The story of Miguel Indurain and the banana

Once upon a time, a young and humble farmboy decided to become the first man in the History of cycling to win Six Tours. So he committed himself, prayed fervently to the Virgin of Villava in his rural hometown, used his enormous talent for the bike and, by busting his also enormous ass to make such a talent event bigger, and by gritting his teeth and struggling through moments of torture and self-denial so little appreciated that any human would certainly consider them a worthless sacrifice, got to the verge of achieving such a utopian goal by actually becoming the first rider in History to win Five Tours in a row. And, eventually, when the hour that nobody in his sane judgment would have considered even remotely possible five years before, but which in this young Navarran`s secret mental calendar had been marked in red all along, drew to a close; everybody, for once, became convinced that the feat, far from impossible, was very much in his hands. In fact, the optimism became so great, that it was quickly forgotten that the same people who were now claiming that it was more likely for a tap to open and not give water than for Miguel Indurain (which, incidentally, was the name of this Spanish fellow) not to win his sixth Tour; had, until a relatively short while ago, earnestly believed that this Navarran farmboy was way too muscular and big-assed so as to pass the Tourmalet`s summit with the race`s top contenders. Certainly, there was always room for accidents, but even with these Big Mig had up to then proved to be invulnerable, so lucky (or so masterful at calculating safe moves and necessary risks), had he been. No, Big Mig would win the sixth Tour for the very same reason which says that when you open a tap you get water. It was a tradition after all, and this year didn`t seem to have been any different: Indurain had gradually lost his excess weight over Christmas, had acquired basic aerobic endurance with long, cold, flat and easy spins on the crude Navarran winter, had put up some strength with hard and meticulous weightlifting sessions, had done the right amount of spring cycling competition which was necessary to tune up his muscles and get used to mountainous competitive paces, and had begun to win low-key races just when it was the proper time to do so (and then he had, as usual, wiped out all competition in those races). In short, Indurain would win the sixth Tour because he had done all that was necessary for it, and he had done it right.

Hadn`t he?

Well, the overall public consensus when Big Mig only yielded a few meaningless seconds in the symbolic Prologue time trial of the `96 Tour, was that he had.

But I, for once, saw things differently.

Maybe Indurain had done apparently all the right things, but when I saw him hiding himself in the wet treacherous and very flat turns of Hertogenbosch and claiming later that the weather conditions had just been not right for him to show off; I had the tingling and unresting belief that, at least psychologically (and it is the psyche what eventually tells the great champ from the average winner), he hadn`t done them with as much passion and conviction as in other years. Nor that this would not have been justifiable: there is truly a difference in training for the Tour when you are a young, bold and unknown rider aspiring to show the world who you are (as he had been in 1991), than when you are sentimentally a married man with a cute one- year old son and more money that you could ever spend in your whole life, and athletically as close to a walking legend as you can possibly get. No, Indurain had reasons to view his 1996 season as a necessary social obligation rather than as the personal challenge it really was, but this does not preclude a professional like him to put his entangled private life apart and give out his best one more time. Specially when such a professional was considered, and there was plenty of proof to back this opinion, as the uttermost example of what athletic chivalry and generosity in effort are.

At that point, of course, I did not want to continue thinking like that. I preferred, on the contrary, to do just what everybody else was doing: consider that the Prologue`s disquieting and intriguing results obeyed no other reason than the weather and the fact that it had been long since Big Mig was last interested in winning Prologues; and hope that, as soon as the scorching heat and the blistering pace of the initial flat stages came, and the mountains finally made its first appearance, Indurain would, like in so many other Julys, put things in their proper place. But the reality was there if you had the guts to admit it, and my cousin, who is much more knowledgeable in cycling than I am, saw it too; although he too did not want to disclose his opinions at that time for fear of spoiling what had to be a party (Prologues are the only stages in the Tour when everybody parties)... although later on he would confess to me that he also began to get worried at that point, when he saw Big Mig a little heavier and more clumsy than in other Tours.

One could argue that, if Indurain had not really trained as hard as in other years (for what consistently maintained him at the top year after year against the aging tendency was just that, harder and harder training), it would have already showed off before, and it hadn`t. With his befuddling demonstrations of power and tactical control at the Bicicleta Vasca and Duphine Libere, the only conclusion one could arrive at was that Indurain was, if ever, stronger than in any other year.

But, while it is true that Big Mig was more untreatable than ever in these last critical short races leading to the Tour of `96, it is no less true than raw physical power and innate abilities are the only assets needed to excel at these low-key races (although they are quite important ones!), and these were still the domain of Indurain even if he had not trained this season his inner psychological competitive drive so hard; and that this very inner psychological competitive drive would become very central as soon as a three-week stage race like the Tour, in which the issue that counts is not so much the ability to perform well in one sporadic day but the ability to focus intensely on the competition, be always attentive, and recover quickly from one day to another, began to roll off.

And it did.

The Tour of 1996 began to roll off, and Big Mig quickly showed signs of being struggling to follow the pace dictated by the lead of the pack. Certainly, much of the blame for what then almost seemed like an optical illusion had to be put on the weather, which, with its unbelievable exhibition of thick copious rain and freezing wind, looked as if it wanted to punish Indurain and the peloton in general for having enjoyed overly too warm Tours in the preceding years. It is of common knowledge that rain, cold and wind, while being unpleasant to anybody, are all the more deleterious and harmful to Big Mig, whose long big muscles cramp and become almost instantly inoperative in bad weather. But, still, this does not exonerate Big Mig from not having emulated his fellow Bjar ne Riis in training during that season and preparing what was already known to be a anti-Indurain Tour, as hard as if his whole life depended on it.

NEVERTHELESS, and even with Big Mig`s training laziness and the weather`s unfair treatment of the five-time champ, Miguel Indurain Larraya could have, still, won his SIXTH Tour de France...

...if he had only remembered to eat a banana on July 6th 1996 just before facing Les Arcs.

Now, bananas, or rather the omission of them, should be at this point quite familiar to Miguel Indurain. Indeed, another banana, very similar to the one whose omission probably cost him, as we will shortly see, what would have been his Sixth Tour, had also cost him, two years before, what would have been his Third Giro.

So now we know why Miguel Indurain is human. After all, he has topped twice over the same stone.

So let`s refresh our memory and flash back to that infamous and very vividly remembered Giro of `94.

Like in the `96 Tour, Indurain had arrived in worse shape than usual, although back then his physical weakness was immensely more evident and notorious, having endured the untraining effects of a tendinitis recovery over the past month. Also like in `96, he had shown himself to be not that strong in the initial Prologue, a stage which, no matter what people may say, is always very indicative of the relative strengths of the race`s contenders; by losing the typical two seconds to the new and threatening rising young star Eugenij Berzin, something which was somewhat good (the year before Big Mig had also lost two seconds in the Prologue and won in the end), but then losing an extra three seconds to stage`s surprise Armand de las Cuevas, something which was no longer that good. Also as in `96, the weather had not been during the first flat and long stages the ideal either: that spring was seeing unusually high levels of pollen, a substance to which Indurain`s enormous but very delicate lungs are allergic. And, to complete the parallel with the Tour of `96, one cannot say that the upset came without warning, for Indurain`s struggle to follow the lead of the pack in the flat, short, and supposedly easy transitional stage of May 28th 1994 (which, in the end, and to round out the paradox, would be the only one in that Giro to go to a Spanish rider, Cubino), was as much of a warning as any clever eyes eager to accept the truth needed. The moment of truth came then finally, and it did so, as usual, in the first serious time trial, that indelible Grosetto- Follonica 44.1 Km flat time-trial of May 29th in which Big Mig, despite the fact that in May he was not yet at his best, was supposed to open a gap on Berzin at least wide enough to shut the young bloke`s stingy mouth, and, leaving hypocrisy aside, by ``wide enough`` we were ALL imagining, when in that balmy and placid late spring afternoon we switched on the very trendy Channel 5, at least a rose- jersey winning 1`10``;... and, in the end, instead of making a difference, Indurain, powerless and breathless, could only manage to see how the difference was MADE on him. Indurain lost a scandalous and unbelievable 2`34`` to Berzin,

who at that point, amidst the unappeasable roar of those uncountable Italian tifossi who were truly ecstatic upon seeing this young Russian under a Italian team discipline beat their spring nightmare from Spain, and amidst a Spanish state that could only be described as ``national mourn`` (I couldn`t sleep that night crying, and next day I got only 65% in a Chemistry exam), seemed beyond doubt to have become the rider destined to end Indurain`s glorious reign. YET, and despite the fact that even die-hard fans like ME had begun to make up our minds about the reality that the Golden da s of our idol were over, Indurain did not surrender. In those obscure and dark moments, when everybody began to look at him as if he were already history, Miguel, more than in any other time, demonstrated just how great a champ he was. He knew from the bottom of his heart that such an upset was not a sign of old age but only symptomatic of poor physical training and bad health problems, and, hurt in his pride, and spurred by the scornful and despising remarks of some evil tongues around him which, up to that moment, had been forced to remain silent in the light of his incontestable results; decided that it was time to give his rivals, the press, and even his fans, a good lesson.

And so came that magical and unforgettable Sunday afternoon of June 5th 1994.

I, not knowing how I could best help Indurain against such an untreatable Berzin, decided that the best thing for me to do was to hand the Giro over to Providence, and concentrate on my then intense and demanding classwork. Maybe, I thought, by doing my exams well, the Giro would also come out well; although it was certainly hard to imagine, upon seeing the kind of power and freshness exhibited by Berzin in all stages, how the Giro could possibly come out in some other way than with the Russian dressed in Rose. So I decided not to watch what was certainly bound to be the most important and transcendental mountain stage in the race, and the only occasion, if there ever was going to be any, for Indurain to do something. Indeed, the scaringly long and steep Mortirolo (The Death Mountain), had to be passed, and although those inhumanely abrupt mountain walls were by no means the ideal place for Indurain, one could imagine, out of the utter desperation of seeing that at all of his supposedly ``ideal`` terrains Indurain was being beaten badly and repeatedly by Berzin, that maybe by trying to attack in not such an ``ideal`` terrain the so-yearned surprise would come up. And so, with an effort to put cycling aside of my mind almost worthy of the Mortirolo itself, I tried to do some linear algebra. ``Isometric maps are linear maps which preserve distance..., like the distance between Berzin and Indurain in the Giro`s overall standings... `` No, it was truly impossible to concentrate. I just couldn`t do it. I just couldn`t stay there doing linear algebra while the big algebra of the Giro`s overall standings was being played at that very moment on TV. I had to be brave and bold enough to see whatever Channel 5 was showing at that very moment. If it was the utter downfall of Indurain in the steep and torrid mountain, then so be it. I was a true fan after all, and true fans are those who support and cheer their idol not only when he wins, but when he loses as well. If Indurain was to die, we would die with him. So I put on Channel 5, and rushed to sit down.

I never reached my chair.

For indeed, as I saw immediately on the screen, Indurain, not only had come back to his former self, but he was also, for the first time since he had entered cycling history,... attacking.

What a moment. The incontestable and irrefutable evidence that the reason why Big Mig had not attacked in a formal sense so far (if galactic time trials cannot be considered as ``attacks``) was not because he had been unable to attack but simply because up to then he had not needed to, was there. Now Indurain did need to attack if he wanted to win that Giro again (how great and glorious the up to then almost insipid term ``winning the Giro`` sounded then, and how right it was that we only appreciated the full value of something when we were about to lose it),... and, indeed, he was attacking. Yes, attacking. Like when a rider stands up on his bike and, without warning, puts in the big plate and begins to pedal like crazy with a gear unrealistically long for the terrain, hoping to open a sudden and substantial gap which he may preserve later on when his pedaling mandatorily returns to a rate more sustainable and steady. Big Mig was standing up. And so were all the Spaniards which were then watching TV.

The tension lasted for a while because, just as that incredible and unbelievable moment demonstrated without doubt that Indurain had nothing to envy the great historical champs in terms of panache and aggressiveness when the actual moment came; so did it demonstrate that Eugenij Berzin deserved, for all of his titanic resistance to surrender, to be called a champ as well. All other competitors had already succumbed. Now, as the TV screen was emphasizing with an awesome and indelible close-up, the Giro had been brought down, on those almost insurmountable mountain walls, to a duel. Indurain and Berzin, hand in hand. The young and bold Russian talent resisted, resisted, resisted, and resisted beyond imagination. One could see and almost feel the suffering in his face: his reddened and contorted young features were the undisguisable manifestation that the athlete behind was at that moment literally agonizing. But, like Indurain earlier in the Giro, Berzin was, in the end, human. Indurain, when the gradient got an extra notch, made one final and brutal push... and then he was gone. Ahead of him, about to get that infernal Dantesque mountain pass behind him, was the Giro`s Italian revelation Marco Pantani, the man who would, on that and other successive days, prove beyond question that the theory that light and skinny climbers are heroes of the past and can no longer blow up modern stage races is simply wrong. Pantani, all lightness and skin, had just blown up the race. Because the Russian man who had committed the fatal mistake of overestimating his energies by trying to follow initially Pantani`s aggressive wheel, was now painfully and tortuously paying for his error, as not only had he been utterly unable of following Pantani; but also because Miguel Indurain, the man who with his apparent plummeting at the Mortirolo`s first ramps seemed to be definitively buried, had, discontented with just capturing Berzin again, attacked... and destroyed Berzin. And, when a few suspenseful moments later Pantani slacked off slightly upon the realization that an alliance with trailing Indurain would become pure dynamite; it seemed, for once, that the route to the Third consecutive Giro de Italia, the one whose association with Indurain had until a few moments before offended logic, was all clear. The gap soon grew to one minute, then two minutes... Berzin was an emaciated corpse, while Indurain, Pantani, and millions of Spanish households were rocketing off to glory.

Nothing can describe the sense of heaven-opening and bliss- attainment that accompanied me when I realized that, at the trend at which the time gap was growing, Berzin`s 3`39`` lead would be gone before the end of the stage, despite the fact that the young Russian fellow, all courage and pride, was fighting like an animal in order to minimize the losses. Indurain dressed in Rose. Who could have told.

But, then, something happened.

Indurain forgot to eat a banana.

Indeed, the last mountain pass of the day, the Valico de Santa Cristina, was a mere kids` play in comparison with the Mortirolo, but, at 2nd rate, it could just not be ignored. If Indurain had just, just managed to remain cold-blooded one more time and, instead of getting carried away with all the emotion, he had stayed cool and looked at that last mountain pass pragmatically and respectfully (something for sure quite difficult at that moment), then, then he would have realized that he had in those final mediocre ramps the chance to bolster definitively his lead. Pantani saw this, and this is the reason why, as soon as the road stepped up again, he increased his pace and arrived alone at the finish line with a 4`06`` lead over Bezin, a lead which would have given the Giro to Miguel... IF he had only remembered to eat his banana at the right time. But he didn`t.

There was no banana, despite the fact that I almost got aphonic shouting to the TV like a possessed one: ``Eat, Miguel eat!!!`` in the tense moments leading to the final ascension,... and there was no third Giro.

And nothing can describe the sense of heaven-closing and bliss-deprivation that accompanied me (and so many others) when the cameras showed clear and very ominous signs of energy-depletion and physical breakdown in the face of a man who was then, far from being able to follow the pace of his up to that moment inseparable ally Marco Pantani, literally struggling to climb 7% at a pathetic 7 mph; and who, incredibly, and only an hour ago, had been the same man who had defied all physical rules by launching his 210 pounds worth of muscle and bike at 11 mph over a 17% gradient, and obliterating the Giro on the way. Indurain was going to lose the Giro in the moment that hurt the most: when it was already in his hands.

And so Berzin finally lost only 36 seconds to exhausted and empty Indurain (he lost something, at least!), and winded up dressed in Rose again. Who could have told.

But one thing is true. Whoever could have predicted that, whoever could have predicted that Big Mig would commit a child`s mistake in the most dramatic and charged moment of his entire professional career, whoever could have predicted that the same epochal and anthological stage (I am sure that, if I ever have any grandchildren, I will too narrate to them, in one far away day, in the warmth of a crepitating homey fire, that, ``a long time ago, on that magical and unforgettable Sunday afternoon of June 5th 1994...``) would enable us to both rise with Indurain to an unprecedented level of cycling glory and sink with him to an unprecedented level of cycling frustration; would not, by any means, have predicted that, two years later, only two years later, Miguel Indurain, like the human he has sometimes been, would commit the same mistake again.

For, indeed, on that fateful Saturday afternoon of July 6th, 1996, Indurain had planned again, despite the Dantesque and frigid weather endured during the whole week, and despite the fact that his muscles were cramped and not as well tuned as in other Julys,... to attack. The Tour was reaching its first mountain finish line at Les Arcs and, after the first selection, the lead pack, in which all the favorite contenders were included, was tackling the last miles of a not at all epochal or famous mountain pass. Indurain forgot to eat his banana`s worth of carbohydrates, and the utopian illusion of the Sixth Tour, when he was the closest to touching it, was gone.

What happened later is sadly well known. One could argue that the sadness only had to afflict Indurain`s fans, and would, as any sadness in sport, be contrasted somewhere else by gladness, as the turn to the fans of the rider who was finally beating the man who up to them had relegated him to dignified but very nastily disgusting runner up`s honors, came. But I am afraid that it is not the case. The sadness experienced when Indurain, gradually, slowly, in a dramatically quiet fashion, began to lose wheel on those endless last two miles to the summit of Les Arcs, was general, almost universal; and I am sure that it was as shared in Rijs` Denmark as it was in Spain. For what was beating and eventually beat Indurain on that Tour of 1996, on what had to be and had almost become a synonym of ``The Sixth Tour``, was not Bjarne Riis, or any rival for that matter. No, Indurain`s nemesis did not have a proper name. It was the weather, the bureaucratized boring training, the failure to summon up the right psychological courage to contest a Tour which presented itself as more difficult and alien to Indurain as ever, and, well, simply the lack of spark. Or, rather, Indurain`s nemesis` name was Indurain itself. The Indurain of `96 was beaten by the Indurain of `95, or of `94, or of `93, or of `92, or of `91. Badly beaten. Indurain lost only against Indurain, Indurain, Indurain. Indurain, what a strange way to lose.

It remains as a consolation that the Tour of `96 was just not ``right`` as a race itself, and that it was not only Indurain who failed to be where he was supposed to be; but also his countryman Olano, who was already prepared to take up the torch in case his master and mentor failed, but who was eventually ruled out of all competition by an unfair and stupid tactical mistake; and the very French, yet very beloved in Spain; Laurent Jalabert, who had monopolized all cycling magazine`s covers in June as the greatest of Indurain`s rivals, but who would not endure a fatidical food poisoning during the race; and Marco Pantani, the light and skinny genius of the mountains without which the Alp D`Huez and the Tourmalet seemed almost inconceivable, but who had gotten injured after a very grave and strange home accident; and Alex Zulle, who claimed rightly that the moment to become something more than just a meritful and brilliant runner up had come, but who, as all of the above, could not, for some reason, live up to the challenge. Indeed, without the big names sounding on TV, and with a race-design lacking those flat and long opening time trial, Tourmalet and Alp D`Huez, which up to that date had been their most essential and irreplaceable ingredients, it seemed as if there was some kind of weird cabalistic craft cast on that Tour, as if that Tour, somehow, was not the Tour. This mystery seems all the more odd and unexplainable the more one thinks about it. The whole hypothesis about some kind of witchcraft may actually be more than just a metaphorical description: e-mail me if you`d like to know what I suspect truly happened, and who may share with Miguel the responsibility for it. But, whatever the reason, Miguel Indurain can, at least, have the not at all disdainable consolation that, as long as the Tour was the Tour, he had always won; and that the moment when he finally lost did not come not because the Tour defeated him, but rather, and more simply, because the Tour became no longer the Tour.

Indeed, when on Sunday July 21st I finally decided that the best way to homage Indurain`s earnest but late effort to amend his training and tactical mistakes, was to refuse to watch on TV Bjarne Riis parade down his yellow jersey along the very crowded Paris` Champs Elysees; I thought, realizing that it was the third Sunday of July and that I was not crying with the Spanish national anthem and the image of a yellow and serene Indurain in Paris as one was SUPPOSED to do on the third Sunday of July, that maybe, maybe, maybe, all that we had been seeing and informed about had been a hoax, and that Indurain had truly eaten that critical banana on the way to Les Arcs, and won the sixth Tour, with Olano rounding off the Spanish glory with the second step of the podium, and Jalabert heralding a new era for French cycling with his third place. Certainly, it would not have been the first time all news media conjure up to hide the real story... It would truly make sense. After all, if you open the tap you get water. Right?

Well, not always. Indurain did not eat his banana and he did not win his sixth Tour. But this is the story of what would have happened if he had done so. This is the movie which all of us assumed would hit July in theaters everywhere. This is the story of the Sixth Tour.

This, is the story of the Tour that almost was.

© Greehamdo Moorgham 1997
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