Gives thumbs up to pavé stage, but says route is too mountainous
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Miguel Indurain won his five Tours based largely on his ability to time trial efficiently.(Image credit: Bettini Photo)
The Vuelta 2012's winner, Spanish cyclist Alberto Contador, former cyclists Miguel Indurain and Oscar Pereiro pose during the presentation of the 68th Vuelta a Espana(Image credit: AFP)
Spaniard Miguel Indurain wins the 13 Jul 73 km (45 miles) individual time trial Tour de France eigth stage from Argentan to Alençon. He won the stage in 1hr35min and 44.348sec.(Image credit: AFP Photo)
1995 Worlds: Miguel Indurain is moments away from winning the time trial world championship in Colombia, the only world title in his palmares(Image credit: AFP)
Spain's Miguel Indurain celebrates his fifth consecutive win in 1995(Image credit: Fotoreporter Sirotti)
Miguel Indurain (Banesto) powering the winning break in stage 7 at the 1995 Tour. Johan Bruyneel (ONCE) would outsprint Indurain for the stage win plus yellow jersey, but Indurain would wrest the jersey away for good the next day in the 54km ITT.(Image credit: AFP)
There may be a stage in the 2014 Tour de France route that pays homage to Miguel Indurain's famous time trial victory in Bergerac exactly two decades previously, but the five-times Tour winner has nonetheless criticised the route - and those of other recent Grand Tours - as being overly favourable to the climbers.
“What’s more, if you put the time trial just one day before the finish, you’re really weighting things in favour of the climbers, because by that point in a race, it really comes down to brute strength, even if the specialists [time triallists] still have a bit of an advantage.”
“Cycling is more than just that [mountainous stages with summit finishes]: transition stages, hilly stages, stages coming after descents, although I like the idea of a stage with pavé.”
Stage five’s 15 kilometres of pavé will be equally dangerous for all the peloton, Indurain argues, “because if you fall off or have a crash that day, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a climber or an allrounder.” As Indurain pointed out, he knows what he is talking about: there were cobbled stages in his time in the Tour, most memorably on a stage in the 1992 Tour en route to Brussels where Indurain lost 82 seconds to Claudio Chiappucci and Greg LeMond.
For all his misgivings, Indurain says he believes he could still have won a Tour like 2014’s, telling AS ‘Why not? Some routes suit you better, others worse, but finally you adapt to it.”
His memories of the 1994 Tour's 64 kilometer individual time trial from Bergerac to Perigeux, which Indurain won at an average speed of more than 50kmh, was that “it was in a very different position in the Tour, just before the Pyrenees, and it was very hard with some nasty little climbs.”
“Above all I remember it was very hot. I got a lot of time on my rivals and then I finished them off at [the summit finish of] Hautacam.” - which the Tour 2014 will also tackle, although as Indurain points out “it’s not so strange that one stage start or finish is the same as in my day, because I did so many...” - every year, in fact, from 1985 to 1996 .
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Alasdair Fotheringham has been reporting on cycling since 1991. He has covered every Tour de France since 1992 bar one, as well as numerous other bike races of all shapes and sizes, ranging from the Olympic Games in 2008 to the now sadly defunct Subida a Urkiola hill climb in Spain. As well as working for Cyclingnews, he has also written for The Independent, The Guardian, ProCycling, The Express and Reuters.
