INTERVIEW: BERNARDO RUIZ
Procycling reminisces with the 93-year-old Spaniard, the oldest living grand tour winner
Bernardo Ruiz cuts a stately figure in the somewhat battered but elegant surroundings of the old casino building in Orihuela, the town in south-east Spain where he was born in 1923 and where he and his family still live. Every day, his tall, besuited figure visits the casino’s wood-panelled, high-ceilinged reception rooms for dominoes with other senior citizens, his cigarettes and an ashtray placed carefully in front of him. The clack of domino tiles being placed on the casino’s glass coffee tables punctuates his stories and recollections, as he shares his memories with his fellow players.
The Spaniard is now 93 years old but in excellent health. Today, perhaps it’s apt that Ruiz sits alone in a vast, echoing salon for his interview, given that so few of his generation are still alive to tell their tales. “I raced out of need,” he tells
Procycling. “I’d earn more money than any other job I could do. Besides, what else was I going to do in a place like this?”
Ruiz was a pioneer. His third place in the 1952 Tour de France was the first ever Spanish podium finish in cycling’s biggest race. He was the first Spanish stage winner at the Giro d’Italia. And he was the winner of the 1948 Vuelta a España, which makes him the only rider alive to have won a grand tour before the late 1950s. He is Spain’s oldest surviving Tour racer.
Ruiz has memories to share of riders like legendary Tour of Flanders star Briek Schotte: “A lovely guy, but his face was so battered from racing so hard he looked like somebody’s grandpa.” And of the mind games rivals like 1936 Tour King of the Mountains winner Julián Berrendero used to play. “During one Volta a Catalunya he poured a bottle of water he had out onto the ground just because I’d asked him for a drink,” recalls Ruiz.
1940s Spain was tangibly separated from European cycling. The combined factors of the 1936-39 Civil War and the Franco regime’s support for the Axis in World War II meant widespread, crippling poverty, a road system consisting of little more than dirt tracks and, from 1945 onwards, economic and sporting boycotts by the international community.
When Ruiz is asked about his first grand tour, the 1945 Vuelta a España, he says simply of the experience, “Most of the population were so poor they had no way of knowing what the race even was when it turned up. And for us, it was simply a whole lot of suffering.”
Unlike races today, there was a grand total of one jeep and two motorbikes to police the entire event. “One of the drivers was always drunk, so he only turned up on alternate days,” Ruiz adds. And as for journalists and how they followed the race without transport, Ruiz looks somewhat taken aback: “What journalists?”
Ruiz was born into a family of agricultural labourers with no cycling tradition and certainly no spare money for luxuries like bikes, so his path into the bleak, brutal world of Spanish bike racing in the 1940s was almost unbelievably by chance. One of his brothers was conscripted under threat of immediate execution by Franco’s army, to fight alongside the Germans against the Soviet Union during World War II. “Thanks to the 3,000 pesetas in pay the army sent my mother, I could buy a bike worth 500 pesetas. A French make called Halcyon. It had three gears and we had to change them by hand.”
Ruiz initially used his Halcyon for small black market operations transporting flour and wheat. Riding ahead of his father, who
“I’d earn more money cycling than any other job I could do. Besides, what else was I going to do in a place like this?”
was using a horse and cart to carry the produce, Ruiz would leave piles of earth on the roadsides as a way of indicating the presence of police patrols. Then, by accident, in his late teens he took part in his first bike race, a small, local event. “It was going the same way as me so I started riding along,” he says.
It was only when he managed to win one important local event, the junior Vuelta a Valencia, that Ruiz realised he could have a future in the sport.
This was no easy decision, given that in 1940s Spain there were no amateur teams, no wages, no racing licences, and very limited public transport. “My father gave me a lot of grief, telling me I’d come home with a broken leg and no money,” he says. Indeed, initially Ruiz’s only way getting from one event to another across the length and breadth of Spain was by bike, and his only way of ensuring he got to sleep with a roof over his head and a meal at the end of the day was by winning.
“The only money I had was from prizes,” Ruiz once said. “You’d save money on trains, riding 700 or 800 kilometres from Barcelona to Bilbao in long lines of a dozen or more, praying you wouldn’t get hauled in by the police, because you’d be fined for riding in a group. Then either you won, or you didn’t eat.
“You’d fight and fight and fight with the riders to win, then fight and fight with the organisers to make sure you’d get a room for the night.” In total, he says, he’d race up to 270 days a year.
Given it was such a tough career, it was probably just as well that the breakthrough result for Ruiz came when he was just 20, in the Volta a Catalunya in 1945. At the time the Volta was a far more important event than the Vuelta a España – the Vuelta dated back only to 1935, and there had only been four editions up to then, while the first edition of Catalunya took place in 1911. The Volta also offered far better prize money than the national tour. Ruiz recalls being paid 500 pesetas for finishing 23rd overall in that year’s Vuelta - the price of the bike he had bought as a teenager - whereas in the Volta the same year, he was paid 200 pesetas for finishing second in laps of a criterium stage.
Ruiz was by no means a favourite and did not win a single stage. But by making it into one break after another, and flying under the radar, his consistency, which became his key talent as a racer, netted him the Volta’s overall.
“It’s the victory I’m most proud of in my entire career, and the one which made me as a pro,” he says. It wasn’t, however, the easiest race. Ruiz punctured late on one stage and although allowed to continue, he had to ride through the night with no lights, no signs and, he says, no idea when he was going to make it to the finish. “The others protested that I’d had a tow, but how could that be when there wasn’t a single car in the area?” he says.
Then, 50 metres from the Volta’s final finish line, after 15 stages and 3,000 kilometres of racing, Ruiz crashed into a dog and his bike broke. “I walked across the line and the commissaire told me I had to go back and get my bike,” he recalls. “I still won, and I made 16,000 pesetas. I’d never seen so much money in my life and because it was all money taken from spectators who had paid to get into Montjuic park to watch the race, none of it was in a note bigger than 20 pesetas. I spread the notes all out on the bed in my hostel that night, just to look at it.”
As a racer, Ruiz was, he says, not a specialist. “I got my wins more out
“You’d ight and ight with the riders to win, then ight and ight with the organisers to make sure you’d get a room for the night"
of being clever and consistent,” he says. Raphaël Géminiani, the contemporary rival who came second in the 1951 Tour, once said of Ruiz, “He was as sharp and strong as the devil.” The 1959 Tour winner Federico Bahamontes said of Ruiz: “He always knows exactly when to put in the attack that matters.”
Bahamontes would surpass Ruiz’s achievements, but in the 1940s, before he turned pro, Ruiz had few equals in Spain – a fact underlined when he won the 1948 Vuelta and defeated Julián Berrendero and Dalmacio Langarica, the two, big prerace favourites. Both suffered bad luck, with Ruiz haring off on a stage to Bilbao and into the race lead after Langarica had broken away but then punctured. In a race that featured no summit finishes, Ruiz’s consistency over the climbs paid off.
The other big problem of that Vuelta, Ruiz says, was the heat. “It was so bad, on one stage we had three hours of neutralised racing. My head was frying so much I snatched some poor farmer’s straw hat off his head and it turned out he kept all his money inside it, just eight or 10 pesetas, but a small fortune for him. The guy chased me for miles down the road yelling ‘Thief! thief!’ and I couldn’t work out why, I hadn’t seen the money, just a rubbishy hat.”
Apart from reading races brilliantly, Ruiz had another secret weapon: his tyres. “I’d cure them like Spanish ham, hang them up for ages. I did three or four Tours de France and four or five Giros without puncturing. You could do 30,000 kilometres if they weren’t properly treated, 60,000 if they were,” he says. He was also an expert bike handler, crashing only twice in his 17-year career. Given the state of Spanish roads, that was near-miraculous.
Things did not go so well for Ruiz, however, when the boycott on the Spanish racing abroad was finally lifted and Spain presented a national team in the Tour, in 1949. Although the race briefly ventured across the Spanish border for the first time, there was no welcome party: all the Spanish had already abandoned.
The official version of events is that the Spanish team withdrew because of poor logistical support
“After 17 years I was sick of the travelling and going without seeing my family. It was like being part of a circus”
when one of their riders punctured. But almost 70 years on, Ruiz reveals a different story. “In fact, we quit on stage 5 because Berrendero said we should all go and do the Tour of Portugal, which paid better money. So Langarica pretended he’d had a puncture and he sat by the side of the road destroying his back wheel to do that. Then my team-mates came past me, all sitting in the broom wagon and yelling ‘Quit! Quit!’”
The subsequent scandal over the mass abandon meant Ruiz spent a year racing in Portugal and Spain and was not allowed to take part in the 1950 Tour. But in 1951 the Spanish returned to the French race and Ruiz snatched two stage wins – a record for Spain.
“That actually had more impact in Spain than when I got on the podium the following year,” Ruiz recalls. “It also got me into a lot of criteriums in France, Me and Abdel-Kader Zaaf - the Algerian [-born French rider] who’d fallen asleep under a tree [in the 1950 Tour] and started riding the wrong way - we rode 57 criteriums.
“The only racers the Spanish people exiled there after the Civil War wanted to see were me and Zaaf. He was a good friend, and popular with the North African migrants.” The other consequence of his taking two stage wins at the Tour was another breakthrough for Spain: Ruiz became the country’s first UCI-registered professional. “After I’d won the Tour stages, somebody realised that I was still riding as an independent, so they gave me a licence,” he says.
The following year, Ruiz finished third overall at the Tour behind an all-conquering Fausto Coppi, which was, he says, a surprise. “Whenever we left for the Tour from Madrid, the only orders we had were, ‘Make sure you finish it.’ That was all they cared about.” Against Coppi that year, in any case, Ruiz says, “We were racing to see who finished second. He was superb in the Giro and the Tour that year. In two stages at the Tour – one in the Pyrenees and one in the Alps – he’d got the entire race sewn up. The rest of the stages we were just freewheeling round. It was clear who the winner was and he and Stan Ockers [second - Ed.] looked after each other’s interests. I was the intruder.” Off the bike, Ruiz liked Coppi. “A wonderful guy, although his wife, Bruna, was a really nasty piece of work,” he recalls.
Ruiz then gradually, and not at all willingly, was overshadowed by the new star, Bahamontes, in Spanish racing. Bahamontes’s spectacular, eccentric feats in the mountains made much better headlines than the less dramatic, if more consistent, style of Bernard Ruiz. It mattered little that Ruiz established a new record for finishing consecutive grand tours: 12, between the 1954 Giro and 1958 Vuelta, a record that stood until Adam Hansen finished his 13th, at the 2015 Vuelta. (Hansen’s total now stands at 19.)
It also didn’t matter that Ruiz became the first Spaniard to win a Giro stage in 1956. (His team, white goods producer Ignis, gave him a fridge as a bonus, and Ruiz was so determined that the fridge, which was a real rarity in impoverished Spain, would make it home, he caught a ferry back from Italy with the fridge sitting next to him on the deck.)
Ruiz and Bahamontes became the bitterest of rivals, and matters came to a head in the 1957 Vuelta, when Ruiz, despite being on the same team as Bahamontes, helped Bahamontes’ arch-rival Jesus Loroño win. Then in 1960, Bahamontes staged a dramatic go-slow in protest at a team-mate’s
expulsion from the Vuelta, with Ruiz, by then retired, his exasperated sports director. “What could I do, kill him?” Ruiz once said, when trying to describe how desperate he got with his wayward rider that year.
After a brief spell directing, Ruiz returned to Orihuela and opened a bike shop. Cycling, finally, had served him well, with financial stability far beyond his childhood dreams, but he had few regrets at stopping as a rider. “After 17 years I was sick of the travelling and going without seeing my family from March to November. It was like being part of a circus,” he says.
But despite his reservations, Ruiz’s love of the sport and ability to read races remained - and remains - as fresh as ever, while he keeps up to date with the ‘offbike’ cycling news as well. In fact, the first thing Ruiz does when the interview begins is ask if my dictaphone is switched off. “That’s the only way I’m going to tell you what I think about the Chris Froome case,” he says.
But apart from current controversies, Ruiz also takes enormous pleasure in watching bike races. “I see each stage three times,” he says. “First live, then the highlights, and then again the next morning. I don’t miss a thing.”
And 70 years after making Spanish cycling history, Ruiz recognises that his own contribution to Spanish cycling has not been small.
“Back then, did I ever think I was a pioneer?” he reflects before saying bluntly. “Bollocks to that. I raced to earn my living. But in Spain I was the one, I think, who opened the door for all the others.” Seven decades later, Ruiz cannot be thanked enough for that.