’t a great champion. I’d never seen him win a single race, and yet somehow he was the very embodiment of everything I loved about bike racing.

When Duclos and Ballerini slipped away at the previous year’s Paris–Roubaix, there was a chase group of seven or eight. Museeuw and Olaf Ludwig were in it, and so too were the classics specialists Edwig Van Hooydonck and Adri van der Poel. Then there was this other guy. He was wearing a white jersey with two horizontal stripes across the chest, a red one and a blue one. My mum explained that he was the British champion and that his name was Sean Yates. She also said he’d ridden for the Archer, just like me.

My mum still loved cycling. She’d met my dad through it and had never really stopped following it. In the past I’d never given the sport a second thought, but this all changed after that Paris–Roubaix. Back then Cycling Weekly used to put a poster on the back cover, and on 15 April 1993 it was of this guy Yates. He was rounding a corner, that beautiful jersey covered in dust. Unlike the rest of them he had no gloves and no helmet, and his shorts seemed to be shorter than anyone else’s. He was wearing an earring, and I thought that was impossibly cool. I cut the poster out and put it up on my bedroom wall.

It’s also true to say that I spent far more time than was probably healthy staring at it.

My guilty little secret?

Not really. Not at all, in fact.

Thing is, I just really, really wanted to be like Sean Yates.

Complete with earring and thinking that I’m Sean Yates, in 1994.

IN THE MID-NINETIES, top-end British road cyclists were few and far between on the international circuit. There were dozens of Italians, Frenchmen, Belgians and Spaniards, and quite a lot of Dutchmen and Germans. There were a few talented Swiss, some Colombian climbing specialists, and beyond that a bit of a mishmash. You had the odd American, Scandinavian and former Soviet, with a few stragglers from elsewhere thrown in here and there. The Brits were very much in the latter category, which was a bit of a double-edged sword. It meant that while the chances of one of them winning any given race were pretty slim, as a fan it wasn’t hard to choose your favourites.

Boardman was immense, but essentially a time-trial specialist. He and Graeme Obree were engaged in a titanic struggle for the Hour Record, but I wasn’t yet dialled into that, and Obree was a complete enigma. Chris was his total opposite, and I found him a bit methodical. Over the years I’ve learned to appreciate him, and there’s no question he was a phenomenal athlete. He’s gone on to become a really important advocate for cycling as a whole, but back then it was all a bit clinical for me. I was a romantic, idealistic teenager, and his approach seemed rather too scientific.

Robert Millar’s winning days were behind him, and beyond that there was hardly anybody. Harry Lodge was holding down a job with an Italian team, Malcolm Elliott had gone to race in America, and I seem to think that Brian Smith had a contract at Motorola. Max Sciandri had been born in Britain, and that would come in handy when the Olympics came around. In reality, though, he’d been raised in Tuscany, and to all intents and purposes he was Italian. I knew about Sean Kelly and Stephen Roche, but they were coming to the end by then. Of course, they are Irish, not British. It was not about nationality either – at 13 I admired them all the same.

Thank God, then, for Yates.

Hanging in there to win Stage 6 of the 1988 Tour de France – with a record average speed at the time.

1983 Four Days of Dunkirk leader’s jersey

1988 Paris–Nice leader’s jersey

1992 Leeds Classic, national champion’s jersey

1992 National Championship jersey

Britain was far from a ‘traditional’ cycling country – road racing had been outlawed here before the Second World War – but contrary to popular belief it wasn’t a complete desert as regards pro racing. The Milk Race was essentially for British domestic riders and foreign amateurs, but we had the Kellogg’s Tour of Britain to look forward to in August. That was followed two days later by the Leeds Classic, which had been founded by Alan Rushton in 1989. It was part of the new World Cup series, and all the big teams raced there.

The UCI were trying to globalise cycling, but the race was typically British in the sense that, with the best will in the world, there was no money in it. The first edition had been in Newcastle, then it had moved to Brighton, and now it was up in Yorkshire. Everyone said they loved racing it, and the crowds were great. In retrospect, though, Britain just didn’t have the critical mass for a race like that to succeed. The Leeds (or Rochester, or Wincanton …) would fold the following year, and Hamburg would take its place in the World Cup. That’s just the way it was, I’m afraid. The sporting landscape was different back then, totally dominated by football, cricket, rugby and golf. Oh, and snooker.

Whatever. First and foremost, the 1994 Tour de France was coming back to England. I say ‘coming back’, because I’d learned that there had been a stage in Plymouth twenty years earlier, though seemingly it had been a bit of a dog’s dinner. They hadn’t managed to get it televised live – I assume it would have interfered with the wrestling on World of Sport – but evidently that was no bad thing because the ‘racing’ had been hopeless. They’d literally just ridden up the new bypass to the roundabout, and then ridden back down it again. Thirty times.

This time there would be two real stages, on days four and five. Everybody at the club was talking about them, not least because Boardman might be in yellow. He was the best prologue rider in the world, and if he could get the jersey and survive the team time trial we’d have one of our own in the maillot jaune when the race crossed the Channel. I learned that no Brit had worn the yellow jersey since 1962, when a certain Tom Simpson had kept it for a single day.

Chris duly won the jersey but his team, GAN, couldn’t defend it in the time trial. Museeuw took it from him and wore it on the stage from Dover to Brighton, but the next day one of his team-mates, an Italian guy named Flavio Vanzella, got it in the break. He wore it into Portsmouth, and that was that for the British stages. As ever with the Tour, the fun seemed to be over before it had really begun. That’s the nature of cycling, I suppose, and I was starting to understand that part of its beauty is the fact that it’s so ephemeral, so fleeting.

Yates hadn’t particularly extended himself in the prologue. He’d shipped almost a minute because he wasn’t a GC rider, but also because he was a serious professional with a job to do. Motorola had made the team time trial one of their main objectives, and Sean would need to preserve every ounce of energy he could for that. Motorola also had the likes of Steve Bauer and Phil Anderson, really powerful rouleurs with big engines, but you’d be hard-pushed to find any team time triallists better than Yates over 65 kilometres. In the event they finished second in the TTT, but as a consequence Sean found himself in seventh place overall when they got back to France.

Yates wearing the maillot jaune in 1994 for a single day, before losing it to Museeuw on Stage 7.

The first French stage was Cherbourg to Rennes, 270 kilometres. A break went, Sean and one of his team-mates got in it, and then one of the escapees, Bortolami, jumped off the front. Now all hell broke loose because you had Bortolami trying to win both the stage and the jersey, Sean and co. desperately trying to bring him back, and Vanzella’s team turning themselves inside out to bring them back. There were effectively three races in one, which is typical of the frantic, dramatic, desperate stuff you often see during the opening week of the Tour. Bortolami held on for the stage, but Sean was a monster. When the dust settled he’d taken the jersey by a single second, with Bortolami second and Museeuw third.

Now it could be argued that he fell on his feet that day, because I am not sure that he’d set out with the objective of claiming the jersey. That wasn’t his job, but by the same token you don’t get to wear it by accident. That’s the key to it, because Sean’s day in yellow was fundamentally a consequence of both his physical strength and, paradoxically, his altruism. He’d shipped some time initially, and then buried himself for his team. That had left him there or thereabouts on GC, but not so close to the race leader that they weren’t prepared to cut him a little bit of slack. He grabbed it with both hands, and there was nobody better equipped to keep hold of it on that kind of terrain. It was his first yellow jersey in his 11th Tour de France, and nobody was ever more deserving. It was breathtaking, heroic stuff, the stuff of the Tour …

My prized possession – 1994 Tour de France maillot jaune

Meanwhile, back in down-at-heel Kilburn, I had no interest in anything but cycling. I was extremely ambitious, and my mind was set on winning Olympic gold on the track and wearing the yellow jersey on the road. Boardman had won the pursuit and now, in him and Sean, Britain had claimed two yellows in under a week! For me that was confirmation that it was possible, because I figured that if they could do it there was no reason why I couldn’t. My mind was made up, and by the end of 1995 I was up and running. I was winning quite often, and I too had a British champion’s jersey. It was only the junior points race, but it presaged another big moment in my cycling life.

There was a prize-giving dinner, and of course everyone who’d won a title was invited. Robert Millar was present because he’d won the road race championship, but I seem to recall that Boardman was absent because he’d had a big off at the Tour and was convalescing. Sean was presenting the prizes, though, and what with me being at the bottom of the undercard I was first up onto the stage. I asked him to autograph the programme, and suffice to say this was the highlight not only of my cycling year but also of my fledgling career.