IN- DEPTH: 40 YEARS OF MOVISTAR
Four decades ago, when the squad that became Movistar made its debut in a ramshackle, near-defunct stage race. The team was tiny, poorly funded and its best rider quit halfway through the season, yet it is still here...
The Spanish team celebrates four decades in the peloton this year, as we look at the team’s beginning
Mallorca’s agricultural village of Ses Salines has little about it that is remarkable, and the Carrer Ramon Llull street on its outskirts, even less so. Carrer Ramon Llull is a broad highway between weatherbeaten agricultural buildings and sturdy-looking rural residences made from the plentiful local limestone. When the combined Movistar forces of one team bus and three team cars draws up here for in late January for the opening day’s racing of the 2020 Mallorca Challenge, the only hints of life on Carrer Ramon Llull are a parked tractor, a Land Rover and three mudspattered locals’ cars - all empty - as well as a large, malodorous, green wheelie bin.
The low-key surroundings are unsuspecting witnesses to a significant milestone in Movistar’s history. That’s because on January 26 1980, a newly created team sponsored by aluminium manufacturer Reynolds made its debut in racing at what was then known as the Vuelta a Mallorca. And in its latest incarnation as Movistar, that same team is rolling up for the Spanish season opener in 2020. Their participation 40 years later is material proof that Movistar continues
as cycling’s longest surviving WorldTour squad.
Ses Salines and the sun-bleached salt flats that gave the village both its name and its first source of income, date back to the Bronze Age, though these days the locals mainly make their living off sunburned German tourists. You could say that Movistar, albeit in the team’s former incarnations as Reynolds, Banesto, Illes Balears and Caisse d’Epargne, has been around for almost as long, in cycling terms that is.
As it so happens, the WorldTour team that runs Movistar the closest in longevity - Belgian squad Lotto-Soudal, born five years later in 1985 but under different management unlike the Spanish outfit - are parked up just a stone’s throw away. “Each January, we talk about how we’ve been around for so many years, and it does make you a little bit proud,” Mario Aerts, with Lotto since 1999 first as a rider and now as a manager, says as he waits for the race start in the warm January sunshine. “But we always remember Movistar, and we think, ‘Of course, they’ve been around even longer!”
While Movistar have gone the distance and then some, their leader for the day in Ses Salines is also well beyond the usual sell-by date for professionals. “Was their first race really here in Mallorca? Wow! Well, I’m proud to be here today then,” Alejandro Valverde, who also celebrates his 40th birthday this April, says when he comes back from sign-on, and is promptly besieged by school children waving specially designed ‘peace’ symbols, as they celebrate the village’s 15 seconds of cycling fame.
Valverde may be proud to be there on such a special moment, but oddly enough, Movistar make no effort at all to blow their own trumpet about their 40th anniversary race start. There are no carloads of VIPs bussed in to Ses Salines to commemorate the occasion, no group photos of smiling riders and staff on the bus, and certainly no bottles of champagne that evening at dinner in the plush spa hotel on the outskirts of the island’s capital, Palma, where the team are staying. They might have uncorked a few had they won, of course, but Valverde’s 51st place as the first Movistar rider home in the race hardly merited that. Indeed, until Valverde was told about the anniversary by Procycling, the only rider to have felt any special value about the opening one-day race of Challenge Mallorca was local star Lluis Más, who happens to come from Ses Salines and who had flown back early from the Tour Down Under just to take part in a race start in his home village.
Yet for all the team’s seeming indifference to this milestone, even in a small town in Mallorca one warm January morning, the strands of history linking Movistar back to that first ever participation 40 years ago are buried just beneath the surface of the day’s racing. At Ses Salines, the race speaker is - as always in Spanish races for the last decade or so - Juan Mari Guajardo, who was born in Estella, a few kilometres away from Irurtzun where the amateur team that became Reynolds was created in 1970.
“When I was growing up, Reynolds were always the squad that mattered the most to me and my friends,” Guajardo says after concluding his usual countdown from 10 with the crowd before the race gets underway, and packing away his notes on the riders in his briefcase. “You don’t forget
things like that.”
At the improbably early time of 10.02am on Sunday January 27 1980, as Navarra’s Francisco Javier López Izcue trundled down the start ramp of the Vuelta a Mallorca prologue (for the first of his three, winless seasons as a pro) the Reynolds team officially became a racing reality. But back then, the omens that the flame of that original pink-and-orange-clad Reynolds team would remain alight to the present day were not good.
For one thing, the late 1970s had been the leanest of lean periods in Spanish cycling, culminating with the Vuelta a España all but folding through lack of backers in 1979 and again in 1980. And while the new decade saw the number of Spanish professional teams, against all odds, double from four to eight, Reynolds itself barely registered on the radar.
The late 1970s had been the leanest of lean periods in Spanish cycling, culminating with the Vuelta a España all but folding
The Reynolds 1980 team had a line-up of just 12 riders and a tiny budget of 15 million pesetas (£75,000), increased from 12 million at the last minute by the company owner Juan Luis Barberena, because, as he put it with ghoulish humour, “That way you’ll be able to pay for some wheels, too.” The two biggest names on the roster were a top amateur from southwest France, Dominique Arnaud, and a Danish six-day specialist, Gert Frank, nominally signed as a sprinter thanks to a complex secondary sponsor deal.
Frank only rode one race, the Vuelta a Andalucía, before falling ill then quitting the team altogether. Others, like José Luis Laguía - a Catalan racer set to become their star rider in the early years - were unhappy about the poor wages, in his case, 30,000 pesetas (£150) a month, which he once said was less than he’d have made staying working as a mechanic and racing as an amateur. But when Reynolds refused to give him any more money, Laguía still signed.
“The team had come up from the amateur ranks, and we were a small to middle-sized operation,” recalls Enrique Sanz, Reynolds’ first and, at the time, only mechanic. (Sanz’s amateur racing career had ended a couple of years before but he stayed with the squad to work on the bikes.) On the plus side, Sanz says the bikes they used in 1980 were “Benottos with Campagnolo components. They were good ones. Moser used to race with them. And José Miguel went to that year’s Milan Bike Show - where everything happened at the time, contracts, deals, you name it - to make sure he got them.”
In 1981, the team switched to Alans - steel frames from the UK - with Galli components, the latter company run at the time by one Gianni Savio before he started directing teams. After that, Reynolds signed with Pinarello, a partnership that would last for a mere further 32 years.
On the down side, that first Vuelta a Mallorca was “a run-down small-time affair that nobody took very seriously”, Javier de Dalmases, one of the three or four journalists to cover it, tells Procycling. Indeed, 1980 was the last edition of the Vuelta a Mallorca before the race gave up the ghost and stopped running for over a decade.
But for all its feeble economic backing and lowkey debut, the Reynolds team had solid roots. “The sponsor was actually very welloff, and Navarre, which is close to the Basque Country, had a very supportive fanbase,” Dalmases recalls. “Their timing was spot-on, too, because the only previous professional squad from Navarre, Super-Ser, had folded in 1976.”
That decision to pull the plug on Super-Ser after just two years was taken by owner Ignacio Orbaiceta, after he spent a Tour de France stage witnessing Super-Ser leader Luis Ocaña blatantly working for rival Lucien Van Impe.
“We were nervous about making our debut in the pro ranks, and we put our foot in it in small questions like anybody new in a job,” says Sanz. “So I watched all the other mechanics as best I could, picked up what I thought were good ideas and discarded the rest. And all of us were delighted to be there, racing.”
The team had come up from the amateur ranks, and we were a small to middle- sized operation... We were nervous about making our debut in the pro ranks
“Reynolds got a lot of good, free advice from Juan José Urraca,” adds Dalmases. “He was the director of the Basque team, Kas, which had ended its sponsorship the year before.” This was albeit after Urraca tried, unsuccessfully, to convince the Reynolds management to buy out his own squad rather than upgrade their own amateur team.
“But their best selling point was their own director, who had a lot of interesting ideas, and who was blessed with an ability to talk the talk that very few others have ever possessed,” Dalmases continues.
That golden-tongued director was, of course, José Miguel Echavarri, a former hotel owner from Navarre who had run the amateur Reynolds squad in the late 1970s alongside Eusebio Unzué, the latter who still handles the squad today. Apart from being an excellent spin doctor and determined to forge his own path as a pro director, Echavarri was also lucky. As early as the first race in Mallorca, Reynolds struck a small but priceless vein of pay dirt, when Laguía took an early hold on the King of the Mountains jersey after getting in a breakaway, and kept it through to the race finale. Long-term, Laguía’s success didn’t just mean that as soon as their first race, Reynolds were already generating publicity for their team, albeit in a fleabitten event on its last legs. (For the record, the last ever Vuelta a Mallorca was won by classics star Roger De Vlaeminck, who swept the floor with the opposition. “The Belgians win, the Spanish train” was the rather downhearted headline in ElMundo Deportivo the next day.) More importantly, Laguía’s unlikely success gave the fledgling team a sense of purpose from the word go, and the motivation to do it as well.
“It was a real surprise,” Laguía told El Diario de Navarra, “I finished fifth overall and between that and the mountains title, which we fought tooth and nail to defend, Mallorca really fired us all up.”
As for Echavarri, rather than overreaching by pushing for GC titles with such a small team, he wisely decided on the spot that Laguía’s win
in the King of the Mountains title would act as the blueprint for the squad for several years to come.
His strategy worked astonishingly well, given Laguía finally won the KoM jersey no fewer than five times in the Vuelta a España - still a race record - not to mention in almost every other stage race in Spain.
Yet Reynolds’ biggest win (of two) in 1980 was a stage at the Vuelta a España, through Arnaud, and that was impressive enough for such a small squad on their race debut. And Reynolds were so taken with the idea of Laguía’s knack for winning the King of the Mountains title that they made him the star of a massive publicity campaign after a year, “I appeared on the side of every telephone box in Spain,” Laguía recalled.
Reynolds, reaching deeper into their well-lined pockets, tripled the team’s budget in 1982.
Apart from being a good talker, strategist, and blessed with good fortune, Echavarri was innovative, too. Reynolds was the first Spanish team ever to have an official doctor, Maria Victoria Fustero, and a trainer, José Luis Pascua. Not all of Echavarri’s ideas worked out perfectly. An early crusade against banned drugs - withdrawing from some stage races when there were no antidoping tests - ended up with Reynolds getting egg on their faces after Ángel Arroyo won the 1982 Vuelta a España, their first grand tour, and promptly tested positive. Even so, Reynolds were impressed enough with what Echavarri had achieved on such a small budget to stay loyal to the team.
They would do so until the end of 1989, when the arrival of a far bigger backer, Spanish bank Banesto, gave the team their longest single lease of life sponsor-wise. “Don Juan helped us get Banesto,” says Sanz. “So even when he was halfway out the door, he was still important and still cared enough about it to bother.”
“The best thing about the team when it started in 1980 wasn’t the riders, who were all pretty young barring me and one other guy. It was its director,” Anastasio Greciano, one of the original team riders, tells Procycling.
“José Miguel had directed me as an amateur in the Vuelta a Uruguay in the mid-1970s, and even back then you could tell he wasn’t a usual run-of-themill DS. He tried to change people’s mentalities, when it came to racing. And there was a great atmosphere in the team as well.”
Finding the right strategy to survive as a small player in the early 1980s and being willing to experiment is one thing. But the million-dollar question of why the squad has survived for so long has a complex answer with multiple reasons, according to Pablo Lastras. The now 44-year-old is the longeststanding member of the team in the present-day Mallorca Challenge this year. The Spaniard first rode for Banesto in 1996 and became a manager at the team in 2016 after retiring.
Apart from Echavarri’s early strategies, part of their longevity, Lastras insists, was due to Echavarri and Unzué always prioritising what sold best in Spain - stage racing - and they had massive grand tour success in the 1980s and 1990s with Pedro Delgado and Miguel Indurain. Delgado won the team their first grand tour title at the Tour de France title in 1988 and followed it a year later with a win at the Vuelta. Then in 1991 Indurain won the first of his five consecutive yellow jerseys at the Tour.
“A Tour de France win guarantees you a sponsor for a couple of years,” Lastras points out, “That’s all but a given. And with Miguel they got five in a row.”
There were rumours that Unzué, like Echavarri (who retired in the mid noughties) before him, got lucky at times after he took over, such as when the former Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, who is also a cycling fan, apparently intervened in 2011 to bring in Movistar to sponsor the team. But as Lastras sees it, “From time to time for sure you’ll hit on some company boss who loves the sport. But that kind of luck always runs out.”
Rather, there were less obvious reasons for the team’s longevity that date back to the earliest days, Lastras argues, such as Echavarri’s three-year legal battle to register his riders as fulltime workers, something Spain’s social services inexplicably opposed.
“I’d been a pro since 1976, on and off, but I’d never been insured before as a bike rider,” adds Greciano, “and that was another change people appreciated.”
Banesto was taken over by another bank, Santander, in 1994. “They kept the team going because they realised it opened them a lot of doors,” comments Sanz. “We’d hear that the management had its big summit meetings and they’d always start off talking about Miguel Indurain and winning the Tour, then get down to business.”
To judge from Lastras’s comments, the management at the team were appreciated for other reasons, too. “When you’re a young racer, you don’t think directors like José Miguel or Eusebio can teach you anything. Then
with time, you realise, ‘Hey, these guys are looking after me; they’re not ripping me off.’ And that matters a lot.”
Surviving for so long does bring unexpected problems, Lastras recognises, both inside and outside of the squad. “One is that sometimes we take the team for granted. We can’t imagine the day when it’ll end, when in fact the economic model of a team is as fragile for Movistar as it is for anybody in cycling,” he says.
“Then the question we have now is, ‘What can we offer to a sponsor that we haven’t already achieved?’ But we can’t live off the past, and we don’t. Instead, every year we sit down and ask what we can win next.”
The Movistar team of today looks mightily different to the Reynolds team that entered the pro peloton 40 years ago, and not just because their once pink jersey is now a bright bold blue. But Movistar’s existence can still be traced back all the way back to Reynolds’ first ever race in the 1980 Vuelta a Mallorca, and that lucky first roll of the dice that resulted in Laguía winning the King of the Mountains competition.
“Eusebio and José Miguel were just kids and they threw themselves into an adventure,” Lastras says. “It was a crazy thing to do. But like Einstein or Dalí, it’s the crazy guys whose work endures the best. We’re not really going to realise how much Eusebio and Jose Miguel achieved until the day comes when they’re not there.”