Vuelta a Espana – Re-Cycle: When Federico Bahamontes gifted the 1957 Vuelta to rival Jesús Loroño
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Updated 25/08/2021 at 14:42 GMT
One of cycling’s bitterest rivalries exploded during the 1957 Vuelta a España, when Federico Bahamontes blew a 16-minute lead to hand his big rival Jesús Loroño the yellow jersey on a plate. But, as Felix Lowe recalls, there’s much more than there seems to a story that blends social, political, economic, sporting and personal conflict.
Federico Bahamontes
Image credit: Getty Images
The dust had barely settled on the Coppi and Bartali whirlwind that gripped Italian cycling either side of the Second World War, and the Anquetil verses Poulidor narrative had yet to capture the hearts and minds of French fans, when Spain was captivated by a rivalry of its own in the 1950s that split the nation in two.
In the one camp, the Bahamonistas, supporters of the Castilian rider widely considered to be among the best climbers of all time; in the other, the Loroñistas, Basque fans devoted to the ruthless rider who constantly clipped the wings of the so-called Eagle of Toledo. Loroño would pip his great rival to both the Tour de France polka dot jersey and the Vuelta’s yellow jersey, but ultimately leave behind a lesser legacy than Spain’s first ever Tour winner.
“It turned into an eight-year duel that tapped directly into some of the most important divisions within Spanish society of the time and is still referred to as the most intense rivalry between two individual athletes in the history of sport in the country,” writes Alasdair Fotheringham, Bahamontes’ biographer.
Through their bitter feud, these two riders came to symbolise one of the most damaging, deep-rooted divisions within Franco’s Spain: the Basque Country verses Madrid. Theirs was a rivalry that rolled social, political, economic, sporting and personal conflict into one – often to the point of self-sabotage and national embarrassment. If Loroño represented separatism, then Bahamontes represented unity – although nothing he did on the bike could be described exactly as ‘unifying’ when it came to his teammates.
It was said that Bahamontes and Loroño were so proud and so stubborn that both would do anything to stop the other from winning – even if that meant not winning themselves. It could be infuriating to follow, although the media loved it; the trading of insults, refusal to collaborate, and constant accusations of foul play, cheating and betrayal combined to produce fertile ground for journalists, many of whom were unable to resist stirring the pot.
It was a rivalry that, according to Loroño’s biographer Javier Bodegas, reached “grotesque” levels of skulduggery and outside influence – with Bahamontes, the man at the centre of it all, even claiming State influence in the race he so dramatically lost in 1957.
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Ganadores Tour Federico Martín Bahamontes-1959-España
Image credit: Getty Images
The background to an enduring rivalry
Widely accepted as the greatest ever climber to grace the sport, Federico Bahamontes won the Tour de France polka dot jersey six times between 1954 and 1964, but it was Jesús Loroño, a former woodcutter and trench-digger, who became Spain’s first post-War King of the Mountains in 1953. Perhaps it was here that the seeds of their deep personal feud were sowed – at least symbolically.
According to Fotheringham, Bahamontes was cycling’s “most emblematic climber: the figure who, the moment the road steepened, would automatically power through the peloton, legs hammering away; the ultimate specialist in stretching the bunch beyond the limits of pain on the cols to the point where they would have to give up and let him go.”
Bahamontes was a climber so accomplished that, legend has it, he had time to stop at the summit of a climb and eat an ice cream while he waited for the peloton to arrive, the polka dot points safely collected in his jersey pocket.
It’s a cute story, but also misleading. The Eagle of Toledo did indeed enjoy an ice cream atop the Col de Romeyère on his debut Tour in 1954 – but only because he’d broken two spokes and was approached by the vendor while he impatiently waited for assistance. Such myths, however, helped contribute to Bahamontes’ reputation as an eccentric maverick – a loner with a bad temper, given to fits of child-like petulance, and once described by the great Fausto Coppi as “stubborn as a mule”.
Born in the suburbs of Toledo not far from Madrid in 1928, Bahamontes was from a large family who lived in abject poverty before and during the Spanish Civil War. Times were so hard that Bahamontes later admitted to eating cats which he hunted with a sling at night-time. Young Fede also resorted to petty theft, before raising enough money to buy a bike in 1946, which he used to transport food on the black market between villages.
Having recovered from typhoid, he rode his first amateur race in 1947 with only a banana and a lemon as sustenance – and managed to finish second. And that set the wheels in motion for a career in which Bahamontes excelled most when the road edged upwards.
“No one could match the Eagle for his impetuous, impassioned, hell-bent style of attack; a slightly zany tendency to attack for the hell of it,” Fotheringham writes in his biography of Bahamontes, The Eagle of Toledo. His tactical acumen was so limited – and his predilection for a grudge so great – that Bahamontes would often build up colossal leads over the summits before losing it all on the flat, only to blame everyone except himself.
Hailing from authoritarian, central Spain, Bahamontes could count General Franco among his fans – and the pair even brushed shoulders on at least one occasion. This already set Bahamontes apart from the man who would become his biggest rival, Basque rouleur Loroño, who, far from being a Franco fanatic, brushed shoulders (and shared family ties) with numerous diehard Basque separatists.
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Spanish cyclist Jesus Lorono during a mountain stage in the Pyrenees between Pau and Cauterets of the 40th Tour de France in July 1953 in France
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Two-and-a-half years older, Loroño had already ridden four Grand Tours and won a stage on the Tour before Bahamontes made his Tour debut in 1954 – winning the polka dot jersey while Loroño was condemned to a hospital bed after suffering a collision with a motorcycle earlier in the season. Both riders were in the Spanish squad for the 1955 Vuelta, but it was not until a year later when their rivalry ramped up a notch.
“Sport apart,” writes Fotheringham, “there was also a major social divide between the two. For the Basques, Loroño was a well-built, no-nonsense, working-class hero from Bilbao’s industrial and agricultural hinterland, who was taking on the more eccentric, erratic wisp of a climber from some dusty city down south. Certainly their personalities could not have been more different. Loroño was dour, pragmatic, straightforward and a direct kind of talker. Bahamontes, on the other hand, was far more quixotic.”
Such were their differences that Bahamontes, who was rendered tipsy by even a sip of alcohol, apparently felt personally affronted by Loroño’s habit of drinking a bottle of wine with dinner during races. Bodegas, a Spanish writer who has penned biographies on both Bahamontes and Loroño, as well as Coppi and Eddy Merckx, claims in his Cycling Milestones series that the pair could just about respect each other in public, but despised each other on the bike.
“Their run-ins were epic,” Bodegas says. “Even though they both rode for the Spanish national team in Grand Tours, they attacked each other no matter who was in front. They rode many races with the sole objective of ensuring the other didn’t win. What happened in Spain during those years is comparable to the tribalism we now see in football – with followers of one rider booing the other, and vice versa. Bear in mind, too, that both riders had friends who were journalists and who would also meddle between the riders and their manager. Sometimes it was even the journalists who dictated when each rider attacked. Their rivalry was, in short, grotesque rather than sporting – and for this reason, many third parties looked to take advantage.”
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Federico Bahamontes climbs during stage 13 of the 1958 Tour de France
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Setting the scene: Bahamontes’ bad luck in 1956
When Angelo Conterno became the first Italian to win the Vuelta in 1956, his eventual advantage over second-placed Loroño was just 13 seconds. Forget that Conterno used every trick in the book to come out on top – including enlisting the support of the Swiss team to help push him up the final mountain of the race. However, it wasn’t the man who came second who felt most hard done by, but the rider who missed out on the final podium – and a possible overall win – after events transpired against him in the final decisive stages.
Despite both being part of the same Spanish team managed by Luis Puig, Bahamontes and Loroño rode their own races and attacked each other at will. With just four stages remaining, the Eagle trailed Conterno by just eight seconds. When he attacked on the short-but-sharp climb of Elgueta, on Stage 15 from San Sebastian to Bilbao, he went into the virtual lead – only to be waylaid by a puncture and fall on the descent.
To make matters worse, it was Loroño who led the chase with Conterno, Bahamontes’ compatriot ultimately benefiting from his misfortune to ride clear on the brutal climb of Urkiola. Bahamontes led the chase – and at one point had Conterno tugging at his jersey, prompting claims later on that he had wilfully pulled the Italian up the climb to defy Loroño, who still finished 47 seconds clear at the finish.
How Loroño overturned Bahamontes’ lead in 1957
And so to 1957, when the Spanish camp’s in-fighting hit the kind of levels that we would see between teammates Greg LeMond and Bernard Hinault in 1986, Stephen Roche and Roberto Visentini in 1987, Alberto Contador and Lance Armstrong in 2009 and, to a lesser extent, Bradley Wiggins and Chris Froome in 2012. Put simply: the Vuelta that year witnessed a team ravaged from within, but still managing to take the overall prize.
While the two main protagonists in this cataclysmic showdown were Bahamontes and Loroño, there was a third rider who played an important role – even though he had been relegated to one of the four regional Spanish teams for the race: Bernardo Ruiz. The Spanish veteran, winner of the Vuelta in 1948, had beaten both men earlier in the season to take the Vuelta Ciclista a la Comunidad Valenciana and, with many of his usual Faema trade teammates filling out the Spanish ‘A’ team, Ruiz was waiting in the wings for an opportunity.
Another figure also had his say in the overall outcome – even if he could never say which side of the fence he occupied. Luis Puig, the Spanish squad directeur sportif, felt a two-pronged assault on the yellow jersey was the team’s best chance of glory. Essentially, claiming that the road would decide was his way of shying away from backing a horse.
“An avuncular type given to bland, meaningless statements of goodwill that proved ideal for a political career that eventually led him to becoming president of the UCI, Puig was totally incapable of handling his two top riders,” Fotheringham writes. “Instead, Puig relied excessively on Ruiz, who, unbeknown to him, was in the Loroño camp, and then promptly washed his hands of any major conflicts. It took the Spanish Federation two years, and a huge scandal in the Tour de France, to realise that with Loroño and Bahamontes in the line-up, someone willing to bang heads together would be far more appropriate for the job.”
To his credit, even Puig admitted that his was a thankless task: “Armed with two of cycling’s monsters, I have to coordinate what cannot be coordinated,” he said. With Bahamontes leading a team packed with allies of Loroño, it was, in the words of Fotheringham, “a recipe for total anarchy”.
The early advantage went to Loroño, who put two minutes into his opponents after getting in the breakaway in the opening stage. Two days later, Bahamontes regained the upper hand after going clear with compatriot Salvador Botella then soloing to glory – and the yellow jersey – in the Asturias mountains. Loroño lost a whopping 13 minutes, but sought to strike back at the earliest opportunity the next day. Mindful that his rival hated the cold, he took advantage of a snowstorm en route to Léon only for the organisers to suspend the stage as conditions worsened. Furious, Loroño continued pedalling up the Pajares pass and had to be hauled off his bike.
On Stage 6 to Madrid, Bahamontes conceded the lead to Botella, a close ally and Faema teammate of Ruiz. This marked the first time that Bahamontes was seriously let down by his team, most notably Puig, who failed to warn him of the growing gap the escapees were gaining.
In the following loop stage that took in the sierras outside the Spanish capital, Bahamontes punctured on the Navacerrada climb. To his credit, Loroño voluntarily gave his teammate a spare wheel – although later admitted that he regretted his act of kindness. After all, on the subsequent Stage 8 to Cuenca, Bahamontes, with a little help from the French team, put in a climbing masterclass to take another three minutes from his rivals and move back into yellow. At this point, Loroño was well and truly out of it, a distant 15’54” down on GC.
But the real drama had yet to begin. As Ruiz would tell Fotheringham many years later: “Fede had more enemies in the national team for the Vuelta in 1957 than out of it.” And the hot-headed Castilian’s chickens were about to come home to roost.
As soon as Stage 10 from Valencia to Tortosa started, Ruiz went clear on the coastal road with two others. Loroño joined shortly afterwards with four others while Bahamontes was busy mincing around near the back of the peloton. According to Fotheringham, the 1950s pro Luis Otaño recalls Loroño later telling him: “‘During the break Ruiz was yelling: ‘Go! Go, Jesús! Bahamontes is dropped and you’re going to win the Vuelta. You’re better than him – f**k it, go, ride!’”
Amazingly, there was no counter-attack from the peloton as the gap continued to grow and grow. The French squad of Raphaël Géminiani was waiting for a reaction from the man in yellow but, curiously, Bahamontes seemed remarkably passive for someone watching his lead slip away to his deadliest rival. And when the peseta finally dropped, none of his teammates were willing to lend him a hand while their ally Loroño was up the road. Bahamontes would later go so far as to claim that, when he tried to bridge across, several of these teammates held onto his shorts and pulled him back.
As Ruiz explained to Fotheringham: “With Loroño ahead, and with all my Faema teammates and friends in the national squad behind, nobody would work for Bahamontes. Bahamontes was the leader, he could have won that Vuelta, he should have won it, but he didn’t know how to win over his teammates.”
Initially, Puig had apparently ordered Loroño to back down – and there are reports that he even made several attempts to block the road with his car while ordering his man to sit up. But Loroño just rode around the blockade, shouting to Puig that he would not stop “even if the Civil Guard [Spain’s military police force] were coming to get me”.
Once the gap hit double figures, there was little the indecisive Spanish DS could do but wash his hands of the situation. It was the Italian Bruno Tognaccini who took the win, but all the talk in Tortosa was of the staggering 21’59” gap the breakaway gained on the main field. Loroño, the new man in yellow, had gone from being 16 minutes down on Bahamontes to six minutes ahead, as the bitterest feud in Spain’s sporting history reached its apotheosis. That night, the two riders almost came to blows in the team hotel – and Bahamontes refused to eat dinner with his teammates.
The Huesca Pact: a ceasefire of sorts
Bahamontes went on the offensive during the next stage, from Barcelona to Zaragoza. Loroño chased him down and the pair were still trading insults off the front as a dangerous five-man move skipped on past. This set the tone for an unsavoury final few days of the race. Tensions rose so much that the Spanish Cycling Federation intervened after Stage 13 to Huesca in the form of a telegram informing the duo that, unless they tidied up their acts, they would be booted off the race.
An emergency summit meeting between the pair and their brokers resulted in ‘The Huesca Pact’. Bahamontes and Loroño then put on a collective brave face and shook hands in front of the media. But no one was fooled, and the bickering would continue all the way to Bilbao. “They kept insulting each other all the time,” Ruiz recalled. “It was incredible. Like something out of a film.”
Less than 24 hours after that staged handshake, Bahamontes – who had tried to quit overnight only to be talked down – rode the 85km time trial with an illegal 28-spoke front wheel from a track bike, helping him to second place, just six seconds behind his rival. A subsequent one-minute penalty saw Bahamontes drop to third place, but his actions left Loroño incensed, claiming Bahamontes still gained more of an advantage from using the wheel, regardless of the sanction.
Bahamontes “attacked and attacked and attacked” according to El Mundo Deportivo as the race entered France for a stage to Bayonne and then back to San Sebastian the following day. But each time he opened up a gap, Loroño managed to reel him in – often with a little help from Ruiz, who was riding to protect his own place on the podium.
Even on the penultimate day, when it was agreed that Bahamontes could go clear on the final climb to secure the King of the Mountains competition and cement his second place on GC, a suspicious Loroño did not trust his nemesis, and darted off in pursuit. Puig ordered Loroño to fall back, but the man in yellow replied that he feared Bahamontes would continue attacking after the summit. For his part, once Bahamontes heard that Loroño was chasing him, he claimed the pact was void, so he would no longer ease up after the summit as agreed.
It was a scenario that would have had even Joseph Heller’s Yossarian scratching his head. In the end, Puig reportedly ordered one of the race organisers to block Bahamontes on the descent with his Land Rover – another one of those mythical incidents now impossible to verify. A stalemate came on the final day as Loroño rode into Bilbao in front of an adoring home crowd of Basque fans to win his first and only Vuelta by 8’11” over Bahamontes, with Ruiz completing the podium. Spain had its first Vuelta winner for seven years, but it was far from the harmonious occasion such a result should have guaranteed.
Bahamontes’s claims of a conspiracy
By turning the tables so spectacularly and snatching victory from the jaws of defeat, Loroño had destroyed his big rival’s best chance of ever winning the Vuelta. That the Basque rider’s greatest triumph came in a race that Bahamontes had been dominating was all the sweeter, as Loroño blew the doors off his compatriot’s rising popularity in Spain by causing one of the biggest scandals of Spanish cycling history.
“Fede says that we robbed him of that Vuelta,” Ruiz said 50 years later. “But he was vulnerable, he let himself lose it. And the ones who knew how to race, well, just like in this Vuelta, we beat him.”
For his part, Loroño told Fotheringham that: “I never thought I’d get the yellow jersey. From two-thirds of the way through the stage [to Tortosa] it was pretty clear what was happening. But if Bahamontes couldn’t do anything then it was because he couldn’t.”
One journalist said at the time that “the Valencia-Tortosa stage was the execution wall for Bahamontes, and Loroño and Luis Puig were the ones firing the rifles”. But was there more to the turn of events than what Fotheringham describes as a “brutal, barefaced betrayal” on the part of Loroño, his Spanish teammates and their bungling sporting director?
Although he never said anything at the time, Bahamontes later made the outlandish claim that he had been “robbed” by a government telegram from the Minister of Sport, José Antonio Elola, received while in Valencia on the eve of that fateful stage to Tortosa and instructing him to throw the race in favour of Loroño. Given Spain was in the midst of a military dictatorship, ignoring such orders would have been a dangerous game to play – even for the country’s top cyclist.
It’s certainly an odd allegation on the face of things. Loroño, after all, was Basque, the Vuelta was run by a Basque company, and the Euskadi region from where Loroño hailed was a constant thorn in the side of Franco – a dictator whom Bahamontes was known to support. But, as Fotheringham explains: “Rather than let someone from the Madrid area win, Bahamontes believes that Franco’s henchmen let the Basques get one over on the centre of Spain to satisfy local pride.”
It was, in other words, a tactical, political concession. At the time of the incident, there was certainly a high level of disbelief and head-scratching concerning Bahamontes’s response to Loroño’s attack. While El Mundo Deportivo’s correspondent put this down to the man in yellow being ordered not to counter, he still did not understand his motivations in throwing everything away.
“I can’t understand what happened, though, and why a rider who fought so hard to get the jersey in Madrid was so prepared to sit back and let it go out of his reach so calmly. Isn’t there one of Aesop’s fables where somebody spends years and years putting together a fortune, then calmly throws it all down a mineshaft? That’s what Bahamontes did yesterday with his yellow jersey.”
And, indeed, if Bahamontes had caved into orders from above, then why did he move heaven and earth to try and win the yellow jersey back during the remainder of the race?
Bahamontes’s biographer puts the rider’s claim that the state ordered him to throw the race in Loroño’s favour as one of four possible explanations for his behaviour on the Tortosa stage, the other three being extreme carelessness, a sudden attack of indifference and an absence of team support – all three of which, to be fair, are entirely feasible given Bahamontes’ track record.
Wherever the truth lies – and it’s worth stressing that Bahamontes was never able to produce the infamous telegram in question – there can be no denying that the bitterness has endured to this day. For more than 60 years, in fact – to the point that the Spaniard, now aged 93, ended up belittling the entire race that forever remained absent from his palmarès.
“The Vuelta? In those days it was just a bit of a joke,” he dismissively tells Fotheringham in The Eagle of Toledo.
The feud continues at the Tour and beyond
Six weeks later, Bahamontes and Loroño were part of the 10-man Spanish team at the 1957 Tour de France, with Ruiz back in the fold after a recall from Puig. What could possibly go wrong? There were certainly parallels between the Vuelta and Tour, with Bahamontes moving into a commanding position early in France despite the combined obstacles thrown at him – including a wasp sting, a heatwave, the cobblestones of northern France, and a team in which his only ally seemed to be Miguel Poblet. What’s more, during the sweltering third stage to Rouen, Loroño decided to cool down under a garden hose, but lost track of time: a 15-minute shower almost cost him his place in the race – and he was forced to battle hard to avoid the time cut.
After a strong opening six stages, Bahamontes seemed to have established himself as sole team leader – only for Loroño to attack in the mountains of the Vosges and leapfrog his rival, who came home almost 10 minutes down.
One day later, Loroño took more time off Bahamontes, who by now was completely isolated following the withdrawal of his chum Poblet. As Fotheringham writes: “For Bahamontes such a situation must have been impossible to accept, particularly as since his Vuelta defeat he had slowly been regaining a strong position in Spanish cycling. Now he was faced with that all-too-familiar scenario.”
To make matters worse, Bahamontes was struck in the eye by a rogue water bottle discarded by a rider, while he was also forced to battle sunstroke, with a nasty boil on his arm. Embittered by Loroño’s latest antics, he quit the Tour on Stage 9 before the race had even reached his stomping ground in the Alps – ignoring Puig’s protests by tearing off his shoes and throwing them down a ravine. He took the first train he could back to Spain, disgusted and disillusioned.
Loroño reached Paris in fifth place as the young Frenchman Jacques Anquetil won on his debut Tour appearance. But once again, squabbling had cast a shadow over the Spanish team – resulting in their best rider being ostracised and sent packing. Puig would soon be replaced as manager by Dalmacio Langarica, a man who wasn’t afraid of banging heads together and who hadn’t pulled any punches in an interview that summer: “Bahamontes is Spain’s classiest rider, the greatest the country has ever known. While Loroño did what he had to, it [the strategy of letting Loroño attack in the Vosges] was throwing stones against our own roof. In that context, Bahamontes’ withdrawal made perfect sense.”
The feud inevitably continued. In the following Vuelta in 1958, the pair both made the selection once again – and another bust-up cost them both the race as Frenchman Jean Stablinsky took the spoils. Once again, the turning point was a questionable tactical decision. Puig ordered Bahamontes, who had gone on the attack in Stage 3, to sit up and wait for Loroño – only for the latter’s counter-move to ensure that his teammate was denied the yellow jersey.
A day later, Bahamontes was once again called back from the breakaway by Puig after Loroño had been distanced. The subsequent fallout from the latest passion-driven bungle by the Spanish team and its selectors opened the door to the French, Belgian and Italian teams, with Stablinsky the ultimate benefactor. Although he won a second King of the Mountains title, Bahamontes came sixth overall, Loroño eighth.
What happened next: Coppi helps Bahamontes come of age
With Loroño choosing not to race the Tour in 1958 after wearing himself out at the Giro, Bahamontes finally found himself undisputed leader of the Spanish team. He took advantage by winning two stages and the polka dot jersey – but could only take eighth place overall, as Luxembourg’s Charly Gaul came out on top.
The bad blood between Spain’s two leading cyclists showed no signs of clotting – although a change in the regulations for the 1959 Vuelta at least allowed Bahamontes and Loroño to fight their battles from different camps. Their continued in-fighting had forced the hand of the organisers, who swapped to a trade-team format so that the two adversaries were free to race for themselves.
Not that Bahamontes exploited this: despite winning the fourth stage to Granada, the Eagle withdrew in the second week after another tactical hash saw him drop to 24 minutes in arrears after Stage 7, with Loroño taking eighth overall. His disappointment did not last long: within 10 weeks Bahamontes had become the first Spaniard to win the Tour de France.
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Spain's Federico Bahamontes being congratulated by his manager Fausto Coppi affter winning the 1959 Tour de France
Image credit: Getty Images
Of course, the build-up to the race had not been without its controversies. Bahamontes was in limbo with his trade team and opted not to stay at Faema because of the ongoing presence of Loroño. Instead, he joined forces with Fausto Coppi at the Italian veteran’s Tricolfilina squad – although the Tour, unlike the Vuelta, was still raced in national team format at the time.
Bahamontes had told Puig’s successor, Langarica, that he would have to choose between him or Loroño; he had also told the Spanish press that he hadn’t spoken to his great foe in over a year, stressing in typical Bahamontes fashion: “I won’t eat at the same table as him.” Tossing a barbed olive branch, he added: “But if he’s leader, I’ll play my part. He’ll have my help, even though I don’t actually rate him as a rider.”
Loroño was less conciliatory, insisting he would ride for no other Spanish rider in any circumstances, and “particularly not that man from Toledo”. To add another curveball, a third Spanish rider, Antonio Suárez, had won the Vuelta that spring and was naturally expecting to play a role.
Langarica eventually made the call that would prove to be the wise one: he dropped Loroño, who admittedly hadn’t won a race all season, in favour of Bahamontes. And the rest, as they say, is history. Bahamontes sealed overall victory with an expert ride through the Alps two days after he won the uphill time trial on the dormant Puy de Dôme volcano. Alongside his maillot jaune, he also won a third polka dot jersey. French duo Henry Anglade and Anquetil a distant second and third on the final podium.
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The final podium of the 1964 Tour de France at Parc des Princes, Paris. From left to right : French cyclists Raymond Poulidor (second), Jacques Anquetil (first), and Spanish competitor Federico Bahamontes (third)
Image credit: Getty Images
The Eagle’s long final flight into retirement
Despite Bahamontes finally winning the world’s biggest bike race to cap a major sporting breakthrough for Spain in a year when the country was at long last stepping up socially and economically, there was still another chapter to be written in his controversial relationship with the Vuelta.
After Fausto Coppi’s tragic death in January 1960, Bahamontes had returned to a Faema team now free from Loroño, who had done the sensible thing and moved away to avoid another open war with Bahamontes. Both riders were at the start of the 15th edition of the race which, for once, was not going to be animated by a dispute between the two firebrands. All eyes were on the man who’d become Spain’s first Tour champion.
But things were far from rosy in the Faema camp. Loroño might have been out of the equation, but another old foe wasn’t: Bernardo Ruiz, the now-retired rider who openly disliked Bahamontes, was manager. Both men had thrown punches at each other in the past, and Ruiz admitted prior to the race that they only “mutually tolerate[d] one another”.
Suárez, the reigning Vuelta champion, announced that he wouldn’t be working for Bahamontes. Other riders openly said they’d be playing their own cards, while one was even kicked off the team before the race for being too friendly with the Eagle. As the journalist Marcus Pereda said in a recent Rouleur feature, the Faema squad at the 1960 Vuelta was “a powder keg” and “the Ides of March were approaching”.
On paper, it was an encouraging start for Faema, who won the opening team time trial in Gijon. But Suárez crashed on the final turn, taking down half the team with him – including Bahamontes, who hurt his hand and lost a nail in the process. At the finish he pointedly showed his finger to journalists – both bloodied and accusatory – whereby laying down the gauntlet for the race to come.
It was an ominous start for Bahamontes, who found himself 44 minutes down in the standings ahead of Stage 13 to San Sebastian, which he won after a brilliant solo attack from kilometre zero. The next day, as Bahamontes continued to claw back lost time, he again found himself at the centre of controversy after his main lieutenant – and only ally at Faema – Julian San Emeterio was disqualified after finishing outside the time limit in Vitoria.
Bahamontes was irate – not least because the next stage finished in Santander and the Cantabrian local San Emeterio knew every twist and turn of the road. The Eagle still felt he could overturn his deficit – but he needed his teammate’s local knowledge and support. Bahamontes threatened to withdraw unless San Emeterio was reinstated – and the latter even turned up at the start of Stage 15 in his kit, only to be turned away.
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1959 Tour de France champion Federico Martín Bahamontes
Image credit: From Official Website
Incandescent with rage, Bahamontes decided he would cause a stir by ridiculing the race: he would ride the stage so slowly he would force the organisers to kick him, the reigning Tour de France champion, off the Vuelta too. And so he rolled out of Vitoria at a leisurely pace amid whistles and insults from fans on the side of the road. At the top of the first climb, the man with more King of the Mountain titles than anyone else stopped – not for an ice cream this time, but to hit an abusive Loroño fan with his bike pump.
A mass brawl ensued, umbrellas and bottles were thrown, photographs taken; Bahamontes had successfully managed to drag the Vuelta through the mud before even reaching his goal of finishing outside the time limit. In Santander, he crossed the line 54 minutes behind the winner – claiming he was suffering from stomach pains all day. Bahamontes successfully managed to be booted off a race that had only 26 riders left, while the Vuelta doctor later tried to deflect attention by claiming Bahamontes had appendicitis.
Six weeks later, Bahamontes abandoned the defence of his Tour crown just two days into the race after an illness. Bahamontes wouldn’t return to the Vuelta for another five years, until his final season as a pro, where he finished 10th. He added three more polka dot jerseys, came runner-up behind Anquetil in 1963 and finished third a year later behind the Frenchman and his great rival Raymond Poulidor.
Six years after his Tour triumph, he rode the race for the last time. Bahamontes being Bahamontes, he abandoned in typically eccentric fashion on his own terms – and on his terra firma of the Pyrenees. Escaping the clutches of the peloton before the climb of the Portet-d’Aspet in what his colleagues must have presumed was in pursuit of polka dot jersey points, Bahamontes climbed off his bike and hid in some bushes. He let the riders pass thinking they were chasing a ghost before entering his team car. And that was that.
“Bahamontes abandoned in view of the peaks where he once reigned,” ran the Spanish newspaper ABC’s headline. He retired at the end of that 1965 season to open a bicycle and motorcycle shop in Toledo that he still runs today. The self-destructive racing style, the tantrums and the multiple abandons – particularly in the home tour which always eluded him – all held him back, yet at the same time made him the unique rider that he was.
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Federico Bahamontes, the 1959 Tour de France winner, at his bike shop in Toledo
Image credit: Getty Images
In 2013, as part of his 85th birthday celebrations, seven out of a panel of nine experts in L’Equipe voted for Bahamontes as the best climber in Tour history. He never won a Monument, nor did he ever win the Vuelta or Giro. Emotional outbursts, tactical bungles and petulant, childish behaviour so often wiped out all the time he gained in the mountains – most notably in the 1957 Vuelta, where his brutal enmity with Jesús Loroño went into overdrive in a race which seemed more difficult for him to have lost than to have won.
But his single Tour victory – and a tally of six KOM victories that would not be surpassed until Richard Virenque 40 years later – ensured that the Eagle of Toledo would go down in history as one of cycling’s greats, not simply one of the sport’s biggest underachievers, a self-centred and self-isolating rider convinced of his own sporting genius but rarely capable of accepting help from others, his own shortcomings, or the ability of his rivals.
“[As a racer] he was what we call ‘madness personified’,” Loroño’s son, Josu, tells Fotheringham in his biography on Bahamontes. “It’s always been about ‘me, me, me’… Yes, he was great, but he never appreciated what others could do.”
It was nevertheless the crackpot Bahamontes – and not the calculating Loroño – who paved the way for future generations, most notably the greatest Spanish cyclist of the modern era, Miguel Induráin, who, for all his Tour glory, like his predecessor was never able to win his home Grand Tour.
It was also Bahamontes’ rivalry with Loroño on the toxic Spanish national team of the 1950s that acted as a precursor to some of the other Spanish tactical curios of more recent years – from Alejandro Valverde and Joaquim Rodríguez’s blunders in the 2013 World Championships in Florence, to any one of Movistar’s confounding strategies laid bare in their fly-on-the-wall Netflix documentary series.
Bahamontes could have achieved so much more on the bike. And yet he might not have made such a lasting impression had he not achieved what he did in that particular wayward and irritable manner for which he will be forever revered. Revered, that is, provided you’re not part of the Loroño family.
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