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.
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