Читать книгу The Call of the Road: The History of Cycle Road Racing - Chris Sidwells - Страница 14

By the second decade of the twentieth century cycling had two of its three Grand Tours, and four of the single-day races known as the monuments. Road racing was taking root. It would have to wait until 1935 for the third Grand Tour, the Vuelta a España, but the fifth monument was born in 1913.

The Tour of Flanders, or De Ronde van Vlaanderen in Flemish, was another product of a newspaper trying to establish itself, but with some extra inspiration. The race had, and still has, a lot to do with Flemish regional identity.

Flemish cycling, like Flanders itself, suffered during the early part of the twentieth century. While a few road races had been held in the region towards the end of the previous century, interest was mainly focused on the track. But now, even the velodromes were closing.

There weren’t many Belgian road racing teams, so the best Flemish road racers, like Cyril Van Hauwaert, had to ride for foreign teams to make a reasonable living. Also, there was a growing feeling in Flanders that it was Belgium’s underdog; that the region of Flanders had got the bad end of the deal ever since Belgium was formed in 1830.

Language was a big source of discontent. People from Flanders speak a variation of Dutch we call Flemish but they call Vlaams-Nederlands. It’s an old language with a history and a literature of its own, but in early twentieth-century Flanders, French was the language of officialdom, used for legal documents. It was taught in schools and spoken in the up-market shops of Flanders. French was also used by army officers to give orders, which caused big problems and even deaths during the First World War, so there was even greater discontent in Flanders after it.

But one very good thing happened in 1912, and it has a direct link with why excellence in cycling, and road racing in particular, is part of Flemish heritage and identity today. As we have seen, a Belgian, Odile Defraye, won the 1912 Tour de France, the first truly foreign winner. Defraye was born in Rumbeke, in West Flanders, so he was Flemish to his very core.

Defraye’s victory gave cycling in Flanders a much- needed boost. A boost noted by two directors of the press group Société Belge d’Imprimerie. They were August De Maeght and Leon Van Den Haute, both of them Flemish, and they decided it might be a good time to launch a new Flemish sports newspaper.

It was called Sportwereld, and the first edition was published on 12 September 1912, a few days before the Championship of Flanders, which is one of the oldest road races in the region. It dates back to 1908 and is still held every September in the West Flanders town of Koolskamp. Like Count De Dion before them, De Maeght and Van den Haute wanted an enthusiastic young cyclist to write about the sport for their new publication. They found him in Karel Van Wijnendaele.

Van Wijnendaele was fiercely Flemish, so fierce that when he began writing he changed his Latin-sounding Christian names, Carolus and Ludovicius, to Karel, the Flemish version of Carolus. He also dumped his family name Steyaert in favour of Wijnendaele, the old Flemish spelling of his village, Wijnendaele. Many family names in Flanders were derived from the places people came from. Now nobody could be mistaken that Karel Van Wijnendaele was Karel from the small village in West Flanders called Wijnendaele.

Van Wijnendaele was one of fifteen children. He left school at 14, worked for a baker and then went into service, employed by rich French-speaking families in Brussels and Ostend. He was treated very badly there, and the experience stuck with him for life. But instead of putting up with it, which was what most young Flemish people did in those days, Van Wijnendaele returned home and decided to try his luck as a professional cyclist.

He did okay, he won some money, although nothing big, but while he raced Van Wijnendaele developed a profound understanding of the sport. He really understood cycling, and he understood what it took to make a good bike racer. Years later he wrote, ‘If you grow up with no frills and you know what hunger is, you grow up hard enough to withstand bike racing.’

Van Wijnendaele didn’t have much schooling, but he was intelligent. He could read, so he could find out what he needed to know, and more importantly he could write. He started supplementing his bike-racing income by reporting on races in his region for a local newspaper in Izegem, then became the West Flanders correspondent for a sports newspaper in Antwerp.

By January 1913 Van Wijnendaele was the editor of Sportwereld, and he was working hard with Leon van den Haute at organising the first ever Tour of Flanders. The race would be run ‘only on Flemish soil, and visiting all the Flemish cities’, Van Wijnendaele wrote when he introduced the idea to Sportwereld’s readers. He wanted a Tour of the ‘true’ Flanders, the land at the core of the old County of Flanders, which once extended north into Holland and south into France, but not as far east as Antwerp or Brussels. The core of the County of Flanders is where East and West Flanders are today.

The first Tour of Flanders was held on 25 May 1913. It started in the Korenmarkt (corn market) square in Ghent at 6 a.m. and covered 330 kilometres of cobbled roads, with a few cinder paths thrown in. The course went northeast to Sint Niklaas, then south to Aalst, then to Oudenaarde, then west to Kortrijk, then Veurne where it met the sand dunes of the North Sea coast. There the riders turned right and went along the coast road to Ostend, where they turned inland and headed to the finish in Mariakerke, a separate town in those days but now a suburb of Ghent.

Five riders came to the finish together, where they completed four laps of a big wooden outdoor track. Paul Deman, a West Flandrian, won the sprint ahead of a Frenchman, Joseph Van Daele. Flemish riders occupied the next seven places, and even Van Daele was Flemish in a sense. He was born in Watterlos, which is almost on the Belgian border and now part of the Lille conurbation, but was once a town in the County of Flanders.

The race was a success for Deman, for Sportwereld and Van Wijnendaele, and for Flemish cycling. The field grew from 37 to 47 riders in 1914, but it was still a struggle to put such a big race on. Sportwereld wasn’t yet two years old, and starting any new business eats cash even without the distraction and demands of putting on a big new bike race covering lots of country. An additional problem was the major French teams forbidding their Belgian riders from taking part.

They did so again in 1914, and most of the top Belgians obeyed their teams and stayed away from the Tour of Flanders, but one Flemish rider took no notice of his team. He was Marcel Buysse, Flemish through and through and a supporter of the growing Flemish national movement. He defied his French team, Alcyon, and not only took part but became the second winner of the Tour of Flanders. Buysse never raced for a French team again. When he resumed racing after the First World War, he rode for Bianchi-Pirelli for three years, then did the next four years for his own team, M. Buysse Cycles-Colonial.

There was no Tour of Flanders in 1915, and the race didn’t run again until 1919, after the First World War ended. The already ropy roads of Flanders were now shattered by bomb blasts. Hasty repairs were made, but the race distance was reduced to 203 kilometres because some of the roads that had been used didn’t exist any more.

A new route was found for 1920, and the race went back up to 250 kilometres, with Jules Vanhevel the winner. The Tour of Flanders was growing in stature, with an increasing number of non-Belgians taking part, and in 1923 it had its first foreign winner, a brilliant Swiss racer called Heiri Suter. One week later Suter achieved the first ever cobbled classics double, when he won Paris–Roubaix.

Suter was the first of a new type of road racer, a classics specialist. He excelled at single-day races, winning 58 big ones during his career. They included five Swiss road race titles; the Grand Prix Wolber twice, a race once regarded as an unofficial world road race championships; the Züri-Metzgete, Switzerland’s classic, six times; Paris–Tours twice; and Bordeaux–Paris once. Suter never took part in a Grand Tour, and extended his racing career from 1931 until 1946 by focusing on motor-paced racing on the track. He was 47 years old when he stopped.

By the mid-Twenties the Tour of Flanders was by far the biggest race in its region, which led to problems because hundreds of people were following it in motor cars. That was solved by an appeal to fans in Sportwereld, thanking them for their support and encouraging them to continue being involved in the race, but only in a responsible manner. Later, after the Second World War, the race would face a much bigger problem, or rather its organisers would.

During the occupation the German authorities allowed several things to happen in Flanders, providing the locals didn’t cause them trouble, which they didn’t allow in the rest of Belgium, and in many other areas of occupied Europe. One of those things was cycle racing in general, and the Tour of Flanders in particular.

The race was shorter during the war, but it had top-quality winners; Achiel Buysse in 1940, 1941 and 1943, Briek Schotte in 1942 and Rik Van Steenbergen in 1944. Schotte was a remarkable racer with a remarkable Tour of Flanders record. He took part an incredible twenty times during his racing career, winning it twice (the other occasion was 1948), and he racked up a total of eight appearances on the podium. Then, after he stopped racing, Schotte presided over five Tour of Flanders victories and eleven podium places in the teams he managed.

Paris–Roubaix was created to publicise a new velodrome in Roubaix, and it’s the only big race to finish in a velodrome today. That wasn’t so in the early days of road racing, when lots of races finished in velodromes. Liège–Bastogne–Liège finished at Rocourt for many years. The Tour of Lombardy, Il Lombardia, has finished in the Velodromo Vigorelli in Milan, and on a track in Como. Grand Tours stages often had velodrome finishes. The Tour of Flanders is no exception.

Its first editions finished on an open-air track in Mariakerke, but a couple of times the race finished on the indoor track located in the Sportspaleis in Ghent’s Citadel Park. That track is known as the Kuipke because it’s so small and steeply banked it resembles a bowl, kuipke being Flemish for a small bowl.

Briek Schotte’s first Flanders victory was on the Kuipke, and shortly before he died in 2004 he described the 1942 race finish to me:

Part of the banking near the big doors to the Sportspaleis, where the track was housed, was removed. We rode through the doors, then up onto the track on some loose planks that were put there for the race. It was a really tricky finish, because as well as the loose planks you had to turn sharp right to get into the Sportspaleis, then sharp right again once inside to get on the track. There was never a sprint inside, the first man through those doors always won.

The Tour of Flanders continuation through the Second World War came back to haunt its organisers when the hostilities ended. Many Flemish nationalists were accused of collaborating with the Germans, and Sportwereld was one of several newspapers that became controlled by the Belgian government. Several journalists, most of them not sports writers, were convicted of collaboration with the Germans. Karel Van Wijnendaele wasn’t convicted of any offence, but he was banned from ever working as a journalist again.

But Van Wijnendaele was no collaborator. It was love of cycling, and love of the race he’d grown from seed, that led him to continue running the Tour of Flanders during the war, not sympathy for fascism. In fact Van Wijnendaele had secretly worked for the Allies by hiding downed British pilots in his house. In response to being banned from doing the job he loved, he sought support from the British authorities, and received it in the form of a letter from General Montgomery that verified Van Wijnendaele’s heroic acts. As a result he was back in the game, but straight into another fight.

Before the war Sportwereld and the Tour of Flanders had been taken over by the newspaper that runs the race today, Het Nieuwsblad. And, once the war-dust settled, Van Wijnendaele was employed by Het Nieuwsblad to write about cycling, and to run the race. But by then Het Nieuwsblad had a growing rival in Flanders called Het Volk, which is Flemish for The People, and it was politically left leaning, where Het Nieuwsblad was centrist. Het Volk started their own new bike race in 1945, and called it the Omloop van Vlaanderen.

Omloop and ronde have similar meanings in Flemish, so Het Nieuwsblad protested to the Belgian Cycling Federation, which insisted that Het Volk change the name of its race to Omloop Het Volk. So another famous Flemish race was born, although Het Nieuwsblad and Het Volk merged in 2009, and what was Omloop Het Volk is now Omloop Het Nieuwsblad. However, it still marks the opening of the Belgian racing season on the last Saturday in February each year.

So with the Ronde cracking on into the Fifties, and a new big Flemish race established, we turn to an older French race, once highly regarded but, sadly, less important in cycling today. Paris–Tours is one of the oldest races on the calendar, and until quite recently was regarded as a classic. It was first held in 1896, when it was for amateurs only, and became a pro race in 1901. After that it only missed three editions through two world wars. Like most early races it was long, sometimes as much as 350 kilometres, and in early editions it was how well riders coped with the distance and rough roads that decided the winner.

Then in 1911 Paris–Tours was switched from September to the spring, when it was billed as the revenge race for Paris–Roubaix, which at the time was always held on Easter Sunday, giving rise to another name, La Pascale, for Paris–Roubaix. So if Easter was early, difficult weather could hit Paris–Tours. The worst conditions were in 1921 when the riders had to battle through freezing cold and snow. Only eight made it to Tours, with Francis Pelissier the winner. But gradually road conditions improved, the race distance was cut and, since the direct route to Tours is flat, Paris–Tours came to be known as the sprinters’ classic.

In 1951 the race moved to early October, so that it coincides with the start of the French hunting season. That’s when the obligatory Paris–Tours photographs first appeared, with the peloton cruising across the treeless Plaine de la Beauce, cheered on by groups of heavily armed men with hungry-looking dogs.

Paris–Tours settled nicely into its autumn slot, and the fact that a sprinter won most years didn’t upset anybody very much, apart from cycling journalists and the race organisers. Sprinters got a bad deal in the Fifties and Sixties, when they were regarded as a lower form of cycling life by the press. It was as if they thought sprinters won because they had been sneaky and duplicitous.

Happily, things have changed, and sprinting is seen in its true light today as one of the arts of cycling. Sprinters are admired for their speed, skill, race-craft, bravery and raw power. But back in more unenlightened times, a series of experiments began in 1959 designed to thwart sprinters and produce more ‘worthy’ winners of Paris–Tours. The organisers tried to change the race, to break it up and make it more difficult, which they thought would make it more interesting. But the changes either didn’t thwart the sprinters, or they were so big they altered the whole character of the race, so it wasn’t Paris–Tours any more. The event has gone back to its roots now, but with a few twists to ensure that the sprinters, if they win, don’t get the race handed to them on a plate.

Tours straddles the River Loire, and the northern approach to the city, the way you arrive direct from Paris, is flat. However, just south of the Loire there are lots of short sharp hills, so for the last edition of the race in the Fifties the organisers sent the riders through Tours, across the Loire, to complete four laps of a circuit in the suburb of Joue-les-Tours, which included the Côte de l’Alouette. The race finished at the top of this stiff little hill. In a wonderful irony the winner, Rik Van Looy, was one of the fastest sprinters of his time – and he dropped the field on the final climb. But he was a sprinter with a difference; he could do other things as well. More of Van Looy later.

So even with the Alouette climb near the end, more often than not Paris–Tours was still won by sprinters. Félix Lévitan, the race organiser and joint Tour de France director at the time, seemed to take this as a personal affront. So in 1965 he tried running Paris–Tours without the riders using derailleur gears. It threw the race back to the early days, when riders had a choice of gear ratios on their bikes but had to dismount to change them. Lévitan thought that would somehow change the outcome of Paris–Tours. It didn’t, not really.

That year a Dutchman, Gerben Karstens, won the fastest Paris–Tours to that date, clocking 45.029 kilometres per hour for 246.8 kilometres. Britain’s Barry Hoban rode that race, and he remembers how Karstens won:

We were allowed three sprockets on a free-wheel, and to change gear you had to stop, get off your bike and swap the chain by hand. That involved loosening the rear wheel. It was quite a long process and not one you wanted to do often in a fast race. If you did you’d end up chasing all the time, and get knackered well before the finish.

I chose 51 x 15 as the gear to start with, and I was going to swap to something a bit higher later on, but the race was so fast I didn’t dare stop at all. About 20 kilometres from the finish Karstens and his whole team stopped together and swapped their chains onto the 13 sprocket, and that’s how he won. By all stopping at the same time his team were able to pace him back up to the bunch. Then, because they had higher gears going into the finale, we were just revved out by them, and nobody could get around Karstens in the sprint.

The funniest thing that day was Jacques Anquetil. He thought the whole idea of not using derailleurs was ridiculous, and he didn’t like Félix Lévitan very much anyway. So he tried to ride all the way in 53 x 13. His team complained like mad because there were some hills in the Chevreuse Valley just after the start, and Jacques made them drop back and push him up them.

The equipment manufacturers disliked the no-derailleur rule even more than Anquetil, so it was abandoned after 1966, when a sprinter called Guido Reybrouck won anyway. But that only renewed Lévitan’s crusade to thwart the sprinters. In 1974 he switched the route around, so Paris–Tours became Tours–Versailles, then Blois–Chaville, and later Blois–Montlhéry, then Creteil–Chaville, all done in an effort to toughen up the race. Eventually its identity got so lost that the race was called the GP de l’Automne. It was a debacle really; it was always meant to be the sprinters’ classic, the perfect race for awarding the Ruban Jaune.

The Ruban Jaune, or yellow ribbon, was created in 1936, and is still awarded to the rider who wins a road race of 200 kilometres or more with the fastest average speed to date. Gustaf Daneels was the first holder of the Ruban Jaune when he won Paris–Tours in 1936 at an average speed of 41.45 kph. It set a precedent.

Of the twelve times the Ruban Jaune has been awarded, Paris–Tours was the race where the speed record was set on nine occasions. Amazingly, Paris–Roubaix has held it twice, and another old race once regarded as a classic, Paris–Brussels, had it once. The current Ruban Jaune was set in 2015 when Matteo Trentin won Paris–Tours at the cracking pace of 49.641 kph.

At times Paris–Tours has been a long way shy of the fastest 200-kilometre-plus road race in the world. In 1988, when it made its comeback as Paris–Tours after being routed all over the place, the riders faced a howling headwind and torrential rain that pinned them down to a 34 kph average. It was almost dark when the bunch sprinted it out on the Avenue de Grammont. The Dutch rider Peter Pieters was the winner of that slow-motion Paris–Tours; the sprinters’ classic.

So far I’ve not written anything about road racing in Spain, because the sport was a little slower to take hold there than in most major European countries. But there were races early on in Spain, some of which are going strong today. The oldest is the Volta a Catalunya, which dates back to 1911 and is the fourth-oldest stage race behind the Tour de France, the Tour of Belgium and the Giro d’Italia.

It was another race created by a newspaper, this time the Barcelona-based El Mundo Deportivo working with the then president of the Spanish Cycling Union, Narcisse Masferrer. The first Volta a Catalunya was very different to the first Tour de France or Giro d’Italia; it was held in early January, was only three stages long, and totalled just 363 kilometres. The modest length and distance probably reflected the factor that held Spanish road racing back for a while: a lack of usable roads. Even as late as the Sixties, stages held to publicise the embryonic Spanish seaside resorts saw riders bussed in over rough gravel roads to ride circuits of the only tarmac strips in town.

The first three editions of the Volta a Catalunya were domestic affairs with all-Spanish podiums. The next two editions in 1920 and 1923 were won by a Frenchman, José Pelletier and Maurice Ville. After that the Volta a Catalunya has run every year, except at the height of the Spanish Civil War in 1937

Spanish racers were insular for a long time. The first Spaniard to take part in the Tour de France, Salvador Cardona, didn’t do so until 1928, when by coincidence, and incredibly considering the journey they had to take in order to get there, the first Australians took part. Cardona, who won the Volta a Catalunya in 1931, was the first Spanish racer to win a stage in the Tour de France in 1929. But even Cardona didn’t ride many races outside Spain, and he certainly didn’t win another big one. He was content to be one of the best in late Twenties and early Thirties Spanish bike racing.

Mariano Carnado was another star of that era. He won the Volta a Catalunya a record seven times, and in 1930 won Spain’s other big race, the Tour of the Basque Country, which started in 1924 and so also has a longer history, albeit interrupted, than the Spanish Grand Tour, the Vuelta a España. Frenchman Francis Pélissier won the first Tour of the Basque Country. It’s a rugged race over tough terrain, and it doesn’t always get the best of weather. The Basque region is close to the Atlantic coast and gets plenty of weather systems in spring. Carnado’s 1930 victory was the first by a Spaniard, and the last for a while.

But that wasn’t due to lack of Spanish contenders. It was simply because there was no Tour of the Basque Country from 1931 until 1935, when Gino Bartali of Italy won. Then the Spanish Civil War intervened, and scuppered the race for a long time. It wasn’t resurrected until 1969, when the five-time Tour de France winner Jacques Anquetil won, but it has grown in stature since. The Tour of the Basque Country is still a very tough race, and as well as being held in high esteem it’s also perfect preparation for Liège–Bastogne–Liège, and another big race in the French-speaking part of Belgium, La Flèche Wallonne.

The first La Flèche Wallonne, or the Walloon Arrow (several Belgian races have the word ‘arrow’ in their titles) was held in 1936. It’s not as big as Liège–Bastogne–Liège is now, but at one time they were seen as being on a par: especially when both races were held over one weekend, called Weekend Ardennais.

Once they were separated, La Flèche Wallonne’s profile suffered a dip because it didn’t have a defined route. Where Liège–Bastogne–Liège had its set-piece climbs, and Paris–Roubaix its cobbled roads, passages of the races that fans look forward to and talk about and compare performances on, for a while La Flèche Wallonne was just a race around the hills between Liège and Charleroi. Sometimes it went east to west, sometimes west to east. It was always hard, though, and always prized among knowledgeable fans and by those who won it. It also satisfied a thirst for bike racing among the huge Italian community working in the steel mills and mines of the surrounding Meuse area. But it had no defining shape. That changed once the Mur de Huy was included in the race route.

Today, La Flèche Wallonne starts in Charleroi and heads east on a big loop north of the Meuse, before plunging down into Huy for the first time. The race then builds in a crescendo, with three ascents of the Mur de Huy in quickening succession on the way to the finish at the top of the final ascent.

But back to Spain and the birth of cycling’s third Grand Tour, the Vuelta a España. When the Tour of the Basque Country was resurrected in 1969, it was done by a cycling club from the Basque city of Eibar, a club with a history of successful race organization. The club’s first promotion was in April 1932 with a race created to celebrate Spain’s first birthday as a republic, called Grand Premio Republica. It was a five-stage race from Eibar to Madrid and back, and is seen in Spain as the template for the Vuelta a España.

According to Lucy Fallon and Adrian Bell in their book Viva la Vuelta (Mousehold Press, 2005), the idea for a Tour of Spain came from a former racer called Clemente López Doriga. He saw the press as the most likely promoters, so he lobbied them tirelessly because he felt passionately that it was time Spain had its own national Tour.

Several things were against him. Spain had terrible roads, which weren’t even a fully joined-up network in the Thirties. The cost would be high and the country was poor. Finally, there was a severe lack of accommodation, especially away from the coast. There just weren’t the hotels in Spain there are now, and for years accommodation for riders on the Vuelta a España was basic to say the least.

Still, López Doriga persevered and eventually attracted interest from Juan Pujol, a director of the Madrid daily newspaper Informaciones. Pujol was an idealist who wrote when announcing the first ever Vuelta in 1935 that it would be ‘an incarnation of patriotic exaltation’. Spain was in turmoil and just over a year away from civil war, but Pujol was undeterred.

On Monday, 29 April 1935, fifty riders lined up at one of the Madrid gates to start the first Vuelta a España. It was a good field, but not the best in the world because the 14-stage race finished in Madrid only three days before the Giro d’Italia started in Milan. For a long time its location in the calendar stifled the Vuelta as a truly international race. An April start and May finish meant it was crammed between the northern classics and the start of the Giro d’Italia. So the Vuelta, while always important to Spanish teams, was less so for other nations.

It became a race that the great riders of each generation would do during their careers, and try to win, but unless they were Spanish it wasn’t one they did every year. Even some Spaniards didn’t do it every year. The five-time Spanish Tour de France winner Miguel Indurain started the Vuelta nine times during his thirteen-year career, but only finished four, with a best placing of second overall in 1991.

Things began to change after 1995, when the Vuelta was swapped to late August/early September. Then, when the UCI World Tour was formed, it included the Vuelta as one of the three Grand Tours. All World Tour teams must take part in all World Tour races. So now, although it’s still the third Grand Tour in status behind the Tour de France and Giro d’Italia, the Vuelta a España is a great race, often a very interesting one, and it’s on the rise.

But going back to its origins, of the fifty riders that started the first Vuelta, thirty-two were Spanish, six were Belgians, four were Italians, plus two each from France, Austria, Switzerland and Holland. Mariano Carnado carried the home nation’s hopes. He was a strong, powerfully built rider from Navarra.

The other top Spaniard in 1935 was very different to Carnado, but far more typical of the best Spanish road racers. Spain is famous for producing tiny climbers, who sprout wings when the road goes uphill. However, at 1.57 metres tall and weighing just 50 kilograms, Vicente Trueba was so tiny he was nicknamed the Torrelavega Flea. He was already more famous outside Spain than Carnado, because in 1933 Trueba became the first ever King of the Mountains in the Tour de France. There had been a mountains prize before, but this was the first year it was given a title.

There were other good Spaniards in the race too, but it was a Belgian, Antoon Digneff, who won the first stage of the first Vuelta, and another, Gustaaf Deloor, who won overall. He was impressive too, winning a really tough stage through the Cantabrian Mountains that went from Santander to Bilbao. Carnado was his closest rival, while the rest of the Spaniards were burned up by the strength of the Belgians.

The weather was a factor that year. It was cold in the mountains of the north, which is to be expected in April, but it even rained on stage 10 in Andalucia, when the Austrian rider Max Bulla won a stage to Granada. Carnado kept fighting but he seemed to have terrible luck, crashing several times on the terrible Spanish roads, as well as having plenty of mechanical problems.

Even the final stage through the Sierra de Guardarrama to Madrid was hit by drizzle, making it really cold high up. Carnado attacked once more, but took Deloor and Bulla with him. Deloor won the stage, which finished on the velodrome in Madrid’s Casa de Campo, the city’s largest park. His brave efforts throughout, and especially on the final stage, saw Carnado finish second overall to Deloor, with Antoon Dignef third.

The second Vuelta a España saw big changes. The average length of the stages was reduced from 245 kilometres to 207, but the number of stages increased from fourteen to twenty-one, making it a three-week race. Growing unrest in Spain saw only eight foreign entries, four Italians and four Belgians, and the weather was bad again. Gustaaf Deloor took his second overall victory, with his brother Alfons in second place. And that was it for la Vuelta, because six weeks after the 1936 race a coup d’état brought about the start of the Spanish Civil War. The next Vuelta a España was held in 1941.

The country was now under the dictatorship of General Franco, which lasted until his death in 1975, and it affected all walks of life in Spain, including cycling and the Vuelta a España. It saw a lot more Spanish winners, but not just because Spanish cyclists were improving; foreign riders were less keen on racing in Spain because of the conditions there.

It struggled through the Forties, and by 1950 only forty-two riders entered, with five Belgians and three Italians the only foreigners. There were twenty-four stages, but the racing was so dull that the few sponsors supporting it pulled out. There wouldn’t be another Vuelta a España until 1955, when there was a landmark edition.

For a start the field was 100 riders for the first time in the race’s history. There were sixty-two Spanish, twelve French, twelve Italian, six Swiss, two German, and six British riders. That was a big breakthrough because proper road racing had only just become established in the UK – but more about the reasons why that was so in a later chapter.

By 1955 Spain had enough riders to field three complete teams, and their A-team was formidable. It was headed by two men, Jesus Lorono and Federico Bahamontes, Tour de France Kings of the Mountains in 1953 and 1954 respectively. They were both terrific climbers, and Bahamontes was one of the best of all time, but they were very different personalities, and that led to a stinging rivalry. Lorono was Basque; quiet, dignified and stoical. Bahamontes was from Toledo; hot-blooded, volatile and sometimes fragile.

The very fast and talented Miguel Poblet was also in the Spanish A-team. He was a rare thing in Spain in that he was a fast sprinter who excelled in single-day races, but he was still capable of winning the Vuelta, if the dice fell in his favour. There were two support riders, Francisco Massip and Bernardo Ruiz, as well as the very experienced Julian Berrendero, the Vuelta winner in 1941 and 1942.

Despite all that Spanish firepower, however, stage one was won by Gilbert Bauvin of France. Stage two broke with tradition and finished outside Spain for the first time. Bahamontes and Lorono launched a two-pronged attack on the Jaizkibel climb, famous now for the part it plays in Spain’s biggest single-day race, the San Sebastian Classic. Bauvin went with them and won his second consecutive stage on home turf in Bayonne, France, but his glory was short-lived.

Lorono took over the race lead the next day, but the French hit back on stage four, a relatively easy one from Zaragoza to Lerida. They attacked from the start and kept on attacking, while the Spanish had nothing but mechanical problems. Afterwards the recriminations started, with the Spaniards blaming each other for the lack of joined-up team thinking. Raphael Geminiani of France now led the race. The Spanish had more bad luck, while the lead passed within the French team from Geminiani to Jean Dotto, who ended up the first foreign winner of the Vuelta a España.