Vuelta skelter, p.1
Vuelta Skelter, page 1
Tim Moore
* * *
Vuelta Skelter
Riding the Remarkable 1941 Tour of Spain
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tim Moore’s writing has appeared in the Daily Telegraph, the Observer, the Sunday Times and Esquire. He is the author of Gironimo!, French Revolutions, Do Not Pass Go, Spanish Steps, Nul Points, I Believe In Yesterday and You Are Awful (But I Like You). He lives in London.
ALSO BY TIM MOORE
The Cyclist Who Went Out in the Cold
French Revolutions
Do Not Pass Go
Spanish Steps
Nul Points
I Believe in Yesterday
You Are Awful (But I Like You)
Gironimo!
Another Fine Mess
To José Luis Navares González
PROLOGUE
‘We will live in your journey. You do this for all of us. We are in your heart and in your mind.’
It was 4 July 2020, and there we were outside Biketown, a shop in Madrid’s northern suburbs. Three fortysomething Spaniards and me, all in shorts and facemasks, sunglasses steaming up in the monstrous midday heat. And a fortysomething road bicycle, thin and silver, leaning against the sun-scorched wall behind us.
Two months had passed since I’d chanced upon a photo of this graceful old machine, in a blog post composed by Gerardo, the stubbled one. I had made contact, asking if it might be for sale. Gerardo gently replied that it wasn’t, on account of a deep sentimental attachment: he had inherited the bike from an elderly cycling companion who had passed away the previous year. He said he would confer with Javier, the tall one, Biketown’s manager and the silver bike’s co-owner. Gerardo’s next email, composed like all of our correspondence via Google Translate, had pricked my eyes with tears of emotion and gratitude. ‘Our friend José Luis was a great lover of cycling and would have much love for your project. I have spoken to Javier and we are happy to lend you José Luis’ bike free of charge.’
Antonio, the one who spoke English, flicked a finger towards Gerardo, who had taken off his sunglasses and was drawing a bare forearm across his eyes. ‘See? Now he cries. He has thoughts of envy for you.’ Throwing Covid caution to the winds, Gerardo strode over and gave me a great big unprotected hug, along with several slaps on my hot, woolly back. It was probably now that I first regretted my choice of facemask: a florid Liberty-print affair that made an awkward contrast with Gerardo’s dourly masculine black number.
I pulled down the peak of my little white cap, then went over and straddled the bike. This wasn’t a graceful procedure with a big saddlebag in the way. Looking from face to covered face, I tried hard to convey appropriate emotions with the small visible parts of my own visage. No thoughts of envy for myself, it’s fair to say, but a welter of sadness, pride and affection for the late and mystical José Luis, for these three masked benefactors, above all for the extraordinary cyclist whose name was plastered all over the bike beneath me. Then I hoisted a string-backed glove, yanked off my poncy mask and freewheeled waywardly down the empty, sloping street, bullying feet into toe clips and doing ugly, crunching battle with the gear levers on my down tube.
CHAPTER 1
Before I hold down the rewind button and spool way back into monochrome history, let’s just give it a brief prod, returning to those balmy, barmy dog days of that first Covid lockdown, when the sun burned bright in a cloudless sky and time went all wrong. Afternoons that seemed to stretch out for a whole week; whole weeks that shot by in a flash. It’s not exactly a hard sell, but this would be an adventure born of stir-crazy, weapons-grade boredom.
My first task under house arrest was to settle down and watch a career in travel journalism die before my eyes. That took care of half an hour. Then I drank cider in the garden. Three days in, my wife came down with a fairly apparent dose of what my daughters called rona – headache, leaden fatigue and a total loss of smell. It dragged on and on, but got no worse than that. I took my son’s bedroom window out of its frame, carried it out on to the patio and somehow spent five whole days doing stuff to it with brushes and spatulas. I drank more cider; I drank stronger cider. I eradicated every last rhizome of every last buttercup from my flower beds. Just after my wife started feeling better, I started feeling worse. But I was lucky, too: a couple of days in bed, another week mired in a kind of jetlagged hangover, all the while with that same unsettling vacancy in my nostrils. Still, what a towering relief it was when I recovered, and could at last re-string our rotary washing line, pickle seven kilograms of carrots, and devote an entire fortnight to restoring the old traffic lights I’d left in my parents’ garage thirty years before.
Towards the end of April, I had scraped the bottom of my barrel of projects and pastimes. Then it came to me. With juggling, topiary or transvestism just hours away, I braved the horrid, spidery depths of my shed and effortfully extracted the bike I had ridden round France two decades previously. What a terrible state it was in, poor old ZR3000. Cracked and airless tyres, great coils of detached handlebar tape that spooled down to the floor. The front derailleur had broken off and everything was covered with rust, dust or both.
Resurrecting this forlorn machine to its proud, factory-fresh glory was more than a project – it was a duty of care, a moral obligation I had been postponing for at least fifteen shameful years. Make that sixteen and counting. I flicked off the biggest insects, pumped up the tyres, slashed away all the bar tape and gaffer-taped the redundant front derailleur cable round the seat tube. Then I went for a ride.
The sky was blue and the roads of London were weirdly, wonderfully empty. I went into town and had Oxford Street and its shuttered shops all to myself, in broad, bright daylight. I went out of town, south-west to Chertsey, up the Thames Path to Staines, back home down the Great West Road. A 30-mile circuit right under the Heathrow flight path, yet the loudest noise was birdsong. Well, that and ZR’s unlubricated shrieking. But I could live with that. The greatest legacy of my previous two cycling endeavours, in which I covered more than 15,000 kilometres on bikes with 140 years and three gears between them, is that everything I’ve ridden since seems like the finest, fastest, human-powered two-wheeler ever conceived. It’s just such a shame that I haven’t ridden anything since, not really. Those 30 miles were a good 27 more than I had cycled on any single day over the previous five years. But sometimes it doesn’t take much to rekindle the flame. Turns out, all I needed was the gentle nudge of living through a global pandemic with my front door welded shut.
I did the Chertsey loop an awful lot after that, getting my head down, pushing the speed up, loving the footloose freedom and successfully blotting out the plague’s ratcheting horrors. In previous years I’d have been watching the Giro d’Italia about this time, but along with the Tour it had been postponed. My Chertsey rides were filling a grand-tour-shaped hole in my life. One especially sweltering afternoon I even contrived an adverse reaction to a surfeit of performance-enhancing substances, chugging a giant flagon of Pepsi Max outside a petrol station because it was cheaper than a can, then throwing it up next to a taped-off playground down the road.
I felt myself being drawn ever deeper into this one-man, half-speed, groundhog grand tour. Lockdown seemed to lend itself to the endeavour: the soothing routines; that unkempt, fuck-it grubbiness; the sense of living in a bubble, a parallel world where everything seemed both tediously familiar yet utterly alien. By night I began to work through my pile of cycling books. Having written three of these it’s not entirely surprising that I get given a lot, but I always dread opening them. Why upset myself? When you read a book about cycling, the very least you deserve is an author who knows a lot about it, and ideally does a lot of it. Because I tick neither box, by the end of the first page I feel guilty and ashamed, laid bare as the total fraud I so clearly am.
It may have been thoughts like these that put Viva la Vuelta on top of my bedside pile. Spain’s national bike race is comfortably the least grand grand tour. It didn’t get going until 1935, twenty-six years after the Giro joined the Tour de France on the cycling calendar, and since then has been shunted all around the season – April, June, August, October – trying to find its niche. And failing, because the race has perennially struggled to attract the world’s best riders: Eddy Merckx only bothered with it once, casually destroying the field in 1973.
When the Vuelta does make history, it’s usually the wrong kind. After winning the 1974 edition by eleven seconds – then the closest ever margin in a grand tour – José Manuel Fuente astounded the foreign press by revealing that he’d calmed his last-stage nerves by chain-smoking through the night. In the 2013 edition, forty-one-year-old American rider Chris Horner became the oldest grand tour winner
Given all this, it’s probably no surprise that the English-language Viva la Vuelta appears to be the only published history of the race. Not even the Spanish have bothered with one. And yet I only got as far as page 25 before dropping it on the floor. To be clear, Viva la Vuelta is a most engaging read, and some weeks later I picked it up again and finished the whole book in a single sitting. I didn’t drop it in despair or indifference, but in the very frankest astonishment. By page 25 I had absorbed a potted account of the 1941 Vuelta a España, focused on the man who won it, and on how he had spent the previous five years of his life. By page 25 I knew how I would be spending the next few months of mine.
CHAPTER 2
The story of the 1941 Vuelta a España actually begins in 1936, on a train carrying two Spanish cyclists to Paris for the start of that year’s Tour de France. At twenty-four, the younger man has left his homeland only once before, competing in an Alpine hill climb that had brutally introduced him to the ferocious chicanery of the continental racing scene. The older is a veteran of two Tours, but as they rattle through the countryside he doesn’t offer the debutant any comforting advice. In part because he had spent the first night of his own first Tour crying himself to sleep, in a hotel room full of similarly traumatised Spanish teammates. And in part because the two riders, courtesy of a number of professional run-ins, absolutely despise each other. ‘The harmony between Federico Ezquerra and me was like the harmony in modern dance music,’ wrote Julián Berrendero in his autobiography, recalling this journey. ‘Which is to say – there was no harmony.’
In accordance with a format that prevailed until the 1960s, the 1936 Tour was organised in national teams of ten riders. Spain, where professional cycling was too poorly remunerated to support more than a handful of full-timers, could only muster five, who were imaginatively merged with a quintet of Luxembourgers by Henri Desgrange, the Tour’s tyrannical race director. The start-line photos are quite something: five strapping, lofty rouleurs looming over Spain’s beetle-browed, diminutive climbers.
Desgrange had great affection for the Spanish riders, but because these were the 1930s and he was a bit of a wanker, he expressed it through the medium of the offensive nickname. Vicente Trueba, a Spaniard of especially modest stature who won the inaugural King of the Mountains prize in 1933, found himself unhappily immortalised as The Flea of Torrelavega. Running with this theme, and adding a dollop of stereotype, Henri dubbed all future Spanish competitors ‘our little fishermen’. But he pulled out the stops for the rider who would emulate his countryman Trueba’s feat in 1936. Julián Berrendero had unusually dark skin, and, for a Spaniard, unusually pale peepers. And so, for the long balance of his career, Berrendero would read through race reports and magazine profiles – in both France and Spain – hoping in vain that this time he wouldn’t encounter any reference to The Black Man with the Blue Eyes.
In Paris, Berrendero was overwhelmed before the race even started. The street outside the team’s hotel was crowded day and night with autograph hunters, well-wishers and pretty girls, puckered-up and ready. ‘Our shoulders hurt from all those claps on the back, and our lips from all that kissing,’ he remembered in said autobiography, Mis Glorias y Memorias. The Spaniards were driven about the city in a complimentary taxi, and ate for free at fancy restaurants, entertaining waiters by miming their orders. (Up to a point, at least: Berrendero caused rather a scene when he asked for eggs with physical reference to a Spanish euphemism – by cupping his bollocks.)
The starting pistol had been handed to black film star and jazz dancer Josephine Baker, who batted for both teams and routinely posed topless. There weren’t many Josephine Bakers to the dozen back in hidebound, Catholic Spain. ‘She gave a carnation to every rider, and a kiss to those who wanted one,’ recalled Berrendero. ‘I got two.’
What followed, though, was as appalling as Ezquerra could have told him it would be. Shattered by the relentless pace (‘Who were these crazy supermen, riding close to 40kmh for hours on end?’), some very North European weather and a catastrophic mechanical, Berrendero finished the first stage plum last, an hour and seven minutes down. This was outside the time limit; only a rare moment of sympathetic weakness from Henri Desgrange saved him from disqualification. As he struggled through these bewildering highs and lows, perhaps it isn’t so surprising that in his account of these early stages, Berrendero makes absolutely no reference to the worrisome situation developing back home.
The Spanish riders had left a homeland in turmoil. The leftist Popular Front coalition – narrowly elected at the start of the year in what would be the country’s last free vote for forty years – was starting to unravel, and with radical elements holding the upper hand, Spain’s Nationalist opposition and its conservative supporters were convinced that a full-scale revolution was both inevitable and imminent. Mobs were storming prisons to free incarcerated anarchists and communists, and Falangist death squads ran amok, planting bombs, shooting suspect judges and left-wing MPs, gunning down workers in the centre of Madrid.
On the day the Tour started, socialist leader Francisco Largo Caballero – who had survived an assassination attempt three months earlier – warned of a looming military takeover: ‘There is a conspiracy afoot, one which hopes to implant a dictatorial regime equal to those that prevail in Italy and Germany.’ Spain had plenty of form in this field. Between 1814 and 1874 there had been thirty-seven attempted coups in the country, twelve of them successful. Another had been on the cards since 1934, when a revolutionary strike centred in the industrialised northern province of Asturias was brutally repressed. Nearly 2,000 people were killed, most of them miners, on the orders of the man sent to crush the uprising: General Francisco Franco.
The race wound south towards the Alps; en route, Ezquerra and Berrendero came to prominence after leading the field over the Ballon d’Alsace, this edition’s first categorised climb. The press photos show the Spanish team having a ball, delighted that they’ve survived a first week that saw eighteen riders abandon, and with their favoured territory now in sight. There they all are, grinning away in a fairground dodgem, around a bar piano, or in one notable instance while carrying a teammate in full drag across a hotel threshold. No trace of the latent enmities that flared up when Berrendero began to attack Ezquerra on the climbs, or of fear for their homeland’s welfare. The Tour’s relentless, all-encompassing clamour blotted out everything else. But thereafter, as the race got better and better for the Spanish, at home everything went horribly, murderously wrong.
13 July: Ezquerra and Berrendero are first over the Col des Aravis, the inaugural Alpine challenge. Spanish newspapers report the assassination of an anti-fascist police lieutenant by Falangist gunmen; the leader of the right-wing monarchist party is killed in retaliation.
14 July: Ezquerra takes the points atop a snowbound Galibier, remarkably setting a new record time, with Berrendero second. In Madrid, four people are shot dead when somebody has the bright idea of burying both sets of victims of the previous day’s murders in the same cemetery.
17 July: After a strong showing over the previous forty-eight hours, Berrendero enjoys the rest day in Digne; he now holds a narrow lead over Ezquerra in the ‘Challenge Martini-Rossi’, as that year’s mountains competition is officially titled. None of the riders are yet aware that Franco has launched a military rising from Spanish Morocco, and declared a state of war across Spain: by nightfall, carefully coordinated manoeuvres see his rebel troops in command of Cadiz, Salamanca and half a dozen other Spanish cities.
18 July: At the end of an inconsequential day in the Alps, the Spanish riders – Republicans to a man – are told the news from back home. By now rebel troops control a third of the country. Ezquerra takes it hardest, suffering ‘a grave moral crisis’. Then he defiantly vows to the gathered journalists that he will win the next stage.
