Viva la Vuelta: Lucy Fallon and Adrian Bell.
Mousehold Press, 2006. 335 pages paperback, £16.95. ISBN 1-874739-40-4
THE VUELTA IS by a long way the youngest of the 'three
major Tours', and its history is very different from that of the other
two. For instance: the Giro d'Italia wasn't won by a non-Italian until
the 33rd edition; the first two Vueltas were won by a Belgian, and 32
of the 54 run off before the year 2000 had been won by foreigners. Indeed,
the special treatment accorded outsiders (specially designed flat courses,
waiving of time penalties, etc) was a constant complaint of Spanish
riders and team managers into the 1980s.
The race had a difficult gestation, birth and childhood. Until the mid-sixties
Spain remained one of the poorest European countries, stifled under
a brutal dictatorship in collusion with the Catholic Church, and supported,
shamefully, by the United States in exchange for military bases (they
saw Franco as an ally against Communism).
Some understanding of the extraordinary recent history of Spain is essential
to a grasp of how the Vuelta came into being and succeeded, against
all odds, in surviving and growing. Then there's the geography: the
country is vast, essentially a high tableland with a narrow coastal
plain, green and rainy in the north-west, arid, almost desert, in the
south - but when rain falls there it does so in torrents. In 1935 only
the main roads were surfaced and there was little money for frills.
There was no formal government backing, but the Second Republic saw
a brief flowering of optimism, and an ex-cyclist, López Dóriga,
and a newspapermen, Juan Pujol, managed to get a bunch of 50 riders
on the road. There were two, before Franco provoked a civil war as savage,
bitter and cruel as any that Europe has known, even in the Balkans.
No-one could have foretold that this crude, stupid man would paralyse
the country for 36 years.
The Vuelta resurfaced briefly in 1941 - there were 32 starters - and
1942, ran from 1945 to 1950, and then seemed to have died forever when
no-one could be found willing to fund it. But in 1955 Alejandro Echevarría,
director of a Basque newspaper, invested six million pesetas in it.
It would be overstating the case to say that the Vuelta has never looked
back, but at last it had a place in the sun and could feel reasonably
secure.
In the next 17 years it was won by Spanish riders only five times. Individualistic
to a degree, each rider was apparently at odds with all the others,
even within professional teams. In a milieu of anarchy, the disciplined
foreign trade teams had a field day, a state of affairs that continued
into the eighties. A pity that, when Spanish unity finally arrived in
1985, the victim should have been Robert Millar.
When Franco died in 1975 millions rejoiced: there wasn't a dry bar in
the country. His death liberated Spain, which has since developed in
ways and to an extent which, one hopes, has the old cabron spinning
in his grave. The Vuelta benefited equally from the extraordinary (and
unexpected) flowering of freedom, autonomy and democracy which followed.
The move to September, much opposed at first, finally elevated the Vuelta
to the same level as the Giro, if not the Tour. Even Cycling Weekly
now gives it as much prominence. Britons have done well in the Tour
since the late sixties, with stage wins (Simpson, Wright, Elliott, and
others) points win (Elliott), and two near misses by Millar.
This detailed and thorough history is arranged in chronological blocks
of varying lengths, determined by significant events: pre-Civil War,
1941-42, 1945-50, 1955-58, and so on. The writing is competent and readable,
interweaving the history of Spain with that of the race, and each edition
of the race gets a detailed stage-by-stage account. There are tables
listing the first three in each year, the points and mountains winners,
lists of all the stage distances and winners, a good short bibliography,
and a satisfactory index of names. The binding is disappointing - my
copy was shedding pages before I'd finished - and the proof-reading
is unfortunate, with numerous mis-spellings and words wrongly used.
It's a pity that an otherwise excellent book should be so marred. But,
unusually, Lejarreta's name is correctly spelled.
How the Tour will cope with the Heras disaster remains to be seen, but,
like the Tour, it's now too big, too important commercially, to suffer
more than superficial damage. This is, as far as I know, the first complete
history of the race in English (there's a Spanish history from 1935-85).
Any cycling historian, or cyclist for that matter, who pretends to a
comprehensive library will feel obliged to have a copy.
Ramin Minovi