Re-Cycle: 'Until he'd killed the bull, he wasn't happy': The riddle of enigmatic Ocaña's only Vuelta victory

Mercurial, unpredictable, courageous, idealistic, superstitious, unlucky, cursed, manically energetic, a hypochondriac, fuelled by raw emotion, vulnerable to poor weather – Jesús Luis Ocaña Pernía was all of these things, and so much more.

It is perhaps a travesty of the Spaniard's legacy that Ocaña is better remembered for the Tour de France he lost in 1971 than the Tour he won in 1973. Described by Eddy Merckx as his "most dangerous rival", Ocaña was arguably the only rider who kept the high-flying Cannibal grounded during his pomp – doing so just days before singeing his own wings and coming crashing down to earth.

But ahead of that cruel, historic 1971 Tour, the 24-year-old Ocaña won the 1970 Vuelta a España to cement his position as Spain's biggest talent – the man who could finally bring the fight to Merckx and shake the Belgian stranglehold that held cycling in its vice-like grip.

"A volatile rider of undoubted class, but uncertain temperament," is how the author Geoffrey Nicholson wrote of Ocaña, describing the Spaniard as "accident prone and understandably anxious."

While his insecurities and lack of focus made Ocaña the antithesis of Merckx, he still believed he was one of the few who was not prepared to sit back and accept the Belgian's superiority. History, however, condemned Ocaña to live in Merckx's shadow; their rivalry defined his entire career and Ocaña's only Grand Tour wins came in the Cannibal's absence.

"He was a stylish cyclist when in perfect health – which was not as often as it should have been – a supreme time triallist on his day. He was more talented than the best cyclist Spain had produced until then, Federico Bahamontes."

If this is the summary of William Fotheringham, Merckx's biographer, then it's not entirely in sync with the views of his brother.

"It's more complicated than that," says Alasdair Fotheringham, who has written biographies on both Bahamontes, the 1959 Tour winner and six-time winner of the Polka Dot jersey, and his compatriot Ocaña.

"Bahamontes is widely rated as cycling's greatest-ever climber,” Alasdair Fotheringham continues. “And that means he was blessed with a level of talent that no other rider has possessed in that speciality. Ocaña, on a good day, was more dangerous than Bahamontes in Grand Tours because he was, as Eddy Merckx says, 'a great all-rounder'.

“He could win major week-long stage races – something Bahamontes found much harder to do. And he could descend and time trial far better than Bahamontes, too."

Born into poverty three months before the end of World War II, Ocaña was brought up in a remote village 150km east of Madrid. His father struggled to make a decent income, working in a textile factory before taking a job in a zinc mine in the Pyrenees. Here, Ocaña was forced to walk up the valley each day to school, some six kilometres away. One day, he hitched a lift on the back of a truck and marvelled at the cyclist who rode along in the vehicle's draft. It started his long love affair with the bike.

Shortly before Ocaña became a teenager, his family were invited by an uncle to move across the border to France where Luis Ocaña senior picked up work with his brother-in-law as a logger. Little Luis thrived in his new surroundings in the Armagnac wine region two hours south of Bordeaux, often borrowing his female cousin's bike to ride around the vineyards.

After saving up enough money through working as a mule driver transporting logs and picking grapes during the harvest, Ocaña bought his own bike – a moment he would later describe as "one of the most emotional in my life".

On the first ever Ocaña family holiday, when Luis was just 14, they travelled back to Madrid, where they saw a track meet at the city's indoor velodrome. Fresh from winning the Tour, Bahamontes – the Eagle of Toledo – was among a roll call of illustrious names that included champions Fausto Coppi, Jacques Anquetil and Louison Bobet.

Although the steep banking gave Ocaña the jitters, and his parents thought professional racing looked rather dangerous, he now knew what it was he wanted to do when he grew up. But first, on leaving school at 15, he became an apprentice carpenter, training on his bike in his spare time until he was old enough to compete on the amateur circuit.

Aged 18, he won a contract at a cycling club in the nearby town of Mont-de-Marsan, where he moved to ride and work part-time as a carpenter. In his first year of racing, Ocaña showed much promise in coming fifth in the Mont Faron hill climb just behind Tour stars Raymond Poulidor and Roger Pingeon. Later in the season, he received a winner's bouquet from a blonde girl who, 18 months later, became his wife.

Approaching a crossroads in his young life, the married 21-year-old Ocaña had to choose between a career as a carpenter or a cyclist; thankfully, he opted for cranks over chisel.

In 1968 he signed for the Spanish Fagor team and promptly became Spanish national champion. Then, disaster struck. His father unexpectedly died of prostate cancer just as Ocaña's wife gave birth to a baby boy. The rookie professional now had to support his mother and four siblings, as well as his own wife and child.

This backdrop of hardship and bad luck ran through Ocaña's life. In the words of William Fotheringham: "The Spaniard bore a slightly bitter half-smile on his lips, as if no matter the joy of the moment, he was always aware of the tragic undercurrents in his life."

Needing victories to make a name for himself and support his family, Ocaña quickly found himself competing in the pro ranks against the riders he'd looked up to as an amateur. And in only his third Grand Tour, the 1969 Vuelta, he almost pulled off victory against all odds. Ocaña made an instant impact, winning the prologue time trial in Badajoz to don the race's first Maillot Amarillo.

Two weeks into the race, he was in touching distance of the overall lead ahead of the Queen Stage. Featuring five climbs, the cold and rainy Stage 12 to Moyá saw the 23-year-old rip the peloton to shreds until only one rider remained on his back wheel. It was Pingeon, winner of the Tour de France two years previously, who refused to take a turn at the front, forcing Ocaña, whom he led by 39 seconds going into the stage, to do all the work.

But 15km from home, on the last climb of the day, Ocaña hit the wall and the Frenchman rode clear. Swept up and then spat out by the chasers, Ocaña ended up four minutes down on Pingeon, who took the Yellow Jersey and now had a five-minute cushion on his nearest rival.

Later, Ocaña admitted he had been tactically naïve that day by riding too hard and being too honest about his legs to his breakaway companion. "[I] lost the Vuelta because I had made the mistake of telling Pingeon I was not in good shape," he said. "And Pingeon immediately realised that, in my one moment of weakness, this was the point to attack."

Despite victories in two of the three remaining time trials, Ocaña could not overturn the deficit and ended 1'54" down on the winner to finish runner-up. Luis Piug, the president of the Spanish national federation, felt the glass was half-full, however, claiming, "We lost the Vuelta, but found a champion."

It would later emerge that the driving force behind Ocaña's foolhardy attack on the way to Moyá that day was not so much his desire to win the race, but to make a point. He had argued with his teammates the night before in the hotel at Barcelona, claiming they were not pulling their weight. It seemed only natural to someone of Ocaña's temperament to react by punishing everyone by riding out of his skin at the earliest opportunity – even if it meant shooting himself in the foot.

As his wife Josiane told Alasdair Fotheringham for his book, Reckless: The Life and Times of Luis Ocaña: "At the end of the day, my husband's biggest problem was that he never raced to win, it was purely because he liked the battle. He wouldn't listen, he just did whatever he wanted and, afterwards, that produced one result or another. He always used to say he didn't race for a palmarès. If he had done that, if he had thought things through beforehand, then he would have a lot more victories to his name."

Six weeks after finishing runner-up in Spain, Ocaña made his Tour debut, but had to be airlifted to hospital after a nasty crash on the eighth stage – two days after an earlier spill. He then joined the French BIC team ahead of the 1970 season, where the 24-year-old vied for leadership with the experienced Dutchman Jan Janssen, a winner of both the Tour and Vuelta. In Paris-Nice that year, Janssen won a stage but Ocaña finished in second place overall – behind an unbeatable Merckx. The early signs of a rivalry were beginning to take shape. And, when the Dutchman went to compete in the Spring Classics, Ocaña was sent to Spain to have another stab at the Vuelta.

For a race that was decided on the afternoon of the final day, the 25th Vuelta was not an especially vintage edition.

"It wasn't a very exciting race at all," says Alasdair Fotheringham. "Except in one big aspect – that it confirmed the breakthrough for Ocaña in terms of fighting for Grand Tours."

Given that Ocaña went on to show that he was the only rider capable of beating Merckx until the Frenchman Bernard Thévenet's star turn on Pra Loup in 1975 , this was of huge significance. Numerous things counted in Ocaña's favour in 1970, not least the absence of Merckx. In fact, a distinct lack of star names – including Pingeon, the defending champion – meant that the Spaniard, in only his third Grand Tour, was the favourite.

The reasoning behind this was quite simple. At BIC, Ocaña found himself as the main cog in a far stronger team than Fagor, and in directeur sportif Maurice de Muer, the Spaniard was in the hands of a shrewd, albeit at times over-zealous, tactician and supportive father figure.

"In those days the Vuelta was far from being the mountainous beast it is today – the first summit finish did not appear until 1972. So a largely flat – and it has to be said, boring – route played in his favour as well," says Fotheringham.

The threat of a new anti-doping control hung over the peloton like the Sword of Damocles and the promise of fines and sanctions for offenders saw three teams pull their riders on the eve of the race. From the reduced field of 100 riders, Ocaña's main rivals for the Yellow Jersey were compatriot Agustin Tamames of the Werner team, and the Belgian Herman Van Springel, who had finished second behind Janssen in the 1968 Tour. Bookended by time trials of six and 29km, the route featured only five first-category climbs – although a new 'secret sprint' classification had been introduced with flying sprints at unknown locations revealed only by a banner 500m before they began.

Ocaña won the opening prologue only because of TT specialist René Pijnen’s crash just 20m from the finish. The flying Dutchman had to carry his bike over the line and, even then, lost only by four-10ths of a second. Pijnen took over the lead from Ocaña the following day, although a timing error meant the Spaniard was initially awarded the jersey and bouquet of flowers on the podium.

Rookie rider Julián Cuevas won the second stage, but did not dare smile on the podium because a recent crash had seen him lose a number of teeth. Following the fourth stage, a minor flashpoint occurred when a rider threw down some sweets to fans from his hotel window, only for a car headlight to be damaged in the ensuing melee below. This resulted in the rider in question, José Maria Errandonea, who would go on to win Stage 18, being called in for questioning at the local police station at midnight.

That same day, the BIC team reported a theft of some equipment from their hotel in the Murcian town of Lorca. With the help of a local pro rider, who reached out to the thieves in what was clearly a tight community, the missing new wheels and tubulars were returned to Ocaña's team that night.

Pijnen wore the leader's jersey for nine days before relinquishing it to Ocaña on the ninth stage – an undulating schlep between Barcelona and Igualada, featuring three climbs. Tamames won the stage but Ocaña picked up 10 bonus seconds on the climb of Monserrat, which put him back on the race summit.

Celebrations for Tamames' Werner team were muted, however, after their bags were stolen from the team car in Barcelona, depriving them of their clothes and belongings after the stage. This time there was no local pro to act as a go-between and locate the pilfered items.

The pick of the performances during Ocaña's second stint in yellow came from his Luxembourg teammate Johny Schleck, who pretty much rode the entire 204km Stage 12 to Madrid ahead of the pack, arriving solo in the Spanish capital well ahead of schedule.

"The stage into Madrid was run off so fast," says Fotheringham, "it reached the finish in the Retiro park an hour before schedule, meaning that the race hostesses hadn't arrived so the organisers asked three women in the crowd to step in to hand over the prizes."

Ten years after his only Grand Tour stage scalp, Johnny Schleck's wife gave birth to a second son, called Fränk. Andy would appear five years later. Between them, the Schleck brothers would dwarf the achievements of their father, with Fränk following in his footsteps with a Vuelta stage victory; Andy – eventually – winning the 2010 Tour de France, and both brothers standing on the podium in Paris a year later.

Meanwhile, back in 1970, Ocaña surrendered the race lead to Tamames on Stage 13 after the latter picked up 10 bonus seconds on the climb of Somosierra. Just one second separated the top two in the General Classification. Following a raft of negative tests in one of the new doping controls, Ocaña couldn't resist telling reporters: "Not all the peloton are running on water alone."

Make of that what you will. Tamames wore the Yellow Jersey for the entire final week of the race, knowing that he needed to extend his lead ahead of the final time trial if he wanted any chance of being crowned the overall victor in Bilbao. But on Stage 17, a tough 191km from Santander to Vitoria, he almost threw it away when Ocaña broke clear with a late move and came within a whisker of pulling off a coup before being reeled in.

"That was probably the only moment where, with hindsight, the race could have been decided by anything barring the time trials," says Fotheringham.

A year older than Ocaña, Tamames, a future Vuelta winner and teammate of the eventual 1970 champion, was a faster finisher than his compatriot, but not as good against the clock.

"In terms of temperament, he was far less fiery and impetuous than Ocaña, but you could say that he was more resourceful, given what he achieved with less natural talent," Fotheringham adds.

The final day of the race featured a road stage in the morning followed by a time trial in the afternoon. Entering the final TT, just seven seconds separated the top two, with the entire top 10 all clustered within one minute of Tamames. He might have started the 29km test in the Yellow Jersey, but it didn't bode well for the man from Salamanca.

"Tamames said he'd need two minutes to win the Vuelta, and he was right," says Fotheringham. Riding at an average pace of almost 44kmph, Ocaña won the time trial – his fifth Vuelta TT victory in six attempts – with his rival coming home a commendable fourth place, 1'25" down. Ocaña's final gap over Tamames was 1'18". Van Springel completed the podium a further nine seconds back.

Last of the 59 riders in the overall standings was the Spaniard Mingo Fernández, just two hours back – a sign of the course’s relative ease half a century ago, and a far cry from the uphill savagery we expect from today's Vuelta. For an impetuous rider who so often crumbled under pressure and the weight of expectation, Ocaña always displayed an uncanny ability to remain 100 per cent focused during time trials. Perhaps it was something to do with riding alone and on his own terms? For Ocaña, hell really was other people.

Affectionately nicknamed 'Chepas', or ‘Humpy’, on account of his slight humpback, Ocaña had an aerodynamic position on the bike and a pair of powerful pistons that served him well during time trials.

But if he owed his victory to this ability against the clock and his calmness and maturity to deliver the goods at the 11th hour, he must also be commended for addressing the weaknesses that saw him pass up that chance to win his debut Vuelta 12 months earlier. Fotheringham goes as far as to argue that the roots of Ocaña's win came in that spectacular collapse in the 1969 race.

"Contrary to popular belief that his greatest talent was as a climber,” he says, “Ocaña's success was thanks to being an amazingly talented time triallist who could also handle the mountains well – not the other way round. In 1969 Pingeon's beating him despite Ocaña's domination in the time trials showed Ocaña he had to improve his climbing enough to defend whatever advantage he took against the clock. By 1970, he was able to do that."

A week after the Vuelta, Ocaña was on the start line for the Dauphiné where, in the absence of Merckx, he beat Pingeon and Van Springel to the overall crown. This ensured that he was named among the favourites – alongside the Cannibal, who'd just won his second Giro, and the Frenchman Bernard Thévenet – when the Tour de France rolled out of Limoges a month later.

"In the words of his first, and most important trainer, the late Pierre Cescutti: 'The 1970 Vuelta was when Luis began to realize he could win the Tour,'” says Fotheringham. “At 24, it made him much more of an up-and-coming international star, and after winning his first Dauphiné, even more so."

But by now he'd also burned himself out by racing way too hard all spring. Coupled with his fragile health, a divided BIC team and, in Fotheringham's words, a gung-ho directeur sportif in De Muer who was "apt to overestimate everyone's strength, including his star rider," the wheels were about to fall off Ocaña's season.

In the event, the 1970 Tour was a disaster for Ocaña. Laid low by bronchitis and haemorrhoids, he shipped 12 minutes in a transitional stage before the Alps to put himself out of contention. In Stage 13 to Gap, he was on the verge of quitting the race in the grupetto on the Col du Noyer before he was joined by teammate Charly Grosskost. With the Frenchman's help, Ocaña got into a rhythm and recovered. At the top, Grosskost told Ocaña he couldn't go on; the Spaniard showed his class by stopping, thanking him for his help with a big hug, and then continued to the finish, crossing the line 20 minutes down.

That evening, Grosskost said: "I could never imagine until today that a rider could suffer as much as that. It makes sacrificing everything for him so worthwhile."

Ocaña toiled on Mont Ventoux the next day but managed to pick up a win on Stage 17 and in the final time trial to Paris to finish an impressive second behind the irrepressible Merckx. Eight stage wins saw Merckx canter to a second Tour win, with only debutant Joop Zoetemelk able to finish within 15 minutes of the untouchable man in yellow.

Thirty-first overall, Ocaña was more than an hour adrift of the Belgian. It was not the result he or his BIC team were looking for, but he showed character to stay in the race. And, given his illnesses and ultimate recovery, it was perhaps further proof that Ocaña had what it would take to win the Tour one day.

Everything was building up to 1971 – the year Ocaña could, perhaps should, have beaten Merckx at the Tour. Ocaña had done enough to convince BIC to build the team entirely around him, which led to the inevitable departure of Janssen.

Before the Tour, there was the small matter of Ocaña defending his Vuelta crown. With fewer than 10 time trial kilometres spread over two very short stages, plus persistent rain, Ocaña always had his work cut out. He was forced to settle for third place behind Peugeot's Belgian duo of Ferdinand Bracke and Wilfried David. At the Dauphine, Merckx and Ocaña squared up for the first time that season, the Cannibal ending up on top by 54 seconds at the Tour’s dress rehearsal. At the main event, victory on the Puy de Dôme in the Tour's eighth stage saw Ocaña rise to third place behind Merckx and Zoetemelk ahead of the Alps.

The scene was set for the Spaniard's best day on a bike – the day he would destroy his big rival. On Stage 11 to Orcières-Merlette, Ocaña inflicted upon Merckx the worst defeat he would ever suffer in a major Tour. After an astonishing solo breakaway of 120km through the Alps, Ocaña beat third-placed Merckx by a staggering 8'42" to soar into the first Yellow Jersey of his career.

Quizzed by reporters following his draining three-hour pursuit of Ocaña, Merckx admitted he came close to breaking point: "If you'd asked me if I was tempted to get off the bike, I would have to tell you I thought about it. I was wasted. What Luis just did was extraordinary. He was superior to everyone."

Merckx would rally in true Merckxian fashion. After the rest day, he put in a 250km break of his own to slash two minutes from his deficit, and then won the time trial before the race entered the Pyrenees. The Belgian was up to second place, but still trailed Ocaña by more than seven minutes when disaster struck – as was so often the case – for the Spaniard.

On Stage 14 to Luchon, Merckx put in a succession of accelerations on the Col de Menté to put his rival on the ropes. And when the heavens opened on the descent, the Belgian pushed himself and his competitors to the very limit of endurance.

In the chaotic deluge, Merckx skidded in the hail and grit on one of the mountain’s tight hairpins, clipping a low stone wall and falling. He remounted, but two spectators had been forced to take evasive action, in turn forcing the chasing Ocaña to hit the deck. The man in yellow lay on his side with his feet still in the pedals as riders whooshed by. Just as he was getting to his feet, with acute pain in his shoulder and knees, he was T-boned by an out-of-control Zoetemelk.

Two other riders joined the tangle and Ocaña, semi-conscious and in extreme pain, was left sprawled across the road, both his Yellow Jersey and dreams in tatters. He was taken in an ambulance down to the valley from where, for the second time in three years, he left the race by helicopter to the nearest hospital.

Out of respect for his fallen rival, Merckx refused to wear the Yellow Jersey the next day – even though he had gone from being seven minutes down, to two minutes clear.

"I would have preferred to finish the Tour in second after having battled every day rather than take the lead like this," he said.

Ocaña skipped the Vuelta in 1972, putting all his eggs in the Tour basket. After beating Thévenet by more than three minutes in the Dauphiné, he entered the Tour once again as the man Merckx needed to beat.

While he was competitive, Ocaña's unlucky streak of being caught up in crashes went into overdrive. Merckx kept him at bay and the struggling Spaniard, having dropped to third place almost seven minutes in arrears, quit the race ahead of Stage 15. It turned out he had contracted a lung infection after an earlier spill in the opening week.

It was only when Merckx was missing from the startlist in 1973 that Ocaña kept things together to become Spain's second Tour winner after Bahamontes. He did so in some style, winning six stages and besting runner-up Thévenet by almost 16 minutes come Paris.

For all his brilliance, there was no way to erase the burning conviction held by all that, had Merckx been there, Ocaña would have buckled under the pressure. After all, when the Belgian decided to make his one and only appearance in the Vuelta earlier that year, he came out on top. Second place? Ocaña, of course.

Injury kept him out of the 1974 Tour as Merckx romped to a record-equalling fifth triumph. And when Thévenet famously ended the Belgian's reign on the climb to Pra Loup a year later, Ocaña was no longer around, having withdrawn from the race days earlier following yet another crash. He rode two more Tours – and finished them both – but never reached the same competitive heights again.

As for the Vuelta, after finishing behind Merckx in 1973, Ocaña finished fourth two years running. On the second occasion, in 1975, he did so in support of Tamames, who had now become his teammate at the Super-Ser team. Five years after losing out to Ocaña in a time trial on the final day, Tamames won his only Vuelta by winning the final TT to turn a deficit of 1'17" into a 14-second winning margin over compatriot Domingo Perurena.

Ocaña was not yet dead and buried. He came back a year later and came close to winning the 1976 Vuelta, but had to settle for a third bridesmaid's finish, this time behind compatriot José Pesarrodona. As crazy as it would seem at the time, he was never able to replicate the triumph he tasted as a 24-year-old in 1970.

Winning the Tour was easier than winning the Vuelta, Ocaña once remarked, because "in Spain it seemed I was expected to win each and every stage". Living in France and married to a French woman, he also had a hot-and-cold relationship with the Spanish fans, who viewed him as French when he was losing – especially while at BIC – and Spanish only when he was winning.

As things panned out, Ocaña only ever added one more Vuelta stage scalp to his name after that brace of TT victories in 1970. So, why was it that the best cyclist Spain had produced failed to build on his early success in the Vuelta?

"The race got more mountainous, for one thing. Merckx taking part in 1973 was another," says Fotheringham. "Ocaña suffered from perennial, epic, levels of bad luck with crashes – and his health was also very fragile.

"But most of all, [he suffered because of] his self-destructive character: as a man of extremes and someone who was very impetuous, his teammates would lose count of the times Ocaña would meticulously prepare every last detail of a race, and then completely ignore his team orders to go off on a solo day-long break, or abandon because he was in a bad mood.

"In other words, Ocaña was brilliantly talented but he was his own worst enemy. Given how high the odds were against him – some of his own making, some not – it's amazing what he did achieve in his career."

It was precisely this recklessness that inspired the title of Fotheringham's biography of Ocaña – a trait that can be easily passed off as panache on the bike when things are going well, but something that bordered on craziness and self-destruction when the chips were down.

Ocaña just didn't do things by half measures. As double Tour winner Thévenet put it: "If Luis wanted to win a race, it had to be with an hour's advance, that was what counted. It was all [about] panache and how he won. He was a real torero. And until he'd killed the bull and it was good and dead, he wasn't happy."

A rider who thrived when he was the underdog, Ocaña at times displayed supreme self-confidence that bordered on arrogance. This served him well when, as in the 1970 Vuelta, things were going his way and he suffered no setbacks. But as soon as he came up against a serious obstacle, he crumbled.

"Mentally, he was a conundrum," says Fotheringham, adding an observation by Zoetemelk: "He was either right at the back of the bunch, feeling miserable as hell because things weren't going well, or right at the front, waiting to attack because he felt great."

Ocaña quit the peloton in 1977, aged 32, following a positive drugs test at that year's Tour. He opened a brandy distillery after retiring in south-west France; legend has it that his old foe Merckx helped him find distributors in Belgium.

Never truly accepted in either Spain or France, Ocaña was an enigmatic outsider who buckled under the pressure of success during the height of his career. Depressed over financial matters and suffering from liver cirrhosis, hepatitis C and cancer, Ocaña committed suicide with a single gunshot in 1994. He was 49.