Riishomon: A Hero’s Tale (Part 1)

With the publication of the English-language translation of Bjarne Riis’s autobiography – Riis: Stages of Light and Darkness (Vision Sports Publishing) – let’s turn the clock back and take a look at the Dane’s rise to the top of cycling’s greasy pole: his victory at the 1996 Tour de France.

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