Obituary: Federico Martín Bahamontes, ‘The Eagle of Toledo’

Every time a reporter visited Federico Martín Bahamontes at his club room and office in Toledo after he retired in 1965, certain elements of the interview would never vary. 

Seated behind his huge desk with a full-size bust of an eagle on one side in honour of his nickname, Bahamontes would launch into lengthy accounts, asked or unasked for, about how he became the first Spaniard to win the Tour de France and the first rider ever to capture the Tour’s King of the Mountains classification six times. 

A cardboard poster with a full list of his achievements would be silently passed over the table during his speeches - his name emblazoned at the top, then the multiple Tour de France podiums and stages in all three Grand Tours, the countless wins in week-long events and hill-climbs. Postcards of Bahamontes doing a victory lap of Paris’ Parc des Princes circuit in the 1959 Tour would follow, and perhaps a t-shirt from Bahamontes peña (fan club) or a poster from the Vuelta a Toledo, the now sadly defunct amateur bike race Bahamontes organised for 51 years – far easier said than done – after retiring. 

A few shots of Bahamontes with his spare bike from the 1959 Tour – the winning model has long been gathering dust in an unopened museum – would be almost unavoidable afterwards. However, requests for Fede' to don his original yellow jersey from the ‘59 Tour would be met with directions to where his maillot jaune has hung for the last 64 years, in Toledo cathedral, and where, after two days of official mourning, it paid silent testament this week at Bahamontes’ funeral. 

All of this lengthy presentation of Bahamontes' life and times, starring the key protagonist himself, would be delivered at his non-stop, firecracker style of talking, of living and, in his time, of racing. In much later years, in fact, a Bahamontes interview would conclude with a lightning trip to his monument in Toledo’s town centre, invariably garnished with sarcastic comments about the town council’s inexplicable delay in erecting it until 2018. At which point the last sight of Bahamontes for the by-now exhausted reporter would usually be Fede’ bounding away off up one of Toledo’s many cobbled climbs, off on his next errand at his invariably breakneck speed.

But if Bahamontes, right up until his last illness a few years ago, was an unstoppable whirlwind of a personality – so much so, it is hard to believe that even at 95, he is no longer with us – his place amongst the legends of the sport is set firmly in stone. With a career that stretched from 1954 to 1965, Bahamontes will be remembered as modern-day cycling’s first and very possibly greatest climbing genius. He was less of an all-rounder than Coppi or Bartali and utterly out of his depth in the Classics. But his anarchic, impetuous character did more to fuse bike racing in the mountains with all-or-nothing, spontaneous strategies than arguably any other rider before or since. "I had only one tactic, and that was attack, attack and attack again," he once told me. "From start to finish." 

Bahamontes and Spain

Inside Spain, Bahamontes embodied even more. In the 1950s, known as ‘the years of hunger’, the country was wracked by a combination of economic depression, famine and a brutal military dictatorship. Its precarious, cut-throat bike racing scene, in which Bahamontes was the star figure of a total of just 23 professional racers in that era, was a mirror image of a society where starvation and extreme poverty were all too familiar. As another top rider, Bernardo Ruiz would observe, the main attraction of taking part in the Tour de France, given Spain’s parlous state, was the chance of three weeks of decent food. Or as Bahamontes said a few years back: “It was hunger that made us fly.” 

Born into a destitute working-class family in Toledo that lived for years as homeless Civil War refugees, Bahamontes recounted the occasion when the discovery of a small pile of coins in some roadside dirt was the only thing that meant they had any supper: “And we made a right old meal of it.” He had the roughest of childhoods, where stolen sacks of vegetables and any cats unlucky enough to pass by their home at meal-time all ended up in the family cooking pot. 

But not even a lengthy battle with typhoid, contracted when on the run from the police and hiding up to his neck in a polluted river, could stop Bahamontes from eventually buying the bike he used to transport black market goods in Toledo. He subsequently rode the same bike to finish second, as a teenager, in his first ever race, even if the bike had no brakes and he had only a lemon and a banana – which he ate, skins and all, during the event – for sustenance.

Spells criss-crossing Spain in the guard’s van of goods trains to win local events then followed for Bahamontes, who always said his climbing skills came from his childhood work transporting heavy loads of vegetables on Toledo’s steep climbs. Whatever the reason, a King of the Mountains title at the 1953 Volta a Catalunya, at the time Spain’s biggest race, was a milestone in Bahamontes' first key steps as a pro.

"That bloody icecream"

Bahamontes’ first participation in the Tour de France in 1954 is forever associated both with his first King of the Mountains title, and his getting off his bike to eat an icecream on top of the Col de la Romeyère while waiting for a replacement wheel. While the icecream incident established him in the minds of the public as a maverick, ultra-confident climber – “I’ll never hear the end of that bloody icecream”, he once told the magazine Cycle Sport – for Bahamontes his first Tour mountains title gave him sudden, massive financial security for the first time in his life.

Turning pro had been purely a way out of economic misery. “I could earn as much out of one race as my father could working an entire harvest,” he once said. But the 150,000 pesetas he took from the Tour de France jersey was, he estimated, as much as any one of the half-dozen leading Spanish pros could hope to earn at home in five years.

Despite a nagging knee injury causing notable setbacks over the next couple of years, Bahamontes’ brilliance as a climber rapidly placed him amongst the top names in the sport. As the late Brian Robinson, Britain’s leading pro in the 1950s, said, “He’d used to go – tsch-tsch-tsch-tsch – and get 100 metres, have a little look back at us, stay there, then go – tsch-tsch-tsch-tsch – again, really pedalling away on the low gears, get another 100 metres. Then he’d be gone. He’d just ride away.”

"He would never have won the prize for elegant riding”, Robinson said, given his racing position was “more like sitting with his arms looking so stiff and holding the bars close up.

“But if he came to a race, you’d know, beforehand, that he could drop me, Geminiani, Anquetil, the good boys if you like, on the climbs. He had the edge on all of us. When he put his mind to it.”

Battles in Spain

Bahamontes' brilliance at an international level, steadily racking up the Tour, Giro and Vuelta stage wins contrasted notably with his perpetual feuds in Spain both with his teammates, rivals and directors and his severely erratic performances. 

At a pinch, it could be argued that the fights he had with his 1950s archrival Jesus Loroño on and off the bike, including one occasion laying into each other with bike pumps, were all part of the cut-throat nature of the Spanish pro racing circuit. At the same time, Bahamontes own waywardness and his forthright criticisms of other Spanish riders – “How can I call them rivals, if none of them could ever beat me?” was his own contemptuous description of them – certainly cost him both allies and victories.

Bahamontes’ defeats were almost invariably as dramatic as his triumphs. His abandon in the 1957 Tour after receiving a suspect injection from Spanish team director Luis Puig and refusing to continue even when Puig pleaded he do so “in the name of General Franco” was one notorious occasion. Then there was his defeat at the hands of Loroño in the 1957 Vuelta, when Bahamontes’ teammates betrayed him en masse, surrounding him and even grabbing onto his shorts to stop Bahamontes from trying to catch up with his rival. “There was as much cack-handedness about him as there was pure talent,” one of his victorious Tour de France teammates, Jose Gomez del Moral, once said about him. 

For better or for worse, in fact, Bahamontes was a law unto himself. “One day he’d beat you, the next he’d do nothing. It was impossible to know what was going on inside his head,” said another one of his key enemies, Bernardo Ruiz. Yet in 1959, the planets finally aligned for Bahamontes in the Tour, as the national squad gained a tough new director, Dalmacio Langarica, who described Bahamontes as having a child-like, but manageable mentality. “If he doesn’t like the people in charge of him, he’ll lead you a merry dance," the Basque director, famous for laying a big walking stick down the centre of his riders dining table during suppers to make it clear who was boss, once said. "But if you know how to handle him, he’ll come quietly enough.”

The 1959 Tour de France

It was Langarica who oversaw Bahamontes’ early attack in northern France that saw the Spaniard steal an early march on his rivals and who knew too, how to play off the French divisions in a ‘super-team’ including former Tour winners Jacques Anquetil and Louison Bobet, along with formidable riders like Roger Riviere and Raphael Geminiani. That said, an attack by Bahamontes with Anquetil en route to Aurillac in blazing heat eliminated the remainder of the French team from contention. But the key moment of Bahamontes triumph belonged to him and him alone.

A superb uphill time trial victory on the Puy de Dôme put him within seconds of the overall lead and far ahead of his rivals. "I never used to drink coffee but that day I'd drunk two in quick succession and I was going like the clappers," Bahamontes once remembered. "Halfway up, I didn't think I was going so well, but by the summit I'd outclassed them all." His time for ascending the Puy de Dome remains nearly two minutes faster than Mike Woods, the winner on the same climb this summer.

Having finally clinched the yellow in Grenoble, Bahamontes was en route to what was, at that point, the crowning achievement of any solo athlete under General Franco’s regime. His victory on July 18, the anniversary of the 1936 uprising that saw Franco gain power, was promptly hijacked by the regime for, as sports daily MARCA put it, “making an already beautiful date, July 18, even more beautiful.”

That his triumph stopped the country in its tracks is no exaggeration, from Asturias in the north where crowds staging pitch invasions of newspapers in search of the latest news about the Tour, to Toledo where beers were renamed ‘yellow jerseys’ and even doctors’ prescriptions forms had special “Bahamontes wins the Tour” printed along their bottom edges.

Yet if Bahamontes’ triumph represented so much for his country, his erratic, volatile personality let him down with a vengeance in 1960, and produced one of the biggest sporting scandals of the era. Booted out of the Vuelta in April for a deliberate go-slow and after chasing a fan who insulted him with a bike pump for an hour, Bahamontes then quit the Tour that July after two days, for reasons that left his team baffled and which Bahamontes, unconvincingly, described as ‘sore guts’.

No less than nine different doctors and a special medical commission in Spain who checked up on Bahamontes could find a convincing enough justification, and he had his licence revoked for a few months. According to Bahamontes, it was only thanks to his wife, Fermina, opting to go the federation and get it returned that he finally decided to continue his career.

After a rocky couple of years, Bahamontes’ second half of his career was, once again, testimony to his climbing brilliance. As Raymond Poulidor recalled, Bahamontes was still so confident he would tell top names of the calibre of Rik Van Looy in the Tour which mountain stage he would eliminate them on time difference: “At one start in the Pyrenees, I remember he said: ‘You, Rik, you’re on the train home tonight.' And he’d be right.” 

The ultimate pioneer

Bahamontes always claimed his best chance of a second Tour victory, though, in 1963, fell foul of French skullduggery when Anquetil’s director, Geminiani, faked a bike change by cutting the Frenchman's gears with a pair of pliers. What is undoubtable is that in 1964, his arguments with the up-and-coming climber, Julio Jiménez, during a Pyrenean breakaway, wrecked his chances of outright triumph. Another row, too, with his trade team over non-payment saw Bahamontes quit his last Tour in 1965. Combined with a dispute over the federation’s refusal to give him a spot in the World Championships make him and his wife pay for tickets to the finishing circuit, finally convinced him that it was time to hang up his wheels.

Bahamontes’ sharp tongue and refusal to share the limelight – “I am a one-man spectacle,” he once said – showed no sign of losing their strength throughout his retirement years, when he ran a bike shop in central Toledo and tirelessly milked his fame as the Spain’s first Tour winner, criss-crossing the country from one cycling event to another in a huge white Mercedes. He was a big fan, though, of Alberto Contador, to the point where he gatecrashed his Tour celebrations in Pinto, and, in one of his last-ever interviews, in 2021, he had nothing but praise for Tadej Pogačar.

Yet for all his complicated, rambunctious, outspoken personality, Bahamontes was never less than entertaining and charismatic, a rider who won Spain their first title in the ultimate target any cyclist can aim at and who did so in an era when there was precious little to celebrate in the country.

As Spanish modern historian Manuel Espin said in an interview a couple of years back, “He took the path from that hard, battered Spain to a nation that started to open up to the world.” In that sense, Bahamontes remained not just perhaps the greatest ever climber, but a pioneer, landmark and example – for all areas of Spanish society, not just sport, in one of its darkest times.

Federico Bahamontes was born in Santo Domingo-Caudilla on 9 July, 1928. He died in Valladolid on 8 August, 2023.