“I’m sorry if I’ve disappointed people.
And for those for whom I was a hero, I’m sorry.
They’ll have to find new heroes now.”
~ Bjarne Riis, May 2007

What had really happened to Miguel Induráin in the 1996 Tour de France? All sorts of things, few of which will ever be told. But one important thing that is known is the change in personnel in his Banesto squad. The team’s doctor, Sabino Padilla, walked out at the end of 1995. Early in his career Induráin had worked with the Italian doctors Francesco Conconi and Luigi Cecchini. And it was to Italy that José Miguel Echávarri, Induráin’s directeur sportif, turned after Padilla left. Surprisingly, Echávarri was perfectly open about this:

I am seeking collaboration with [Ilario] Casoni, [Nicola] Alfieri and [Marcello] Lodi [three of Conconi’s protégés at the University of Ferrara] at least for a team get together which will be held in Palma di Majorca in February [1996]. There will hopefully be some tests in Milan followed by a week at Pamplona. At the present time the Italians lead the world in sports medicine and training techniques.

A void has been left by Sabino Padilla, the medic who has left Banesto after so many years to take a position with the football club Atletico Bilbao. Sabino, who was Induráin’s personal trainer, left without even mapping out the [1996] season. So we have to find a new medic, either in Spain or in Italy, but probably from the University of Ferrara. As of now Casoni, Alfieri and Lodi are being considered as our consultants.”

Most all of the big name riders of the time had specialists like Sabino Padilla available to them. ONCE’s Laurent Jalabert and Alex Zülle used the in-house services of Nicolas Terrados and also had the Spanish gynaecologist Eufemiano Fuentes on speed-dial. Fuentes had once been ONCE’s in-house specialist, having earned his sporting spurs blood-boosting Spanish athletes to glory at the Los Angeles Olympics, where the Americans and the Italians were also among the nations tainting their gold medals with blood. After the LA Games, Fuentes had played a role in Pedro Delgado’s victory at the 1985 Vuelta a España, as a staff member on the Spaniard’s Orbea outfit. Fuentes was also a member of Delgado’s entourage during the 1987 Tour de France that the Spaniard lost to Stephen Roche. He missed out on Delgado’s 1988 Tour victory, having switched to Manolo Sáiz’s ONCE squad. After a couple of seasons in-house with ONCE, Fuentes moved on to Amaya and then Kelme, where he finally came unstuck after Jesús Manzano’s revelations in September 2003 which eventually led to Operación Puerto.

Mapei’s Toni Rominger was a client of Michele Ferrari’s, as were his teammate Abraham Olano, his Gewiss rival Evgeni Berzin, and Saeco’s Mario Cipollini. Ferrari had learned his trade alongside Aldo Sassi when they were part of Francesco Conconi’s team that blood-boosted Francesco Moser to the Hour record twice in the space of five days in 1984. In 1994 Ferrari had compared EPO to orange juice following the one-two-three at the Flèche Wallonne achieved by Gewiss riders Moreno Argentin, Giorgio Furlan, and Evgeni Berzin. That podium lockout alone merited raised eyebrows but it had come on the back of a season which had already seen Gewiss riders winning Tirreno-Adriatico, Milan-Sanremo, and the Critérium International. Even though Aldo Sassi banned his Mapei riders from working with Ferrari in 1996 the Italian doctor continued to work with Rominger, having helped him set two new Hour records over a fifteen day period in 1994 (and, in the process, taking the record from Induráin – one of the few times Rominger actually managed to beat his Spanish rival).

The Festina boys, Richard Virenque and company, they had the in-house services of Willy Voet, an old school soigneur who changed with changing times. During his career Voet had worked with riders like Joaquim Agosthino, Hennie Kuiper, and Sean Kelly before helping Festina become one of the power-houses of 1990’s cycling. Voet finally came unstuck at a Franco-Belgian border crossing just days before the 1998 Tour de France rolled off from Dublin. The drugs found in his possession led to him becoming the scapegoat for all the excesses of Gen-EPO.

And Riis? He – and his Telekom team-mate, Ullrich – used the services of Luigi Cecchini, whose orbit Riis had come into after he joined Ariosta in 1992, where Cecchini worked alongside Michele Ferrari. After Ariosta folded at the end of 1993 Moreno Argentin had enticed Riis to join Gewiss, where Ferrari was installed as the in-house specialist until his injudicious comments about orange juice saw him (officially, anyway) become persona non grata. Riis, having had to choose between Ferrari and Cecchini at Ariosta, retained the services of Cecchini throughout the rest of his career. As well as working with Riis in 1996, Cecchini was also working with Pascal Richard (Switzerland/MG), Rolf Sørensen (Denmark/Rabobank), and Max Sciandri (UK/Motorola) – who pulled off a gold, silver and bronze triple in the road race at the Atlanta Olympics.

The Telekom team also had access to the facilities of the Department of Sports Medicine at the Freiburg University Hospital. Dr Andreas Schmid was their on-call specialist from their days as the Stuttgart squad (1989/90) until his suspension in May 2007. From 1995 onwards the team also had access to Dr Lothar Heinrich. In 1996 Schmid and Heinrich were also working for the German cycling federation, Schmid a member of their medical commission and both doctors responsible for German riders at the Worlds and the Olympics.

In 1992 Schmid had begun working with the Jef D’hont. Since the mid-seventies D’hont – like Voet, an old school soigneur – had been administering cyclists with his own home-brewed ‘special potion.’ But D’hont’s homebrew was became ever less effective as EPO took hold of the peloton. As early as the 1992 Tour de France the Telekoms realised they were getting nowhere without the use of EPO, which was being heavily used by Italian and Spanish teams in particular. Initially, individual riders sourced EPO themselves and their use of the drug was supervised by Schmid. Later in 1993 Schmid was able to source EPO for the team, with D’hont responsible for passing it on to the riders.

Once the use of EPO commenced, Schmid and Heinrich assumed a greater role within the team and, from the 1995 season onward – when Telekom’s systematic usage of doping products commenced – identified which riders were to peak for which races. In addition to EPO the Freiburg doctors were also administering glucocorticoids, growth hormone, and testosterone. Despite their improved doping regime the Telekom team was still not producing the wins and had to negotiate hard in order to secure a place in the 1995 Tour, eventually padding out the squad with a number of riders from the Italian ZG team. Drugs alone, it seemed, weren’t the answer.

* * * * *

Echávarri’s openness on the subject of doctors and the importance of Sabino Padilla in the Banesto set-up seems surprising today, and even in 1996 it was somewhat unusual. In the early 1990’s journalists like David Walsh and Paul Kimmage had spoken positively of the new role being played in cycling by men like ONCE’s Nicolas Terrados (profiled in Walsh’s Inside The Tour de France), and expressed the hope that their arrival would see the end of cycling’s reliance on doping. But even though the UCI’s big boss, Hein Verbruggen, had leapt to Ferrari’s defence in 1994, slamming the media for miss-quoting the Italian, the outcry over Ferrari’s comments – which had been reported accurately – saw a veil fall over the role he and men like him were playing in the sport.

EPO, even before Ferrari’s 1994 comments, was no secret; people had been writing about it – and the unusually high number of cyclists dying in their sleep – since the early nineties. The IOC were funding research into a test for the drug (and actually supplying EPO for research purposes), a test which was being developed by Francesco Conconi at the University of Ferrara. As one year passed into the next and no EPO test appeared (despite repeated promises that he was on the verge of a breakthrough) Conconi wrote to Hein Verbruggen suggesting the implementation of a haematocrit test, with his proposed limit being 54%. That happened in June of 1996, a month before Riis galloped up the Hautacam on his Pinarello. Verbruggen, though, was opposed in principle to blood testing. It was – and continues to be – considerably more expensive than urine tests. And, in 1996, the UCI had other ideas on where money needed to be spent in cycling: they were dreaming of new headquarters in Aigle.

A month before Conconi wrote to Verbruggen, Italy’s Nucleo Antisofisticazione e Sanità (NAS), the branch of the Carabinieri dealing with health and hygiene matters, had planned on paying a visit to the Giro d’Italia, having become aware of unusually high sales of EPO in Tuscany in the weeks leading up to the race. The 1996 corsa rosa started in Greece – it was the centenary of the modern Olympics – with a prologue in Athens followed by two stages before the race returned to Italy. The plan was for everyone on the Giro to return to Italy by ferry, across the Aegean, landing at the port of Brindisi. NAS decided that this was where they would hit the race and search everyone. When checking the exact details, NAS enquired of CONI when the ferries were due to arrive in Brindisi. Somehow NAS’s plans leaked.

Everyone on the Giro was aware of the welcoming committee awaiting them in Brindisi, especially after La Gazzetta dello Sport (part of the RCS Group which organises the Giro and the race’s newspaper of record) published details of the proposed raid. For some unknown reason twelve unmarked team vehicles decided to return to Italy overland via Montenegro, Albania, and Croatia and then all the way down the Italian boot to Brindisi. They could have saved the petrol money – because of the leak the NAS officers decided to watch the Giro on telly instead and cancelled their raid.

Unknown at that time was that CONI were part of the problem when they should have been the solution to cleaning up Italian sport. Since February 1994 they had been sitting on a report by Sandro Donati, a survey into drug use in the Italian peloton. Donati’s report was based on interviews with a small number of riders, doctors and team bosses and in it the Italian didn’t mince his words:

The abuse has spiralled out of control. In some of the races, they are now climbing hills at speeds they used to reach on the flat! And why? Because the majority are pumped to the gills with shit like EPO, HGH and testosterone. For the good of sport, it is imperative we act immediately to stamp this out.”

For the good of sport, maybe, but not for the glory of Italians at the Olympics. CONI, conflicted by their dual role of bringing home the bangles and baubles every four years and stopping athletes from cheating, figured that the glory was more important than the catching of cheats. And so Donati’s report lay buried until French and Italian journalists forced CONI to acknowledge its existence toward the end of the 1997 season.

But there was more to just sitting on damaging reports going on in CONI. Months after the 1996 Giro ended, Ivano Fannini, direttore sportivo at the Vatican’s cycling team, Amore e Vita, claimed that an important CONI official had decamped to Greece shortly after the NAS phone call and personally informed a number of teams of the reception committee awaiting them in Brindisi. Like a lot of Fannini’s claims down the years, this has never been proven.

* * * * *

Since the days of Fausto Coppi – and probably even before then – Italians had led the charge to turn cycling into a scientific sport. Coppi always gets the credit for dragging cycling out of the stone age and into the modern era. In the years after his reign it was to Italian teams that the best European pros tended to gravitate. Italian industrialists who’d grown up listening to the exploits of Coppi and Gino Bartali on the radio were splashing their money about in the sport of their youth and those industrialists expected value for money. Italian teams became the best prepared in the peloton.

Preparation doesn’t always mean doping. The simple fact is that the Italians took the sport more seriously than others. They trained properly. They targeted races and trained to peak for those targets. They used doctors who understood human physiology and didn’t rely on old wives’ tales passed from one generation of soigneurs to the next. Many of the doctors who worked with Italian teams would claim to have operated to high ethical standards. But the problem there is that one doctor’s version of high ethical standards varies from another’s. Left to individuals to decide, the limits of what is ethically acceptable will always be tested. And Italian doctors became world leaders when it came to testing the limits of what was ethically acceptable. So preparation often does mean doping.

By the time the nineties came around the Italians were rocking the sport of cycling. Go back to all those stats that bogged you down at the start of this series. The strength of the Italian peloton at the time is shown in the number of Italians who turned up at the 1996 Tour: sixty-two of their riders were in ‘s-Hertogenbosch for the race’s start, more than the combined number of French and Spanish riders. Go back and take a longer look at the results of the major races. In 1996 alone the only major races not won by Italian riders or Italian teams were the Flèche Wallonne (Motorola’s Lance Armstrong), the time trial at the Worlds (ONCE’s Alex Zülle), Paris-Nice (ONCE’s Laurent Jalabert), the GP du Midi Libre (Jalabert), the Dauphiné Libéré (Induráin), the Tour (Riis), and the Vuelta (Zülle). Armstrong was already working with Ferrari, Riis was with Cecchini, and Induráin was using the University of Ferrara. Meaning that only ONCE stopped Italians making it a clean sweep of the year. The Spanish may have been slow out of the blocks when it came to cycling but they were catching up fast. And they were playing by Italian rules.

* * * * *

Other important issues were also at play in the lead up to the 1996 Tour. As if having the judicial authorities taking an interest in the use of EPO in the pro peloton wasn’t bad enough, Conconi had a rival in the search for an EPO test. In February 1996, Professor Guy Brisson, Director of the Montreal anti-doping laboratory, floated the idea of an EPO test to the UCI. Brisson proposed to the UCI that he should carry out research on the pro peloton during the Tour de Romandie in May. Key to Brisson’s research was proving that blood tests could easily be carried out on the peloton before competition. The UCI eventually gave Brisson the green light, but only if he worked with the Institut Universitaire de Medicine Légale, often erroneously referred to as the UCI’s Lausanne laboratory. But while the IUML was independent of the UCI, the doctors working there had a very close working relationship with the cycling authorities.

Unfortunately for Brisson the riders at the Tour de Romandie were unhappy with the idea of anyone looking at their blood and refused to cooperate with his tests. In the end it was agreed that samples would be collected purely for research purposes, and that anonymity would be guaranteed. Brisson was then able to carry out his research during the Tour de Suisse in June, where he proved that blood testing was feasible. And that the riders tested were showing surprisingly elevated haematocrit levels.

The UCI claimed that Brisson’s research came to naught, that it was ineffective at indentifying the use of EPO, which was good news for those worried by what the Canadian’s research might reveal. But, when the proverbial brown stuff hit the revolving air-conditioning unit during the Festina affaire, Brisson presented an alternative viewpoint: the longitudinal analysis he was working on was more than effective at identifying cheats. The UCI, fearing the fallout from riders with deep pockets who could drag them through the courts and bankrupt them, hadn’t wanted to know.

The attitude of the cycling authorities at the time is probably best exemplified by the fates of different riders who popped positives in the run up to the Tour. Consider these cases: MG’s Fabio Fontanelli, positive for testosterone at the Amstel Gold Race; Agrigel’s Jacky Durand and Thierry Laurent, positive for nandrolone at the Quatre Jours de Dunkerque and, in Durand’s case, the Côte Picardie; GAN’s Philippe Gaumont and Laurent Desbiens, positive for nandrolone at the Dunkerque and Picardie races as well as the Tour de l’Oise (and, in Desbiens’ case, the Vendée International Classic). Fontanelli’s positive didn’t become public until August. Durand and Laurent completed the Tour even after French media got wind of their positives before the Tour commenced. Roger Legeay, on the other hand, didn’t just drop Gaumont and Desbiens – he made sure the French media knew they had been dropped, and why. The cycling authorities had simply adopted the practice of not releasing any details of positives. No news is, after all, good news. And the 1996 Tour was full of good news for the cycling authorities: not a single rider returned a positive.

* * * * *

Having confessed in 2007 to using EPO and other drugs during his cycling career, it’s no secret anymore that Riis was charged up on the blood booster during the 1996 Tour de France, as were many of his rivals. How high Riis was charged up when he galloped up the Hautacam on his pretty little Pinarello is where, after the Festina affaire broke and Willy Voet spat in the soup, Riis got one of his nicknames: Mr 60%. In Breaking the Chain (Yellow Jersey Press), Voet had this to say of the 1996 Tour:

Remember Bjarne Riis’s stunning win on the Hautacam climb in the 1996 Tour de France. The Dane, who was to win the race, literally played with his rivals before obliterating them. And the haematocrit levels of his rivals, certainly at Festina, had been blithely boosted to about 54%. His exploit was as perturbing for those in the know as it was spectacular to the uninitiated.”

According to Jef D’hont – whom Riis refused to work with – the Dane was dosing up on 4,000-unit double-doses of EPO every other day during the 1996 Tour, pushing his haematocrit level to at least 60%, sometimes 64%. Such levels were contrary to the rules employed by Schmid and Lothar for the use of EPO within the Telekom squad, wherein they favoured a limit around 53%.

Others were similarly blithely boosting their haematocrit levels to the mid fifties. In one of their investigations into doping, reporters at L’Équipe managed to get hold of Evgeni Berzin’s blood values during the 1995 season. In January the Gewiss star had shown a haematocrit level of 41.7%. By July it had risen to 56.3%. In Gen-EPO the fastest and the fittest were more and more often those willing to push their haematocrit limits highest.

How many of Riis’s rivals on the Hautacam were doped is open to dispute. Go back to the table of the top twenty finishers in the ’96 Tour and consider what happened to them in the years after 1996. All three riders on the podium – Riis, Ullrich and Virenque – have confessed, to varying degrees, that they doped. Go through the rest of the list and the riders who haven’t since confessed or been caught all carry question marks against their names by virtue of the teams they rode for. And this is where the true crimes of Gen-EPO really become clear.

You would dearly love, for instance, to believe that Peter Luttenberger’s ride throughout that Tour – throughout the 1996 season – was talent shining through. But the twenty-three-year-old climber was on the Carrera squad that was home to the young Marco Pantani. And when the NAS raided the University of Ferrara in 1998, the files they seized showed that the EPO the IOC had bought for Professor Conconi’s research purposes was actually being administered to the Carrera team, among others. Luttenberger’s name doesn’t appear in the Ferrara files. But the damage is done to him nonetheless. The Austrian domestique rode for a dirty team in a dirty peloton and, rightly or wrongly, the mud sticks to him because of that.

When the 1996 season ended Luttenberger was surplus to requirements as the Carrera team rebuilt themselves as Mercatone Uno and around the new Italian climbing sensation Marco Pantani. The Austrian moved to Rabobank where, at the 1997 Tour, he again finished second in the best young rider category, once again to Ullrich. After two years with the Dutch squad Luttenberger moved to ONCE for two seasons, then Tacconi Sport for two seasons, before finally finding some form of stability: Bjarne Riis’s nascent CSC squad signed him. The Austrian, who was more than three minutes slower than Riis climbing the Hautacam that day in 1996, spent the last four years of his career with the Dane’s squad. Unlike Riis, Luttenberger never got the chance to be more than a domestique. Only a few paupers get to become princes. Though Luttenberger did get to end his career wearing the Austrian national champion’s jersey for the time trial. Maybe he did it all clean. Maybe he didn’t. Were he to tell you it was the former, would you believe him?

How could you? When asked if they had done it clean, men like Riis, Ullrich, Virenque and so many others lied in order to protect their own reputations. Through months and years of investigations and allegations they lied. These men didn’t just steal victory and glory through their doping, they robbed the reputations of others with their denials. Through their lies they rendered meaningless the claims of the few clean riders that their modest achievements were down to natural talent alone. Since their belated confessions, Riis and a few others may have been able to recast themselves as saviours of cycling. But until they find a way to restore the reputations of the few clean riders in Gen-EPO’s peloton they should not be allowed to consider themselves redeemed. They should not be allowed consider themselves to be heroes.

Epilogue

Tuesday, July 16, 1996. The sixteenth stage of the Tour de France. The salle de presse. The massed ranks of cycling’s media watch the scene unfolding before their eyes on the Hautacam. And they laugh. What they are seeing, they know, is impossible. What they are seeing, they know, is not right. What they are seeing, they know, is the result of that decade’s not-so-secret super weapon, EPO. These men know what has been going on in cycling over the last few years. They know about men like Ferrari and Cecchini. They know what had happened at the Tour de Romandie and the Tour de Suisse. They know what had nearly happened at the Giro d’Italia. Watching a donkey like Riis gallop up the Hautacam on his Pinarello, well who wouldn’t laugh knowing what the massed ranks of cycling’s media know?

Then the media stop laughing and get back to duty, forgetting all that they know and hiding from their audience their own beliefs. This isn’t a day to spit in the soup they all drink from. This is a day to celebrate the rise of Riis, a new géant de la route, and the fall of Induráin, the deposed King. Yes, some of them will try to tell the truth, will drench their reports in euphemisms which the alert fan might notice and be able to interpret correctly. And a few of them will heed the wake-up calls and start piecing together stories which will appear over the winter and force the UCI’s hand on the issue of testing rider’s haematocrit levels, a Pyrrhic victory for the men of the press. But for most of them this is just another day in the office, and so they serve up more tales of heroism and athleticism.

The journalists themselves are, of course, only following orders. They all have editors and those editors are only too happy to tell the approved story. The story the teams and riders want them to tell, the story the race organisers and cycling authorities want to be told, the story the fans want to hear. The tale of a new era (Ullrich), a new champion (Riis), a page turned in the history of cycle sport (Induráin). The tale of an epic duel. The tale of one of the greatest Tours ever.

If only it had been true.

Virenque, Riis and Ullrich celebrate their achievements at the end of the 1996 Tour

Coda

Fifth man home that day on the Hautacam in 1996 – fifty-six seconds down on Riis – was a man who would win there a dozen years later. Leonardo Piepoli, then with the Refin squad of the Tashkent Terror, Djamolidine Abdoujaparov.

In the 2008 Tour Piepoli and his Saunier Duval teammate José Cobo went off the front of the race on the climb of Hautacam, with Bjarne Riis’s Saxo Bank star Fränk Schleck tagging along for the ride. Piepoli crossed the line ahead of Cobo, with Schleck a couple of dozen seconds down the road. Piepoli savoured the taste of victory on this miraculous mountain.

Leonardo Piepoli and José Cobo celebrate another stunning stage win for the Saunier Duval team at the 2008 Tour

Then, two days later, the news came through: Piepoli’s teammate Riccardo Riccò was positive for CERA, the new flavour of EPO all the cool kids bought. With the UCI and ASO at war over the Pro Tour, responsibility for dope testing at the 2008 race had been handed over to the AFLD and they proved to be more than capable of doing something the UCI seemed singularly unwilling to do: bust the cheats, no matter how big or small they were.

Riccò’s directeur sportif, Mauro Gianetti, immediately pulled the whole of the Saunier Duval team from the Tour. Christian Prudhomme, the Tour’s chief architect, made it clear that – as far as ASO were concerned – Riccò’s positive was not a case of one bad apple spoiling the lot. The tree it came from was rotten to the roots:

I was pretty disturbed when I saw the superiority of two riders from the same team on the stage to Hautacam, as the rest of you were, I’m sure. I have my opinion on the manager – a person who does not have good virtue – and that opinion will not change in two months, five months, six months, two years, three years … for the sponsor this is terrible news.”

Before the summer was out Saunier Duval pulled their sponsorship. Through the summer, as CONI investigated the Riccò case, Piepoli proclaimed his purity: what he did on the Hautacam he did clean. Then, as the leaves fell from the trees and the cycling year wound down, the results of re-tests of samples from the Tour came through: Piepoli was a double positive, from both the pre-Tour test and a test conducted on the rest day after his win on the Hautacam. Three months later Piepoli received a late Christmas present from CONI: a two-year ban.

One day the Tour will return to that hill above the Roman Catholic shrine in Lourdes, where miracles happen. That hill where Miguel Induráin had effortlessly chased down Marco Pantani in 1994, where Riis reigned supreme in 1996, where Lance Armstrong closed on Javier Otxoa in 2000 and where Piepoli had run rampant in 2008. One day, riders in the Tour de France will once again race up the Hautacam. When they do, let’s hope there are no more miracles on the Hautacam. Let’s hope for a hero fans can believe in.

Next: Riis – Stages of Light and Dark (Vision Sports Publishing) reviewed.

Two questions need to be asked here about the 1996 Tour de France. The first is: what had happened to Miguel Induráin? The other: what had happened to Bjarne Riis?

But before turning to those questions let’s consider one other question that ought be asked: where the hell had the Telekom team – which ended the Tour with the top two steps of the podium and the maillot vert as well as the maillot jaune along with what is today the maillot blanc for the best rider under twenty-five – come from?

The 1996 Telekom team

Hennie Kuiper was the boss of the squad back in 1991 when the Telekom sponsorship began. Since he’d hung up his wheels at the end of the 1988 season Kuiper had been running the small Stuttgart squad and, in 1990, had seen his riders bag stages in the Nissan Classic and the Vuelta a España as well as overall glory in the Herald Sun Tour and De Panne, with Markus Schleicher, Erwin Nijboer, and Udo Bölts bringing home the booty. When the team became Telekom in 1991 it was with the same core of riders as the old Stuttgart squad. Their sole win of note that first season was Ad Wijnands’ overall victory in the Etoile de Bessèges.

The following year Kuiper was out and on his way to Motorola, and Walter Godefroot – the former Belgian pro who’d sparred with Eddy Merckx – was brought on board to boss the squad along with Frans van Looy. The roster was improved, with the addition of riders like Christian Henn and Jens Heppner, who would remain part of the team’s core for the next few seasons, along with proven talents like Uwe Ampler, Etienne de Wilde, and the Madiot brothers Marc and Yvon. Even if these older riders didn’t bring home results they were the sort who would help the squad get invitations to some important races. Bölts won them a stage in the Giro and that was about it for the year.

For 1993 Godefroot strengthened the team further with the addition of riders like Rolf Aldag, Bert Dietz, Brian Holm, Mario Kummer, and Stefan Wesemann. Two sprinters from opposite ends of the age spectrum also came on board: the thirty-two-year-old Olaf Ludwig and the twenty-two-year-old Erik Zabel. Between Aldag and Ludwig the team bagged stages in the Tour Méditerranéen, the Tour de Romandie, and the Tour de France. The following year Rudy Pevenage joined the management team. Axel Merckx came on board for the one season (the team rode Eddy Merckx bikes). Jens Lehman joined as a stagiare at the end of the season but didn’t stick around. But the key signing who did stick around was a twenty-year-old kid from Rostock: Jan Ullrich. Zabel delivered wins in the short-lived Classic Haribo as well as the sprinter’s Classic, Paris-Tours. Things were beginning to click into place.

In 1995, with no major additions to the squad, Zabel delivered stages in the Tour de Suisse and the Tour de France, with Dietz and Henn bringing home stages in the Vuelta a España. And then came the big breakthrough in 1996. As well as switching from Eddy Merckx’s bikes to Pinarello’s pretty little ponies – on which Pedro Delgado and Miguel Induráin had ridden to victory in five of the previous eight Tours – the German little team that couldn’t added Bjarne Riis to their roster.

Riis’s podium place in the 1995 Tour – and a top twenty and a top ten in the two Tours before that – were in his favour, but his age (he was then thirty-one) made him a risky choice. But at least his podium finish in 1995 would probably make it easier to get an invite to the Tour. Riis was also a driven man. As a kid he’d won early and often. As he grew through his teens, though, he didn’t seem to mature as quickly as his peers and the wins dried up. He’d had to scrabble hard to get a place in the pro ranks, signing for Lomme Driessens’ Roland squad and then going through one-year contracts with Lucas and Toshiba before falling into the orbits of Cyrille Guimard and his faltering vedette Laurent Fignon. At Super-U and Castoroma Riis matured and served as Fignon’s domestique. His reward was a stage win in the 1989 Giro d’Italia.

When Fignon split with Guimard, Riis moved on to the Italian Ariostea squad bossed by Giancarlo Ferretti. Two years there saw him adding another Giro stage to his palmarès along with a stage in the Tour. When Ariostea pulled their sponsorship at the end of 1993 Riis moved on to Gewiss, bossed by Emmanuele Bombini, where he added another stage win in the Tour to his record as well as that podium finish. But Gewiss was not a happy home for the Dane, not with Evgeni Berzin as a teammate. With the Russian on the rise Riis saw a future in which he’d be a domestique once more, and so he scarpered at the end of his two-year contract. When Godefroot dangled a contract with the right number of zeroes on it in front of his nose, Riis signed for Telekom, where there were no visible threats to his leadership and he could count on the undivided devotion of his new teammates in the years to come. That was the Dane’s plan anyway.

In the 1996 Tour de France, everything was out in the open

Now let’s get back to those other two questions, the ones about Induráin’s fall and Riis’s rise.

Various people have offered various explanations for Induráin’s Tour sans. There was the fringale on Les Arcs: the Spaniard had simply forgotten to eat. There was the weather: in the Alps it was too cold, on the Hautacam it was too hot. There was his weight: some say he’d gone into the Tour above his ideal race weight, others say the rainy conditions in the first week had bloated him as he retained water like a sponge. For sure, Induráin was no Bibendum, but in cycling’s size-zero obsession every kilo – every gramme – counts. And, when you’re six foot two and horsing eighty kilos up every claim, excess baggage comes at a very heavy cost. On a ten-kilometre climb, one kilo of excess weight can cost a rider a minute in time. Or so the stattos say, anyway, and you should never argue with a statto; they’ll only baffle you with bullshit.

Two races after the 1996 Tour help put Induráin’s Tour into context. At the Olympic Games in Atlanta the Spaniard was back on form, bagging the gold in the individual time trial. Then he turned up for the Vuelta a España which, the year before, had switched to its new Autumn calendar slot. Induráin’s relationship with his national Tour was somewhat fractious. Since his second-place finish in 1991 – when the Vuelta was still run off in Spring – Induráin had avoided the Spanish Grand Tour. Banesto put a gun to his head and told him he had no choice but to ride it in 1996.

So Induráin rode the Vuelta. On the first hard day in the high hills, Induráin served up a repeat of his Les Arcs défaillance with a pájara on the Alto de Naranco, in Asturias, where in the space of the final two kilometres he surrendered a minute to his ONCE rivals Laurent Jalabert and Alex Zülle. The next day was due to finish on the Lagos de Covadonga, but Induráin was already four minutes down as the peloton climbed the Fito. Before the base of the Covadonga itself the Spanish champion pulled out of the race and effectively ended his career.

As for Riis, all sorts of explanations have been offered for the transformation of a domestique into a Tour winner. Induráin himself had gone the same route, spending the first few years of his career working for others – especially Pedro Delgado – before finally, at the age of twenty-six, becoming the boss. The only real difference between Induráin and Riis was in when they’d matured: the Dane was three months older than the Spaniard but hadn’t got his chance to lead until he had turned thirty. Riis had simply taken longer to come of age.

Do the time losses and gains in the Alps matter much when looking at where Induráin lost the Tour and Riis won it? Yes and no. Riis exited the Alps with just a forty-second cushion over Berzin, time that could easily be lost in either the Pyrénées or the penultimate day’s time trial. But Riis had delivered a psychological blow to his opponents in the Alps, especially on the truncated stage to Sestrières.

As for Induráin, the three minutes lost to Riis on Les Arcs plus the minute lost the next day in the time trial up to Val d’Isère and the half-minute lost up to Sestrières were, to say the least, unusual. But, with the Pyrénées and that final time-trial still to come, it was not inconceivable that the Spaniard could still come out on top. Richard Virenque (Festina) only had a minute on him, a minute he could (and would) surrender in the time trial. Peter Luttenberger (Carrera) and Jan Ullrich (Telekom) may have had two and three minutes on Induráin, but they were kids – twenty-three and twenty-two – and kids break easily, physically and mentally. As for Abraham Olano and Toni Rominger (both Mapei), Evgeni Berzin (Gewiss), and Riis, well Induráin had cracked each of them in the past and could still crack them in the Pyrénées. Maybe it’s true that Induráin was unlikely to win the Tour exiting the Alps but it’s also true that his key rivals could still throw it all away. Once the Spaniard was there to take advantage of that then, yes, he could still win the Tour. That’s the key to defensive cycling: put them under pressure and wait for your rivals to crack.

After the Hautacam, though, the 1996 Tour was all but over. So what had really happened on the Hautacam? Again, the explanations vary. Induráin’s previous Tour victories, some would remind you, were based on defending time gained in time trials and guarding his losses in the mountains. Letting his rivals tire and exhaust themselves trying to crack him, and then profiting from their efforts.

The more obvious excuse for Induráin’s collapse on the Hautacam was that he simply couldn’t cope with Riis’s constant changes in paces. Had Induráin simply let Riis go and climbed at his own rhythm, who knows what the outcome would have been. Perhaps had Induráin paid more attention in his apprenticeship years he would have seen this. In the 1987 Tour Pedro Delgado had played on Stephen Roche’s climbing weakness by attacking him on the climb to La Plagne. Roche simply let Delgado go and worked up the climb at his own rhythm, ceding just a small amount of time to his Spanish rival at the finish. But Induráin allowed Riis to dictate an unsteady rhythm at the base of the Hautacam and paid the price. In his years of domination Induráin had grown accustomed to watching his rivals wear themselves out trying to shake him and simply assumed – hoped? – that the same would happen again.

What had happened to Riis on the Hautacam? The attack itself was almost as daring as the manner in which it was carried it out. Riis was, after all, in the yellow jersey and even by then cycling was in thrall to defensive tactics. According to the rules of catanaccio cycling, Riis was supposed to sit back and wait for the others to crack and only then put the boot in. But Riis had paid attention during his own apprenticeship years. Back in 1989 he’d been Laurent Fignon’s domestique and stood on the Champs Élysées on that infamous final Sunday afternoon in the Tour. Riis had seen Fignon struggling to match Greg LeMond’s split-times throughout the time trial and watched in horror as the Frenchman paid the price of riding someone else’s race and pedalled squares. He watched the American cry tears of joy and the Frenchman tears of loss when it was all over. (And he and his team-mates had cried, too, at the loss of their share of the winner’s purse.) Riis was there, too, for the autopsy that followed. Was it the saddle sores that had lost Fignon the Tour? Fignon’s aerodynamically-inefficient ponytail combined with LeMond’s aerodynamically-efficient helmet and tri-bars? Or was it that Fignon simply hadn’t put the boot in when he should have in the Alps? Whatever it was, Riis learned not to make the same mistakes himself.

And so, in the maillot jaune and with advantages of between one and four minutes on his key rivals at the start of the day, Riis attacked on the Hautacam. And it wasn’t just the memory of Fignon that played a role that day. At the end of the stage Riis thanked not just his Telekom directeur sportif, Walter Godefroot, but also the former champion Fignon. The Frenchman, the Dane said, had been offering him advice throughout the race. And Fignon’s advice was simple: attack, attack, and attack again. The sacred principles of la course en tête.

So Riis attacked in yellow. And kept attacking. But where had the power for those attacks come from? Isn’t that really the big question of that day on the Hautacam? Riis flew up the climb like a Ferrari blitzing the track in Mugello. How had a donkey turned into a Thoroughbred? The answer to that, too, was simple: acupuncture. Riis used the services of an acupuncturist, John Boel, who travelled on the 1996 Tour as part of Riis’s entourage. And Boel knew of an area below the knee he called the three mile point. Jab a pin in it properly, he claimed, and you’ll get a new source of energy that’ll carry you three miles beyond where you normally give up. Riis certainly believed him. And sometimes believing is enough to make something true.

On the Hautacam that day, as well having Boel press the turbo-charge button below Riis’s knee, the Dane also played some mind games with his opponents. Riis was one of that rare breed of cyclists who actually paid attention to the machine he propelled. While Toni Rominger was farting around with switching his brake lever over – and thus propelling himself arse over tit when instinct kicked in one day and he pulled the wrong one to avoid an errant rider in front – Riis was thinking how he could use his bike as a psychological weapon. And on the day of the Hautacam stage he had his wrench monkey fit a smaller than normal outer ring. When Riis went for it on the Hautacam, spinning that big ring with ease, his rivals saw a man possessed by supernatural strength. What they didn’t notice was that he was riding about the same gear they were.

Winning and losing bike races, some would argue, really is as simple as all that.

Virenque, Riis and Ullrich celebrate their achievements (Photo: Pascal Rondeau/Allsport UK)

Next: The other explanations.

Tuesday, July 16, 1996. The sixteenth stage of the Tour de France. Miguel Induráin’s thirty-second birthday. In any given Tour you can – a statto will tell you – expect to see about a dozen riders celebrating their birthdays. Most will do it anonymously, unnoticed by anyone unless it’s a very quiet day and the media following the race have airtime or column inches to fill.

On this Tour fourteen of the 197 riders who started in ‘s-Hertogenbosch will be another year older by the time the race reaches Paris (three of them – Jean-Claude Colotti (Agrigel), Stefano Colagè (Refin) and Francis Moreau (GAN) – won’t survive to get their birthday cards from the Tour’s post office). Not one of eleven who did get to celebrate their birthday on the Tour got a free ride from the peloton as a present. Wilfried Peeters (Mapei) probably had the best of the lot, celebrating his thirty-second birthday on the Tour’s sole rest day. Erik Zabel, on the other hand, had to suffer through an uphill time trial on the day he turned twenty-six. But, while Zabel missed out on his own birthday, he did deliver on the day that Walter Godefroot, his Telekom directeur sportif, turned fifty-three.

So much for the Happy Birthdays. For Miguel Induráin this is going to be a very unhappy thirty-second birthday. The Spaniard’s birthday has by now become a part of Tour tradition. Each year the same photograph is staged, Induráin with a slice of birthday cake in one hand and a glass of Champagne in the other. And each year the bubbly goes undrunk and the cake uneaten. Every gram counts and champions have no time for frivolities like cake and Champagne. For the Spaniard, who has suffered in the cold and the rain of the race’s first week, the sun is shining brightly, as if Mother Nature herself is finally smiling on him. It will be thirty in the valleys, half that on the final climb. The sort of weather the Spanish lizard likes. The peloton itself, though, is not about to be kind to the reigning Tour champion.

There’s a pall of anticipation over the peloton as they set out toward Lourdes: three rough days in the Pyrénées are ahead of the remaining 136 riders in the Tour and a summit finish awaits them at the end of today’s riding. Hautacam, the High Plate, rising more than fifteen hundred metres above the Roman Catholic shrine of Lourdes.

TVM’s Laurent Roux goes clear forty kilometres out from the finish and is out on his own as the peloton blasts onto the first slopes of the Hautacam. A group of a dozen or so riders is giving it some serious welly at the front of the bunch. All the big guns are here. Induráin (Banesto), Alex Zülle (ONCE), Richard Virenque and Laurent Dufaux (both Festina), Toni Rominger and Abraham Olano (Mapei), Bjarne Riis and Jan Ullrich (Telekom), Evgeni Berzin (Gewiss). Also to the fore is Luc Leblanc (Polti) who matched Induráin’s pace up this climb two years ago and won the stage.

Zülle jumps away with still a dozen kilometres to go and quickly catches Roux, whose day of glory is over. Virenque and Laurent Brochard (Festina) quickly bring the bunch back up to the bespectacled Swiss star, and Zülle – like Roux before him – is shelled out the back. The other Swiss star, Rominger, is already struggling to hold the pace.

Ullrich takes over the pace-making from the Festinas. The front of the peloton is now Indian file, eight or nine riders wheel on wheel, behind them the rest bunched and spread across the road. Riis is second wheel when he suddenly swings out and eases off the power. He’s still flying up the hill but relativity makes it look like he’s standing still, cat and mousing as if in a track sprint. As the others pass, the Dane turns his head to the left and eyes them up. Induráin, Olano, Virenque, and Dufaux all pass. Then Riis slots back into the file of riders, seventh wheel, behind Leblanc and ahead of the bunching group of riders behind.

The metres count down and the riders are belting up the climb. Ullrich is pulling them along at a vicious pace, the seven-percent gradient no impediment. Then, as the climb ramps up toward eight, nine and ten percent, Riis again swings wide and is on the outside of the line of riders. He stands on his pedals and blasts past his rivals. Now it’s they who look like they’re standing still. And then, as suddenly as Riis’s burst of speed came, it goes and the yellow jersey eases back. Induráin, Dufaux, Virenque and Piepoli are onto his wheel. Behind, Rominger’s goose is cooked. Berzin is struggling. Two down. Three to go.

Behind, a group of riders coalesce around Ullrich who seems to be driving the rhythm. Olano and Luttenberger (Carrera) bridge up to the yellow jersey group. Riis turns on the turbo again. Virenque matches him. Induráin struggles to cope with the changes in pace. The he seems to be going backwards as Riis, Dufaux, Virenque and Leblanc pull clear. Two to go.

On they drive, Induráin left to struggle alone, the others powering up the climb ahead of him. A gap opens between Riis on the front and the other three. When Riis looks back he seems surprised to see no one on his wheel. It takes him a moment to process the information before he responds by pouring on more power. The elastic snaps, there’s barely a response from the two Festina riders or Leblanc. Riis is away and free.

Induráin is back down the road, swept up by the Ullrich group. Ahead of them Piepoli has bridged up to Dufaux, Virenque and Leblanc. Jean-Marie Leblanc, the Tour’s chief architect, once said of Induráin that he was the aesthetic perfection of the cycling machine. He wouldn’t say the same of him today: on the climb up the Hautacam Induráin’s on the edge, all grace gone as he grinds out the metres on his Pinarello. As the five kilometres flag comes into sight, and the climb again ramps up toward nine percent, Induráin loses contact and is again out the back. Coming up behind him, riding his own race, Rominger seems to take strength from the suffering of the man who has been his bête noir these past five years. The aging Swiss star passes the fading Spaniard, out of the saddle and wide: no way is Rominger going to tow Induráin up this climb.

Riis is fighting his way up the climb, supple but hardly graceful. He’s in and out of the saddle, kicking and dragging his Pinarello as he gallops along, sprinting up the Hautacam. At one moment he grabs his bidon and pours its contents over his balding head, almost coming into contact with a car parked on the verge. Then he’s past the kilo kite, the Virenque group about a minute back, Induráin more than two, Berzin three.

As he approaches the line Riis celebrates, arms in the air, fingers and thumbs skyward. The clock counts down. Forty nine seconds elapse before Virenque crosses the line, ahead of Dufaux. Five seconds later, Leblanc. Another three seconds, Piepoli. Another thirty-six seconds pass before Rominger leads home Ullrich and Piotr Urgomov (Roslotto). Eight more seconds, then Brochard and Fernando Escartin (Kelme) roll home. Forty-two seconds later Induráin crosses the line, two twenty-eight down on Riis.

Russia’s new cycling hero, Berzin, is another thirty-nine seconds behind the Spanish idol. The rest of the peloton comes home in dribs and drabs. The autobus arrives twenty minutes after Riis’s victory salute, Dario Bottaro (Gewiss) bringing up the rear.

After the Hautacam the Tour was as good as over.

To the victor, the spoils.

For the Festina squad, with Virenque and Dufaux in the top ten, the next day’s ride through the Pyrénées down into the Basque Country and Navarre and into Pamplona was where they had planned to win the 1996 Tour de France. They’d scouted the climbs in January. But Riis, as on the road to Sestrières, had again beaten them to the punch with his attack on the Hautacam. So they settled for the consolation prize of a stage win, with Dufaux taking the glory for the French team from Andorra.

Over the Aubisque it was Australia’s Neil Stephens (ONCE) who lead the race over the top, pocketing 20,000 French francs for the prime. On the fourth of seven climbs, the Soudet, the two Mapei GC contenders – Rominger and Olano – were out the back and surrendering their podium places. Also out the back were Induráin and Berzin. The Spaniards Tour de Souffrance was still not over. Induráin trailed the leaders all day as he passed fans waving banners. He suffered and slogged as he passed through Villava, near Pamplona, where thirty-two years earlier he’d been born. At the end of the stage he was eight and a half minutes down on Riis, alongside Rominger and Olano.

On the run into Pamplona Riis had been pelted with eggs and tomatoes by some Spanish fans unhappy to see their King toppled by the Dane. On the podium, Riis wisely ushered Induráin in front of the crowd and let them cheer their fallen idol before stepping forward himself to accept the flowers and his ninth yellow jersey of the race.

The day itself had been a fear fraught affair for the race organisers. In the run up to the Tour Basque separatists had been threatening to take action against companies supporting the Tour – particularly those in the caravane publicitaire – who, they claimed, were anti-Basque. In the weeks leading up to the Tour bombs had gone off in the offices of several French and Spanish companies, including the Renault showroom in Pamplona. A bomb had also gone off at a guardia civil station in Ochagavia just before the Tour reached the Pyrénées. Another bomb was defused in Pamplona on the day the Tour flew up the Hautacam.

The Basque separatists were also threatening the safety of the riders. Similar threats had been issued four years before, when the Tour visited San Sebastian, and had come to nothing. But nothing could be taken for granted: ETA had, in the past, planted a bomb on the route of the Vuelta a España and disrupted the Tour on its occasional visits to the Basque Country. The Basque separatists had written to the ASO threatening action unless a Basque announcer was used during the stages in and out of Pamplona. ASO caved, promising an announcer who would speak Basque on the two stages concerned. ETA were also miffed with the Tour organisers saying the race was passing through France and Spain, instead of saying France and the Basque Country. In the end, ignoring the background noise of bombs going off in the days and weeks before the Pamplona stage, the only real trouble was a group of protesters waving flags and banners on the descent of the Soudet.

Thursday was final the day in the Pyrénées and saw the peloton taking it easy as a big break went up the road. Seventeen minutes after Bart Voskamp (TVM) led that break home the sprinters – Zabel and Abdoujaparov – duked it out for the glory of finishing fifteenth. During the stage press photographers and their motorbike riders were striking, complaining that the Kelme directeur sportif, Álvaro Pino, had been treated too leniently after skittling one of L’Équipe‘s motorbikes the previous day. Like a hit and run motorist Pino had buggered off without stopping to check the fates of the motorbike rider and his photog pillion passenger. Rather than the stern talking to Jean-Marie Leblanc had delivered to Pino, the media wanted the Kelme directeur chucked off the race. Roger Legeay, the co-founder of the AIGCP and also directeur sportif of the GAN squad, expressed his regret that Lino hadn’t stopped to say sorry and his hope that the Spaniard would take the hint and issue an apology.

The Tour’s trip to Spain coincided with the death of Jose Manuel Fuente, the man they called el Tarangu. Fuente’s only major victories were a couple of wins in the Vuelta España and a win in the Tour de Suisse but he’s best known for keeping Eddy Merckx on his toes in a couple of Tours and Giri. Like Claudio Chiapucci or Marco Pantani in later years Fuente was one of those erratic escaladores who could cause some serious damage on a summit finish. His passing was mourned as the Tour returned to France.

Before the Tour got under way the peloton mourned the passing of another of their number. ONCE’s Mariano Rojas, who was due to participate in the Tour, died from injuries sustained in a car crash. And then, during the Tour itself, as the riders had trundled through the Massif Central, the death by suicide of another former pro had occurred. Carlo Tonon had been a team-mate of Giovanni Battaglin back in the days of Inoxpran. In the 1984 Tour, while riding for Inoxpran’s successor, Carrera, Tonon had collided with a cyclo-tourist on the descent of the Col de Joux-Plane and spent the next few months in a coma. He never recovered fully from the accident.

With the hills behind them and only the time trial ahead offering a chance to unseat Riis the GC looked like this:

Bordeaux is typically sprinter’s country and in the bunch sprint on the eve of the Tour’s final weekend it was GAN’s former maillot jaune Frédéric Moncassin who edged out the once and future sprint stars Abdoujaparov and Zabel. Alain Juppé – who was double jobbing as the local mayor and the French Prime Minister – was on hand to present Riis with his tenth yellow jersey of the race, the eleventh of his career.

The next stage was the final Saturday of the Tour and penultimate’s day’s time trial. Sixty-three kilometres against the clock. Tour’s have been won and lost in the final time trial. Few were expecting any surprises this time out. Induráin was cooked and Riis was home and hosed. Ullrich was a kid and Virenque would lose time. Nothing much was gong to change. This was going to be one of the most boring final time trials in Tour history. But a surprise was delivered.

In the time trial Induráin showed a spark of his old form, form which would carry him to an Olympic gold in the time trial in Atlanta a few weeks later. Setting off eleventh from last he lit up the course with a time of 1h16’27”, more than a minute and a half ahead of the mark set by his fellow former Hour man, Chris Boardman. While Induráin was completing his tenth Tour in twelve attempts Boardman was about to complete his first, on his third attempt. Like Induráin Boardman would also find form after the Tour, reclaiming the Hour record from Toni Rominger in September, the last Hour record before Hein Verbruggen pressed the reset button.

The surprise of the day was the performance put in by the twenty-two year-old Jan Ullrich. Riding in his first Tour de France the kid from Rostock had already been one of the revelations in the Tour, showing he could stay with the big boys in the mountains. Now he demonstrated that he could take on – and beat – the best when racing against the clock. The German was second from last off and blitzed the course, stuffing fifty-six seconds into Induráin and finishing more than two minutes faster than his Telekom team leader Riis. Not nearly enough to trouble the yellow jersey but more than enough to make everyone sit up and take note. It was like a chink in time had cracked open and the future revealed itself. A future in which the young German would dominate the Tour.

Riis became the first Dane to win the Tour de France. Ullrich became the first German to stand on the podium since Kurt Stoepl in 1932. Their Telekom team-mate Erik Zabel won his first green jersey. Induráin left the Tour empty-handed, without even a stage win as a consolation prize. The old King was well and truly dethroned. But the new King-in-waiting, Riis, was already being usurped by his dauphin, Ullrich. Even before the Dane’s victory champagne had gone flat his German domestique was being talked off as a future Tour winner and Riis was being painted as just an interim champion. At twenty-two, it wasn’t a question of whether or when Ullrich would win the Tour. It was a question of how long his reign would last.

Virenque, Riis and Ullrich celebrate their achievements.

Next: Alternative ways of seeing.

Tuesday, July 16, 1996. The sixteenth stage of the Tour de France. A little matter of 199 kilometres through the Pyrénées from Agen to Hautacam. Hautacam. That 1,560-metre mountain nearby to the Roman Catholic shrine in Lourdes where miracles occur daily. Or, at least, millions of Roman Catholics believe they do anyway. Sometimes, believing is enough. Two years after its first arrival in the Tour’s itinerary – when Luc Leblanc matched Miguel Induráin’s pace up the climb and won the stage for the ill-fated Le Groupement squad – Hautacam itself is to be the scene of a modern sporting miracle, when a donkey turns into a Thoroughbred.

The 1996 peloton was already international, with riders coming from Australia (3), Austria (1), Belgium (9), Colombia (5), the Czech Republic (1), Denmark (5), France (37), Germany (11), Italy (62), Japan (1), Kazakhstan (1), Lithuania (3), the Netherlands (10), Poland (3), Portugal (1), Russia (3), Spain (23), Switzerland (8), the UK (2), Ukraine (4), the USA (3), Uzbekistan (1), and Venezuela (1). Jacques Goddet’s dream of mondialisation was becoming ever more real

The average rider then was 93% European and 4% from the Americas. And he was riding a bike that was 68% Italian. Each morning of the 1996 Tour, bikes bearing the names of champions of the ages were on show in the paddock: Battaglin (Refin), Eddy Merckx (GAN), Fausto Coppi (MG and Polti), Fondriest (Roslotto), and Moser (Saeco). Bikes from the historic marques Bianchi (Gewiss) and Peugeot (Aubervilliers and Festina) were on show. Unfancied rides like Caloi (Motorola), Carrera (Carrera), Gazelle (TVM), Gios (Kelme), Look (ONCE) and Vitus (Agrigel and Lotto) strutted their stuff. But most-loved of all the ponies were those of Colnago (Mapei, Panaria and Rabobank) and Pinarello (Banesto, Brescialat and Telekom). The Tour had already been won twenty-six times by bikes bearing the names of all these marques (Battaglin, Colnago, Coppi and Look once each; Bianchi twice; Eddy Merckx and Pinarello five times each; Peugeot ten times).

The average rider was also twenty-eight. Autumn was the worst time to be born: only ten riders celebrated their birthdays in October, compared with twenty-one in March and May and twenty in January. May 7 was the most popular birthday in the Tour’s peloton, with four riders turning another year older on that day. Fourteen were due to celebrate their birthdays during the Tour.

The Mapei riders were the oldest squad in the race, with an average age of thirty-one. Arsenio Gonzalez was the oldest rider, four months past his thirty-sixth birthday, with his Mapei team-mate Federico Echave next oldest, celebrating his thirty-sixth birthday during the Tour. (The Mapei boys would turn out to be the only team to make it to Paris with everyone still in the saddle.) At thirty-three Marek Lesniewski (Aubervilliers) was the oldest rider making his Tour début. At the other end of the spectrum Franck Bouyer (Agrigel) was the Benjamin of the Tour, four months past his twenty-second birthday. Just three months older, and the next youngest rider in the race, was Telekom’s Jan Ullrich. If you want to know the average rider’s height and weight, ask a statto.

The easiest way to tell you who the teams and riders of the moment were is to look at some race results. So let’s look at the big races of 1996 and the two years before and after:

Of these Durand (Agrigel), Bertolini (Brescialat), Brochard (Festina), Boardman (GAN), Berzin, Minali, Zanini (all three Gewiss), Tchmil (Lotto), Museeuw, Olano, Taffi (all three Mapei), Bartoli, Richard (both MG), Armstrong (Motorola), Jalabert (ONCE), Camenzind (Panaria), Guesdon, Leblanc (both Polti), Sørensen (Rabobank), Hamburger (TVM) and Zabel (Telekom) were all riding the 1996 Tour. You can add in from the table below Induráin (Banesto), Luttenberger (Carrera), Dufaux (Festina), Gotti (Gewiss), Rominger (Mapei), Elli, Järmann (both MG), Zülle (ONCE), Svorada (Panaria), Colagè (Refin), Bölts, Riis and Ullrich (all three Telekom). The big guns really do come out for the Tour. But how many of them would be firing? Well, that’s another question.

Coming into the race Banesto’s Miguel Induráin was odds-on favourite to win a sixth successive Tour. You could almost feel the Tour organisers, ASO, building the race to suit the Spaniard, eliminating the team time trial in which Banesto traditionally ceded time to others and routing the race through Induráin’s home region of Navarre. And Induráin had shown his form in the weeks building up to the grande boucle by winning the Critérium du Dauphiné Libéré.

French hopes were riding on the former sprinter Laurent Jalabert (ONCE), who skipped out of the French National Championships to prepare himself properly for the ordeal to come. With wins in the Midi Libre and the Route de Sud under his wheels Jalabert had shown form in the lead up to the Tour, though he’d pulled out of the Dauphiné before the finish. Maybe Jalabert could end the decade of hurt in which no French rider had been able to win his home Tour. Or maybe not.

Rominger, the reigning champion of the Hour (after six new marks had been set in a sixteen month period in 1993/94), already had four Grand Tour victories to his credit (three in Spain, one in Italy) and had declared at the start of the season that 1996 was all about the Tour for him. But, at thirty-five and already talking of retirement the following year, many doubted his credentials. Since he’d run Induráin a close race in 1993 – finishing second – he hadn’t really shone in the Tour.

Other names being bandied about before the race started were the other French favourites Richard Virenque and Laurent Dufaux (both of Festina). Russia’s Evgeni Berzin (Gewiss), who’d won the Giro in 1994 and finished second there the following year, was also being talked up. Also in consideration were the two men who’d finished on the podium in Paris the year before: Alex Zülle (ONCE) and Bjarne Riis (Telekom). One of the dark horses was the reigning World Champion, Gewiss’s Abraham Olano, who many were already viewing as the next super-champion in waiting. But not before the old super-champion raised himself above Jacques Anquetil, Eddy Merck and Bernard Hinault and won his sixth Tour. That seemed almost like a foregone conclusion.

The 1996 Tour turned into a battle royale between two thirty-two-year-old riders: Bjarne Riis and Miguel Induráin.

Far from being a foregone conclusion the 1996 Tour de France failed to adhere to the script prepared for it. And races do have scripts. The lines aren’t set in stone like in a Samuel Beckett play, they’re more like a Mike Leigh film, improvised around a central core with the actors – the riders – improvising their lines as they go along. The race organisers use the parcours to try and define the central core of the script, playing to the strengths and weakness of individual riders, and chucking out appearance fees where necessary to bring the best stars of the day to their stage. Wild card invites are handed out to fill in the extras or provide some comic relief.

From the off the 1996 Tour threw up surprises. Starting in ‘s-Hertogenbosch – hometown of Hieronymus Bosch and Marianne Vos – the opening prologue got under way in conditions that would become overly familiar as the Tour worked its way through its first week of racing: rain and wind. Prologue specialist Chris Boardman (GAN) was trying to bury the ghost of his 1995 Tour, in which he’d decked it clocking eighty on the last corner of the St Brieuc prologue, breaking his wrist in the fall, his ankle when he caught it in a crowd barrier, and his nose when his directeur sportif, Roger Legeay, slammed on the brakes in the team car and only narrowly avoided running the British time trial star over. But in ‘s-Hertogenbosch Boardman was pipped for the first maillot jaune by Alex Zülle. Zülle’s time trial bike, with an aerodynamic tail-fin above the back wheel, was later judged illegal by the race commissaires – even though the design had been used about a dozen times since ONCE first tried it out the year before – but by the time the blazers got around to making their minds up it was too late to take the prologue victory or the maillot jaune from him.

The first three stages did got to form, with the traditional feast of mid-stage carnage followed by bunch gallops. Saeco’s Mario Cipollini – the Italian stallion with the porn-star looks and a surfeit of nicknames (Il Magnifico, the Lion King, Super Mario, Cipo) – got himself relegated on the first one and Refin’s Djamolidine Abdoujaparov failed to fire up his spark plugs in all three. Zülle surrendered the lead on the last of the three to GAN’s sprinter, Frédéric Moncassin, who had won the opening sprint stage and had been busy picking up bonifications in the mid-stage sprints sine then.

The French sprinter surrendered the lead the following day, Wednesday, to his team-mate, Stéphane Heulot, who had been part of a five-man 200 kilometre breakaway that held the sprinters off for the day. Behind there was carnage in the bunch sprint when Jan Svorada (Panaria) brought down Laurent Brochard (Festina) and Bjarne Riis (Telekom) had to take evasive action in order to avoid catching a dose of road rash. Svorada didn’t take the start the next day. Nor did Cipollini: the race hadn’t even entered the mountains but the Italian was off home anyway, ostensibly to prepare for the Atlanta Olympics.

The foul weather which had dogged the race since its start in the Netherlands took its toll on the riders on the seventh day of the race. Of the 184 riders who’d finished the previous day at Lac de Madine only 167 were still in the race at the conclusion of Friday’s stage and the Tour’s first week of racing. Two hadn’t taken the start, three wheeled into Aix les Banes outside the cut-off limit and a dozen abandoned during the course of a stage which had seen the peloton cross the first serious hill of the Tour so far, the Croix de la Serra (2C – 1,049 m) in the Forêt Noire.

As the race prepared to enter the high hills the GC looked like this:

On the first day in the Alps – over the Col La Madeleine (HC – 2,000 m), the Cormet de Roseland (1C – 1,968 m) and finishing at the top of Les Arcs (1C – 1,700 m) – the first selection proper of the Tour occurred. All the big hitters were together going up the Madeline except for Jalabert, who was trailing on the first real test of the race. Rominger decked it after the feed zone in Albertville – for some daft reason he’d switched his break levers over and, while stuffing a sarnie into his gob, instinctively pulled the wrong one to avoid a wheel in front of him and went arse over tit – but was soon back up with the big boys. On the climb of the Cormet de Roseland Heulot – the yellow jersey – abandoned with tendinitis in his knee. On the descent of the Roseland Rabobank’s Johan Bruyneel took a flyer into a ravine.

And then, on the climb up to Les Arcs, Induráin fell victim to the dreaded fringale: the five-time Tour winner had forgotten to eat and was bonking badly. Seeing a man on his knees his rivals did the decent thing and put the boot in: at the end of the stage (won by Polti’s Luc Leblanc) Rominger, Virenque, Dufaux, Olano, Riis and Ullrich were all within a handful of seconds of one and other while Zülle (who was maybe suffering the after effects of having turned twenty-eight the day before) shipped more than three minutes, Induráin more than four and Jalabert more than twelve. With Heulot gone Berzin inherited the maillot jaune.

A pursuit champion in his youth in Russia (he was World Champion in individual and team events) Berzin had won Liège-Bastonge-Liège with Gewiss in their magical season of 1994. He’d also bagged three stages on his way to victory in that year’s Giro. The following year his best showing was a sole stage win in the Giro and second overall. Alongside Bjarne Riis he’d been part of the Gewiss squad that won the team time trial in that year’s Tour. Coming into the Tour he’d won stages in Tirreno-Adriatico, the Giro d’Italia and the Tour de Suisse. And now he was in the Tour’s yellow jersey, the first Russian to wear that garment.

One of the surprises of the day was the third rider home at the summit of Les Arcs, Peter Luttenberger. The twenty-three-year-old Austrian member of the Italian Carrera squad was in his second full season in the pro ranks, having been a stagiare with David Boifava’s squad in the Autumn of 1994 and turned pro with them the following season. In the pre-Tour leg-loosener, the Tour de Suisse, Luttenberger had raised eye-brows by winning a stage and the overall classification in a tough and testing race. Not bad going for a domestique.

In the Tour itself Luttenberger was supposed to break wind and pass water for Enrico Zaina – who had finished second in the Giro d’Italia – and the aging Claudio Chiapucci. But Chiapucci failed to make his presence felt and Zaina decked it in the carnage of the Tour’s opening stages and was already out of the race. Life in Carrera was like that: Chiapucci’s heir-apparent, Marco Pantani, was back home in Italy recovering from a broken leg sustained during the Milan-Turin race the previous October. Luttenberger himself opened his 1996 season with a smash in the Tour of Sardinia that saw both of his arms broken. When he returned in May he finished third in two stages of the Euskal Bizikleta – with Induráin and Zülle the riders in front of him. Then came the Tour de Suisse and his surprise victory. Not bad going for a guy who’d sat out the start of the season and whose only notable wins before 1996 were the Austrian national championships in 1993, where he doubled the road and the time trial. And now in the Tour de France he was shining bright as a real star of the future.

A properly fuelled Induráin should have been able to make good some of his losses on Sunday’s thirty kilometre uphill time trial but instead he ceded a minute to stage-winner Berzin, twenty-six seconds to Riis and sixteen to Olano, finishing just fifth in the Tour’s first proper test against the clock. Ullrich was six seconds down on the Spaniard while Zülle, Virenque, Dufaux and Jalabert all lost minutes on the day.

Even though Saturday’s stage had finished at a ski station snow was the last thing that the Tour’s script-writer, Jean-Marie Leblanc, wanted. But snow it was in Val d’Isère and snow it was again on Sunday – along with high winds – resulting in the passages over the Iseran (HC – 2,770 m) and the Col du Galibier (HC – 2,640 m) being edited out in a last-minute rewrite of the parcours. That saw the 189.5 kilometre stage shortened to just forty-six, which still included Col de Montgenèvre (2C – 1,850 m) and the stage finish at Sestrières (1C – 2,033 m). The Tour’s etapa reina was demoted to a relatively ordinary princess.

There was very little that was ordinary about the forty-six kilometres of racing that went on that Monday afternoon. The Festina boys had scoped this stage out back in May, before the GP du Midi Libre, and planned something special for it. But it was the Telekoms who punched first and hardest: Riis went on the attack before the half-way point and was twenty-odd seconds clear at the end of nearly seventy-one minutes of racing. As well as the stage win the Dane also took the maillot jaune, following in the footsteps of his compatriot Kim Andersen. Induráin showed some signs that whatever had been troubling him the previous two days was passing but he still lost the thick end of half-a-minute to Riis. As did Virenque and Rominger. Jalabert lost nigh on nine minutes.

The last day in the Alps – once more over the Col de Montgenèvre – was actually a day for the sprinters, with Zabel and Abdoujaparov duking it out in the gallop for the line in Gap. The German finally donned the maillot vert which had spent the first part of the Tour travelling from the shoulders of Boardman (in place of the yellow jerseyed Zülle) to Svorada to Moncassin. The stage ended minus Jalabert (who was beset by yet another lurgy – the guy seemed to take more sick days than the average civil servant) and Bruyneel (still suffering from the after effects of his trip into that ravine), among others.

With Wednesday offering a rest day in Gap before the transition stages taking the race to the Pyrénées the GC now looked like this:

As the Tour resumed after its rest day the Telekom team held both the maillot jaune and the maillot vert while also heading the team classification. And, sitting in fifth on GC, there was also Jan Ullrich, the best young rider in the Tour. Pretty impressive for a team who, before 1996, were relying on the generosity of the Tour organisers for an invite to the grande boucle.

With Riis in yellow, the Telekom’s took control of the race. On Thursday’s first transition stage, heading out of the Alps and into the valley of the Rhône through the foothills of the Alps and the hills of the Vercors, they allowed a break to get away. The only real trouble that day came from tack attacks by protesters with the peloton falling prey to an unusually high number of punctures. The next day, another bumpy ride over the hills of the Massif Central, was another breakaway victory with Telkom controlling things in the bunch. The bumps on the Saturday helped shake things up a little at the top, with Berzin and Rominger surrendering a couple of dozen seconds each, allowing Olano to leap-frog them and land in second. Ullrich also ceded seconds to his Danish team-mate. Induráin seemed to be coming alive again, leading the small bunch home in the wake of the day’s break. Virenque pulled back a couple of dozen seconds.

For Quatorze Juillet, Bastille Day – the third Sunday of the race – the Tour served up another bumpy day in the Massif Central. The only surprise at the end of an up and down day was the winner: bunch-sprint specialist Djamolidine Abdoujaparov who, for once in his career, had plenty of time to prepare a victory salute as he soloed down the finishing straight in Tulle. The big loser on the day was the lanterne rouge. Daisuke Imanaka, Japan’s first Tour rider since the Paris-based Kisso Kawamura in the 1920s, finished last on the stage and more than four minutes outside the cut-off. George Hincapie, riding in his first Tour, took a tumble during the stage and only just scraped home inside the cut-off. His injuries saw him retiring from the race the next morning.

The final day of bumps in the Massif Central saw more breakaways profiting and the peloton rolling home in their wake. With three days in the Pyrénées now ahead of them the big guns were content to keep their powder dry.

Those three stages would see the Tour serving up a Pyrenean entrée finishing on the summit of the Hautacam (HC – 1,560 m) on the Tuesday followed by a feast on the road down to Pamplona – at 262 kilometres, the Tour’s longest stage – with the riders having to haul themselves over the mega-climbs of the Col du Soulor (1C – 1,474 m), the Col d’Aubisque (1C – 1,709 m), the Col de Marie-Blanque (2C – 1,035 m), the Col du Soudet (1C – 1,570 m) and Port de Larrau (HC – 1,573 m). After that Thursday would offer a final bumpy day up to Hendaye – where Alfredo Binda’s one and only Tour de France ended in 1930 – over the Ispéguy (2C – 672 m) and the Puerto Otxondo (2C – 602 m).

For Induráin these three stages were going to be crucial. His défaillance in the Alps was by now being put down to the rain and the cold: the Spanish champion with lungs the size of galleon sails, the world was now being told, didn’t like it when it was cold and wet. With his batteries recharged by the heat since the race left the Alps Induráin was claiming to be back on form. But rather than promising to go on the attack – something he only ever did rarely anyway – the Spaniard was talking about sitting in and waiting for his rivals to crack. As, for the previous five years, they had always done.

The Eagle of Herning was in the form of his life during the 1996 Tour.

For the maillot jaune himself, Riis, well the Dane was cock-a-hoop, claiming to be in the form of his life and threatening to fire things up on the Hautacam. The yellow jersey does, they say, give you wings and, if Riis’s fighting talk was to be believed, the Eagle of Herning was planning to spread those wings and take flight. Having put time into Berzin and Rominger on the run through the Massif Central Riis was more concerned about rivals like Richard Virenque, the French mountain goat who had won in the Pyrénées the year before on the day Fabio Casartelli died. Olano, Rominger’s Spanish team-mate and (for Spanish fans at least) heir apparent to the crown of Induráin, was the other threat. Olano’s biggest problem, though, appeared to be that he was as timorous as a field-mouse and seemed more content working for others than himself. And his Swiss team-mate was still refusing to admit his own race was run.

Going into the Pyrénées the GC was little changed from when the race exited the Alps:

And then came that day on the Hautacam.

Next: Hautacam