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B.Labourdette, from the BIC team, winner in Gourette-Les Eaux Bonnes of the 16th stage of the 1971 Tour.
B.Labourdette, a native of the Pyrénées Atlantiques, excellent French rider winner of the Luchon - Gourette Les Eaux Bonnes stage of this Tour 71, and teammate at BIC of Luis Ocana shares with you his experience of this Grenoble - Orcières-Merlette stage of the 1971 Tour where Ocana put Merckx within 10 minutes and entered the legend of the Tour.
"The day before this stage we had already tested Merckx who had lost his yellow jersey to Joop Zoetemelk: our leader Luis Ocana after a big job by our team-mate Mortensen had attacked and already Eddy Merckx hadn't been able to follow Luis' group.
Also, for the next day, our Bic team under the leadership of our sports director Maurice de Muer had decided to toughen the Grenoble-Orcières-Merlette stage right from the start and in particular after a dozen kilometres with the Laffrey coast and its terrible slopes.
Luis had to attack in this second category difficulty and all his teammates had to hold on and hold on.
The objective was to isolate Merckx early on and it was thought to be vulnerable.
The tactics were clear and went perfectly because as soon as Luis attacked, Merckx gave in and above all all his team-mates of the Molténi had cracked: at the top of the hill of Laffrey Merckx was distanced from the leading group of Ocana- Zoetemelk-Agostinho-Van Impe and was at the head of a reduced peloton which included myself with four Bic team-mates some other riders and no team-mate of Eddy Merckx .
That day Luis accomplished a real feat to outrun Merckx by more than eight and a half minutes on the stage and relegated him to ten minutes in the overall classification.
Merckx was impressive all the same because he was the only one in our small peloton to chase for one hundred and twenty kilometres behind the leaders and especially our own Luis Ocana.
Maurice De Muer spoke to us after the finish about his fear of the last four or five kilometres because he had feared Luis would fail.
In the evening, we simply celebrated the stage victory and Luis' yellow jersey.
On a Tour, every night you have to think about recovering because the Tour is three weeks and that evening we were all thinking about getting some rest.
Luis, who I was sharing a room with, was exhausted and tired.
The greatness of this mythical stage was not realized until much later. »
