Does your brain ever get tangled up in little knots where a stupid little phrase sticks in your head and you can’t quite shake it? Just me? Oh, good.
Driven by nothing other than a haunting linguistic realisation, I’ve just scoured 894, decades-old pictures looking for a wet Spanish cyclist. Why? Perfectly normal reason; I wanted the little dopamine rush of seeing Miguel Indurain, in the rain. Because I like how it sounds. Nothing suss.
Now, you’d think that would be a simple enough thing to find. You’d be wrong. I wanted a picture of a wet Miguel Indurain, and I really had to work for it. It is a photographic phenomenon about as rare as Indurain’s famously elite cardiovascular capacity, a logic-defying needle in a haystack.
In the search for all these pictures, a much richer understanding of the life and times of Miguel Indurain (and documentation thereof) has been my reward. As such, Escape Collective can exclusively – surely! – report that those 894 archived photos, all from the frenzied lens of veteran Dutch photographer Cor Vos, can be split into four buckets:
1. Recent photos of the GP Miguel Indurain
In this sub-category, you will not actually find that many pictures of Miguel Indurain, because he is a man and not a bike race with his name on it. What you will find: friendly little photos of fellas like these smiling at the cameraman:
With a side sprinkling of this kind of thing:
2. Vintage photos of Miguel Indurain, riding in glorious sunshine
These are, I would estimate, about 95% of the Cor Vos x Miguel Indurain archive, which is fine: as a five-time winner of the Tour de France, we would expect a large number of photos of Indurain in action. From this we can glean that the late ’80s and early-to-mid 1990s were a different, sun-drenched time, filled with baggy jerseys and big blokes on bikes. Halcyon days.
3. Vintage photos of Miguel Indurain living his best life
There are shots of him in yellow jerseys, shots of him meeting fans, shots of him wiping a tear from his eye at Jacques Anquetil’s funeral, shots of him in an enormous jacket pushing his son around in a pram.
To be clear, I like these pictures just fine. They give us a glimpse of Indurain as a man and a cyclist. A big, tall Spanish man with sorrowful, enigmatic eyebrows.
Oh, and there are a lot of pictures of Indurain in time trial mode. This is a great thing, because he usually looks like he’s from a futuristic reboot of Gladiator and is always riding a bonkers bike.
4. The most elusive category: Miguel in the rain
We encounter some challenges here. Is a visibly damp Miguel Indurain ample proof of Miguel in the rain? It is not – he could merely be sweaty. Where do we find our yardstick? Water on the roads? Water in the air? When does mist become drizzle become rain? Is our burden of proof umbrellas on the roadside? Why does every jacket from the 1990s look like it could be a rain jacket (but probably isn’t)?
This is the cursed chalice that Miguel Indurain and Cor Vos have left us to drink from.
After rigorous inspection, I think we’ve got just five measly photos – this is from almost 900! – across Indurain’s career (or at least the segments of it which Cor Vos was in attendance) where we can say for sure that our guy was in the rain. This seems statistically improbable to the cusp of impossibility. Yet more questions: did the big Spaniard have his own weather-repelling vortex around him? Were cameras of the era so fragile that wet days went undocumented? Did Cor Vos just scurry indoors whenever the weather turned?
A quick survey of weather statistics from the time deepens the mystery further. Across the mid 1990s, France averaged 8-9 days of rain each July, when Indurain was riding and winning the Tour de France (granted, France is a big country with its own regional microclimates, but still). In 1995, Spain had 104 days of rain. Many Spanish races are climbing-heavy, to say nothing of the long-established fact that the rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain, but still: the odds don’t stack up. Logic dictates there should be many more pictures of Indurain in the rain than there appear to be.
What we do know is that in 1996, the year that Indurain’s five-year winning streak came to an end, there was rain. He suffered bronchitis in the first week of the Tour de France after a long streak of bad weather, and a rain- and snow-affected stage 9 saw him drop further down the GC standings. He’d eventually finish the race in 11th overall, and retired at the end of the season. Now he’s remembered as a big, methodical, solemn man who is unique in having won five Tours de France on a trot, maybe even without chemical enhancement.
That legacy now extends a little bit further: as a much-photographed man who I could find just five unambiguous photos of in inclement weather.
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