If asked what has led him to the Skoda Titan Desert, Miguel Indurain (58) repeats the answer:
–If this does not go with me!
Years go by, and that’s how it is: the five-time Tour champion (1991 to 1995) insists that mountain trails are not for him.
I already said it, for example, in February 2020, a month before Covid emerged in our country and confined us:
“If I go to the Sahara,†he said then, “it’s because Melcior Mauri (sports director of the KH7 team) is very insistent and has spent years chasing me. And because my son (Miguel Indurain jr.) is also going to accompany me, and that makes me laugh, I’m not going to fool him.
And there the man intended to go, to the Sahara.
But then a month later, Covid had hit us in the face. And in her wake, paralysis had come.
And the world had come to a standstill, and with it the world of sports, and that Titan Desert that should have been held in April in the Sahara would end up being postponed until November, eventually migrating to the Tabernas desert, in AlmerÃa, the scene whose trails Miguel Indurain and his son Miguel Jr., and Melcior Mauri himself, would end up pedaling.
How strange that AlmerÃa edition had turned out, with a stage canceled due to the rain and cold –rain and cold in a desert!– and with an Indurain landing (just like the rest of the titans), numb and shivering.
-And? We had gone to ask him then.
“Well, I don’t know, that this is not for me,” insisted Miguelón, from his almost six foot ninety height and his more than ninety kilos of weight.
Time had contradicted him, as three years have passed and now he is there, cycling in the Sahara, this time with the Kosner-Saltoki team.
–And what has led you to the desert definitively? he was asked weeks ago, in a meeting with the press.
-Curiosity. In the end, the pandemic had prevented me from testing myself in the Sahara. After that 2020 experience in AlmerÃa, he had told me that he had had enough. But Mauri has been chasing me all this time. And also Haimar Zubeldia… And among all of them they deceived me again.
And Indurain has now deployed in the Sahara, a giant of cycling –in its strictest sense– that draws on its own resources (“I have not specifically prepared myself, I have barely touched dunes or beach sand, there is not much of that in Navarra either â€), who has not gone to dispute any title, since his times of sporting glory are over, and even so, in the opening stage of this Sunday (89 kms), he has finished 47th, in 4h10m12s, at forty minutes from the winner of the day, Fran Herrero (32), from Cannondale VAS Arabay, runner-up last year.
“Last year is unforgettable,” Herrero recalled this Sunday.
And he spoke of the reception that his town had given him, Carbonero El Mayor, a Segovian town whose 2,500 inhabitants had stood at the foot of the town hall to listen to the speech of their champion, essentially a farmer who runs a farm with 140,000 chickens.
“Now let’s see if I can get a street named after me,” added Herrero, whose victory was rushed, after a puncture one kilometer from the finish line, before going back to last year’s champion, Konny Looser, to open a margin for him end of twelve seconds.