CONTENTS

FOREWORD

by Sean Kelly xiBOTTLES FOR NEKANE 1FROM ELDA TO VAL-LOURON 49THOSE GLORIOUSLY IMPROBABLE YEARS 77 NOTHING WILL EVER BE THE SAME AGAIN 183MIGUEL INDURÁIN’S PALMARES 231(compiled by Richard Allchin)

Picture reproduced by kind permission of Jeremy Mallard,from his limited-edition print ‘Riding into History’.

In his gentle way Miguel always rejects anything that could be seen as presumption on his part. One day I put it to him: ‘Youknow the descent from the Tourmalet as well as anyone does.’ I wasconvinced that he did – both via La Mongie and the road to Bareges,and via Luz-Saint Saveur, which is perhaps the rockier, wilder andmore inhumane side. That was where he hunted down Rominger in

1993. But Miguel denied this at rst. Later he accepted that, yes, it

was a dangerous descent that he did know well, and one on whichhe was forced to brake on ‘three or four bends’. So, not on the others,then?‘You’re always gambling when you’re descending!’ he told me,‘and it’s better not to see what’s on either side, those sheer dropsand the like, because otherwise you’d probably stop the bike thereand then.’That was a modest way of expressing his Theory of the Descent, onthe greatest of the Pyrenean giants. Touch the brakes on four bends.Don’t look. It sounded almost like an excuse for having clinchedthe ‘91 Tour in such rampant style, when he launched himself downtowards La Mongie, or for having caught Rominger on the roadto Barèges in the ’93 Tour. And this, coming from the rider who isremembered for the most spectacular descents (perhaps the mosteffective, rather than necessarily the fastest descents) in the historyof cycling.The decade up to the summer of 1991 had seen a dramatic shiftin Spanish cycling. At the outset there hadn’t been a single ridercapable of making a showing in the big foreign competitions; bythe end of the decade the Reynolds team had burst on to the scene,