Gianni Bugno - BORN TO BE GREAT

Gianni Bugno was seen as the heir of the greatItalian champions of yore, and he looked a likely Tour winner. But the pressure weighed heavily on him. Procycling looks at a career that teetered on the edge of greatness

Writer: William Fotheringham
Procycling magazine - Issue 270 - July 2020

At the start of 1991, if followers of cycling had been asked to nominate a rider who would dominate the sport in the next five years, most would have come up with the same man. José Miguel Echavarri, long-time manager of Reynolds, would have been the exception in nominating his protégé Miguel Indurain, but ‘Miguelon’ wouldn’t have been the first name on most lips. 

If the future of cycling at the start of 1991 didn’t belong to Indurain, then who? Not Greg LeMond, Stephen Roche, Pedro Delgado or Laurent Fignon. They were on the downward slide. Claudio Chiappucci, the surprise runner-up to LeMond in the 1990 Tour, was widely viewed as a one-hit wonder, and he was no spring chicken. Laurent Jalabert and Tony Rominger were not exactly unknowns, but they weren’t star material. Yet. 

The obvious choice would have been the young Italian who had dominated the spring of 1990 and carried that momentum through the summer. Gianni Bugno (for it was he) was the coming man of professional cycling. 

A near-perfect stylist, Bugno had won Milan-San Remo by a street. He had dominated the Giro – from start to finish in pink! – in a manner that recalled the young Eddy Merckx. He had gone on to the Tour de France and outsprinted all the best riders – LeMond, Breukink, Claveyrolat – to win at l’Alpe d’Huez, adding a second stage in a late breakaway at Bordeaux. He had added the Wincanton Classic and a bronze medal at the Worlds. And the UCI’s World Cup, for what that was worth. 

Indurain, at this stage, was a hulking young Spaniard with a past as a sprinter, and penchant for week-long stage races. In 1989 victory in Paris-Nice had been largely overshadowed by Roche’s comeback; his victory in the "Race to the Sun" the following year had impressed but he was still not regarded as Tour-winning material. He was an outstanding domestique for Delgado who could win races on his own, but that was about as far as it went. 

1991 was Indurain’s breakthrough Tour, but it only looks that way with hindsight. Tour history is packed with riders who’ve won the race just the once, and at the time, it was far from definitive. He had missed the stage 1 break, his Banesto team flopped in the team time trial, he’d only beaten LeMond by 0:08 in the long time trial, and there was an obvious question over the fact that the entire PDM team had had to drop out due to illness. 

Indurain based his assault on the overall on a single long-range attack on the Pyrenean stage to Val Louron; Bugno’s fans could point to a second stage win at Alpe d’Huez – the only other rider to manage two wins in two years there is Hennie Kuiper in 1977 and 1978 – and a strong second place to Indurain in the final time trial, when he was just 0:27 behind. In Stuttgart a month after the Tour, Bugno outsprinted the cream of cycling, including Indurain, to take the first of two world road race titles. It was still not obvious who was the man of the future.

***

In 1992, with Gatorade on board as main sponsor and a full-bore attempt at the Tour’s GC on the way, Bugno’s management hired Laurent Fignon as road captain. It was a classic appointment: Fignon had won the Tour twice and the Giro once, and was in the final phase of his career. His experience of working with the Tour’s most successful directeur sportif, Cyrille Guimard, should have been invaluable. 

In practice it didn’t work out that way. Fignon was continually frustrated through 1992 by Gatorade’s collective refusal to race in the way that he and Guimard had always done. “When we decided to do something it was often the wrong moment; most of the time we didn’t actually do anything. Worse, the plan was to do nothing,” said the Frenchman. Fignon berated the team for “the modest way they raced and their lack of ambition”. Fignon highlighted a mountain stage over the Ballon d’Alsace to Mulhouse in the 1992 Tour when he felt the team could at least dispose of LeMond and push Bugno up. At the pre-stage meeting, he told the team that the day was a good day to attack, and that when he told them, they should all pile the pressure on. The team agreed, but when Fignon did the rounds in the peloton at the key moment, at 100km to go, nothing happened: “They all slipped away for some reason that eluded me.” 

He wasn’t the only star of the time who felt that Bugno was unwilling to challenge himself. LeMond, interviewed in 1993, confessed that he was baffled by the tactics adopted by both Bugno and Chiappucci in the 1991 and 1992 Tours. “There should be a tactical reason to race – that should be the goal. The problem is that guys like Bugno and Chiappucci never want more. They seem to be content with second place. If they were patient they could win one day and take the Tour. But Bugno is easily defeated. If I had his legs I’d be so happy. He thinks he can’t be any better.” 

For Fignon, the episode that summed up Bugno’s lacklustre approach came in the Alps. On the 254km epic to Sestriere, Chiappucci mounted a legendary long-range assault on Indurain which almost cracked the Spaniard; Bugno dropped a minute on the Banesto leader on the final climb but still hauled himself up to third overall. 

Fignon had done his job as the road captain earlier in that Tour: he had closely observed Indurain and figured out that his technique on a mountain stage was the classic one adopted by time trial specialists. When a climber made a move, Indurain never responded immediately but would wait until the attacker had slowed slightly after his initial effort. At that point he would accelerate to bring the aggressor to heel. 

In his autobiography We Were Young and Carefree, Fignon recalled how he took time to explain all this to Bugno, in detail. His suggestion was that he and the Italian should adopt the following plan: at a certain point, he would raise the pace, without riding flat out. Bugno would make an initial attack, “without going too deep but keeping something in reserve”. The real attack would be made just after Indurain began to ride faster to bridge the gap; the Spaniard would expect Bugno to weaken as usual, but instead he would make his move, flat out. Crucially, if Indurain regained contact, they would repeat the process, for as long as it took, the idea being that the Spaniard would eventually crack. Bugno took this in, but – as Fignon recalled – without great conviction. “He was saying yes, but I could tell that he was probably thinking the opposite. I ended up convincing him, or so I thought, by saying, ‘Do you think you will lose the Tour? If you do nothing the Tour is lost anyway.’” 

The plan fell flat: Fignon raised the pace at the determined moment, and Bugno attacked. But once Indurain got rolling, what happened next horrified the Frenchman: “Not only did Bugno fail to attack again, but he put up the white flag. He simply slipped onto Indurain’s back wheel.” 

Fignon’s devastating conclusion: “The role of team leader was too big for him. Pushing Bugno to his limit was fruitless. He kept complaining, saying we were going too hard. It was an amazing thing to watch this exceptional champion committing sporting suicide in front of me.” 

The Frenchman highlighted another episode from the following year, when Bugno ripped Gatorade to shreds in the team time trial, over a marathon 81km. “He was unable to manage his own strength. He set a pace that was too high for his team-mates; less than 50km in, the team blew to bits. Bugno had no idea how to ride; this was simply not the way a team leader should behave.” 

In 1992 Bugno had put pressure on himself by missing the Giro in order to focus only on the Tour. For an Italian world champion, this was a colossal gamble, risking the ire not only of the tifosi, but the Giro organisers, who also ran the newspaper La Gazzetta dello Sport. Basically, every pedal stroke Bugno took would be detailed in print, and if he failed to win the Tour, he would be castigated. Perhaps it was not entirely surprising that he was unwilling to follow Fignon’s advice and risk everything where he could at least guarantee a place on the podium. 

Moreover, the 1992 Tour was where the Indurain myth was made, and more specifically in one single stage, the 65km Luxembourg time trial. Here, Bugno was actually the best of the other overall contenders, but he was still nearly four minutes down. He collapsed badly in the Alps, slipping to 10min behind Indurain after his and Fignon’s fruitless attempt to shake the Spaniard. The structure of the Tours put together by the organiser Jean-Marie Leblanc – emasculated mountains, extremely long time trials – did nothing to favour the likes of Bugno or anyone other than Indurain. 

In 1993, as Indurain raced to his second Giro-Tour double in two years, Bugno effectively gave up on any attempt to be a grand tour contender. Neither race went well for him; 18th in the Giro and 20th in the Tour were results that were far below expectations. “It’s very sad if I have to talk about being a grand tour rider using the past tense,” he told Gazzetta after falling to bits in the Dolomites. “It can’t all be over.” Gazzetta wasn’t impressed. “Gianni is a classy rider,” wrote the paper’s senior cycling writer – and future Giro organiser – Angelo Zomegnan. “But this is not the first time he’s collapsed, and when you have more than one exception they tend to become the rule.” 

Team boss Gianluigi Stanga was most damning: “Incapable of recovering from adversity” was one quote; another was, “Like a horse dying of hunger because it can’t decide whether to eat straw or hay.” 

Set aside whether that was good man management, this was far from fair. The following season, Bugno took a seriously cunning win in the Tour of Flanders from no less a rider than Johan Museeuw, his seventh major oneday win (including national and world titles) in five seasons. He would leave Stanga at the end of that season and reinvent himself as a capitaine de route and stage hunter, first for Giancarlo Ferretti at MG-Technogym, and finally at Mapei. His final grand tour stage win came in the Vuelta in 1998. It’s a paradox that the impression of Bugno is of a huge underachiever. At the same time, by the time he retired in 1998, he’d won the Giro, the Worlds twice, Milan-San Remo, the Tour of Flanders, Clásica San Sebastián and 15 grand tour stages.

***

Cycling’s greatest rivalries are widely documented: Coppi versus Bartali, Anquetil against Poulidor, Saronni and Moser, Armstrong and Ullrich, Froome and Contador. Indurain versus Bugno had the potential on paper to become one of these, but it never was. One journalist who spent many hours with Indurain in the early 1990s recalls that while the Spaniard would frequently discuss the unpredictable and gutsy Chiappucci as a threat, Bugno never got the same treatment. 

Indurain was legendarily unruffled, famously described as the man who would remain a mystery even to his wife. Bugno was the opposite, a man whose early breakthrough came as a result of treatment for vertigo through listening to Mozart. “Bugno was a fragile being, continually teetering between dominance and disaster,” wrote Fignon. “He was a true superstar but a vulnerable man.” 

It’s also important to remember what each man represented. Indurain was taking Spanish cycling into new terrain; he was light years from the cliché of the matador such as Fuente, Bahamontes, Ocaña or even Delgado, who would fight like crazy, in a chaotic, heroic way, to the extent that it didn’t matter if they won or lost. Indurain got on with the job and was brutally successful in a far more clinical way. 

Bugno was Italian but with a very Swiss edge to him, having been born in Brugg. To some, this explained his perceived lack of charisma. His rise coincided with the resurgence of Italian cycling after the lean years following peak Moser-Saronni and on the back of the arrival of preparatori such as Francesco Conconi and Michele Ferrari. Whereas Indurain was unchallenged in his ascendancy in Spain, Bugno not only had to live up to every Italian campione since the war, he also had to jostle with the likes of Chiappucci, Moreno Argentin, Franco Chioccioli, Franco Ballerini and Mario Cipollini. It wasn’t the environment for a sensitive, questioning type. 

Given that this is the early 90s we are talking about, speculation is legitimate about how far Bugno was, or wasn’t willing to buy into the EPO culture that became prevalent, according to most onlookers, at the time. It seems likely that Bugno didn’t work with a preparatore in what should have been his best years – Michele Ferrari left his Chateau d’Ax team in mid-1989 and his flirtation with Conconi in 1993 ended in tears. One hypothesis is that as a talented, gifted rider, with a huge future in front of him, his head fell off when cycling began to go haywire. But it’s only speculation. 

What can be said with some certainty is that Bugno has always denied any doping, and that he was a perfectionist – a rider with his head in a road atlas every evening worrying about the next day’s stage – and as cycling changed in the early 90s, the sport wasn’t a good place for worriers. Robust characters such as Fignon, LeMond and Robert Millar were scarred by it; maybe listening to Mozart couldn’t fix this one. 

Shakespeare rightly said that some are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them. In cycling terms, Indurain was the anti-star who had greatness thrust on him in spite of his natural modesty, Greg LeMond (double junior world champion) was born great, and Bernard Hinault achieved greatness. 

Lance Armstrong was another to achieve greatness, a reminder that this is a complex quality. Most of the time, most of us tend to believe that it is a virtue, something that everyone should want. Occasionally we are reminded that there are those who go the other way. Gianni Bugno stared greatness in the face, but didn’t seize it, for reasons even he doesn’t know. Unlike most of the human race, he at least had the option to aim for the stars, and if he only managed to get to the moon, who are we to carp?