The following feature forms part of our 'I love the 1990s series' and sees William Fotheringham relive the 1992 World Championships in Benidorm, Spain.
A long weekend among the burgers, bacon butties and warm beer of Benidorm, with a splitting headache, sunburn and a near-permanent feeling of being hung over. How British. Except this wasn’t a stag night or a cheapo mini-break, but watching Gianni Bugno make a bit of history by winning his second consecutive road world championships.
The headache wasn’t alchohol induced. If only it had been. In fact it was the result of a long, long drive from Madrid airport in blinding sun on the Friday, down those interminable straight main roads through Central Spain, getting so bored in a rather crap hire car that in one of the garages, in utter desperation, I bought something to listen to by a band called Roxette. That something was a cassette tape. That’s how long ago this was: 1992, when cheap flights from Britain to Europe had yet to be invented because Stelios and that loudmouthed Ryanair chap were still mugging up on business studies.
I didn’t like Roxette. The race was a different matter. It wasn’t a ding-dong thriller like the first world’s I watched live, the LeMond-Fignon-Kelly epic in Chambery in 1989. Those kind of world road races, where the stars knock seven bells out of each other in the finale with amateur abandon, are rare indeed.
This was more typical, a slow burn business, kind of like Gianni himself.
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Italian national coach Alfredo Martini talks to Claudio Chiappucci and Gianni Bugno
Bugno was, I remember once writing, an Italian born in Switzerland, with everything that the idea implies. He had Latin good looks and could turn on the style on his bike when needed, but 95 per cent of the time he was a charisma-bypass personified. Robert Millar felt he had Bond-esque cool, but Bugno was George Lazenby rather than Sean Connery or Daniel Craig. His problem was not that he couldn’t win races, more that he seemed unable to deliver when it was expected and demanded of him.
After his utterly dominant 1990, when he won Milan-San Remo, led the Giro d'Italia from start to finish and won at L’Alpe d’Huez, Gianni had had a relatively poor year in 1992, going into the World Championships without a major win, and with the Italian press on his case, questioning whether he was over the hill at 29.
He had been expected to challenge Miguel Indurain in the Tour de France, with the support of Fignon. He didn’t. The pair didn’t gel and Bugno didn’t have the legs or the guts to attack Indurain. “The role of team leader was too big for him,” Fignon wrote in his autobiography, condemning Bugno’s racing style as “sporting suicide.”
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