VueltaSkelter encounter

We join Tim in Zaragoza as he battles stinky cycling mitts and down-tube gears, and recalls the plight of Spanish cyclists at the Tour…

● My slimy, wrinkled gloves now ranked as the most appalling items of clothing I had ever put on, certainly since 1978. They looked as if they’d been pulled off the corpse of an Ancient Briton found preserved in a peat bog, and smelled like it too. Whenever my hands passed anywhere near my face, the stench of pickled death brought tears to my eyes and food up my throat. That night I sluiced ten sinkfuls of acrid Bovril out of them, but come morning they still reeked, and were still sodden. I set off with them tied to the bar-bag to dry, but almost straight away had to stop and pull them squelchily back on: changing gear without a padded palm was agony. I realised that gloves had been a rarity in photos from the 1936 Tour de France – the last gear-less Grand Tour – but were universal thereafter, just one minor tremor among the seismic changes wrought by the advent of derailleur gears. Though they seismic the afford Spanish top weren’t a pros in derailleur. riders Spain: couldn’t quite would even as suffer disadvantage a technological that continued for decades, their abysmal domestic earnings compounded by the anti-Franco sanctions that kicked in after the war. Spain was banned from the Tour de France until 1949, and for some years thereafter its riders usually turned up in Paris without a bicycle, knowing that the humdrum yellow service bikes that the organisers would lend them were superior to anything they might have brought over from home. The Spanishmade tubes they were saddled with had to be stretched from the branch of a tree before attempting to force them over the rim, a process that the riders completed using their teeth. Vuelta Skelter is out on paperback on 14 July 2022 from Penguin Random House priced at £10.99.