He Navarrese ex-cyclist Miguel Indurain was remembered his 1993 double in Italy and France assures that in his time and nowadays it is “always difficult” to win the Giro and the Tour at the same time.
He remembers some “good but intense” months in 1993 with a “fought and difficult” Giro with rivals like the Latvian. Pyotr Ugrumov and the italian Claudio Chiappucci as the leading rival. “It was difficult for me to move forward”, he added about the test of the transalpine country after the presentation The Indurain 2023 this morning at Pamplona.
Of that summer’s Tour, the Villava man said it paid off with “a whole year of hard work after falling ill due to an oversight.” “The last few days have been complicated for me, I’ve had Tourmalet with the race judge so I had to risk going down and in the end I solved it”.
“It was a mistake by the team. We were in Andorra and we went out to train, the weather was good. At the hotel we were two thousand and a half meters away. We did quite a few kilometers down and at the end there I was cold. The next day was I saw that he had something, luckily it was the penultimate day and the next day was flat and there were not many attacks,” he added about the slip.
“My goal is the Tour. I went to the Giro to see what was happening and to prepare myself as well. The race led me to a situation and in the end I ended up in the fight. Those efforts in the end is taking its toll on you and on Tour I paid for it a little”, he commented.
Facing this year’s gala test, which begins on July 1, Induráin has a candidate: “Jonas Vingegaard it’s strong He’s the current winner and he’s a bit of a favorite, but the truth is they’re all there, others have injuries, like Tadej Pogacar. There are always many candidates. It features the Spaniard Eric Mas or Mikel Landa “tormenting” the favorites.
“You have to focus a lot, sacrifice a lot of the season, organize your efforts well, it’s very complicated. Only a few of us have achieved this”, he pointed out about the merit of getting two great titles.
He misses “the good moments, like leaving the Tour, the previous atmosphere and the profession itself, but then when you see the increase that it has this year, with the tension that usually exists and so on, phew , I’d rather see it from television.”
“Cycling, like sport in general, has changed and opened up more. They are shorter, explosive stages and there are fewer time trials. In addition, now there are more international teams and before , you still stayed with the home teams because of the proximity and the way you were understood”, he said about the moment the two-wheeled sport was experiencing.
Source: La Verdad
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