Indurain by Alasdair Fotheringham

Author:Alasdair Fotheringham
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ebury Publishing

CHAPTER 8

1993–94: A Strip of Sandpaper

A few years ago, former 1990s British professional Chris Boardman went to pay the Pinarello bike manufacturers a visit. The Italian company had all of their previous top bike models on display, including the time trial bike that Indurain used in his assault on the Hour Record, the Espada. What caught Boardman’s attention, though, was not so much the machine per se as the strip of sandpaper someone had stuck down the leading edge of the frame’s front tubes.

‘It was very old tech, but somebody in there must have known what they were doing. You create roughness there, and by manipulating the air flow on the drag, you can gain quite a bit of time,’ Boardman, a time trial specialist and Hour Record breaker, amongst multiple achievements, recounts. ‘They’d done it crudely, but they did something. It was something we did with the Team GB track team clothing during the Olympics when I was working for them – not with sandpaper, but the principle was the same.’ However, he was probably as much surprised as he was impressed.

Boardman, himself a triple prologue winner in the Tour, readily describes Indurain as ‘one of the greatest time triallists in history.’ However, when it came to technological advances, ‘[Indurain would] use new kit and a few bits and pieces, but he was very much of the Old Guard. I don’t wish to sound disrespectful, but he carried on doing his own thing. He was the last of an era.’

Indurain’s successful Hour Record bid in 1994 came at the tail end of a time when as Boardman sees it, ‘generally in the sport there was little to no understanding of aerodynamics, at best it was scrappy. Indurain was fortunate to be in a period when everybody was as ignorant as each other.’ As the newcomer, taking his own first Hour Record in 1993, winning the Tour prologue in 1994 at a record average speed and very much at the cutting edge of what Unzué describes as the ‘underworld’ of time trial specialists, Boardman says, ‘for me it was brilliant. I’d done the wind tunnel with Lotus [a fundamental element in Boardman’s Individual Pursuit victory in the 1992 Olympics] and I knew what mattered.’

Boardman describes himself as an unwitting catalyst for change, ‘because I was the newbie, I battered everybody; they actually took a closer look at what I was doing: a compact body position, very low gears, prologues at 120 rpm, dress rehearsals for absolutely everything. It was all just done in a completely different way. But they’ – the opposition including Indurain – ‘didn’t understand the dynamics of the event, for them it was all about having a big engine and that was it. He was a big guy with his elbows out, grinding along. They didn’t know that moving your body as little as three millimetres can change your whole aerodynamic silhouette. Back then it was all about power production. I’m not sure if Indurain even went to a wind tunnel.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.