STATE OF THE NATION: SPAIN
Our deep dive into the cycling culture, landscape and history of the sport in one of its heartlands
Spain has produced many grand tour winners and a few classics champions. However, its teams and fans are concentrated in one small corner of the country. And while the Tour and Giro unite France and Italy, the Vuelta just highlights Spain’s atomised cycling scene. Procycling looks into a unique cycling nation
How frequently have you come across the argument that sport can break down barriers even between the bitterest of political and social enemies? From the earliest Olympic Games providing respite to the warring Hellenic world, through First World War soldiers playing Christmas Day football games in no-mans land, to rugby’s 1995 World Cup putting a nail in the coffin of South African apartheid, at least on the surface of it, it’s an idea as old as sport itself.
Cycling, often, has worked like that. Matt Rendell described in this series how Colombia’s unique cycling culture helped unite a fragmented nation. The Tour de France forms part of the bedrock of France’s collective consciousness. Across the Alps, the Giro d’Italia has played a role in boosting 20th century Italy’s brittle sense of nationhood. It’s true that in Belgium, there’s a slightly murky onesided relationship between some elements of Flemish Nationalism and how they conceive of the Tour of Flanders. But Eddy Merckx saying his wedding vows in both Flemish and French shows how the seemingly chronic Walloon-Flemish divide can melt away when Belgian sporting idols do the right thing. And even if cycling is a Flemish obsession, the national football team is supported by all.
But unlike Colombia, France, Belgium and Italy, and just as the tourism slogan of a few years back put it, Spain is different. That’s thanks to the massive importance of bike racing in just one (or two, depending on your political point of view) regions: Navarre and the Basque Country, which comprise a mere three-and-a-half per cent of Spain’s total surface area and about six per cent of its population, but which punch far above their weight in terms of the sport. Beyond that, general interest is high if a Spanish rider is winning the Tour, for example. But what about clubs, races, investment by local authorities and general media support, to give a thumbnail description of ‘cycling culture’? Beyond these two regions, grassroots interest and support can definitely be found, but geographically and socially, it is much more patchy.
Movistar’s Eusebio Unzué, the longest serving manager in the WorldTour, whose team is based in Navarre, confirms this to
Procycling. “Of course there are other parts of Spain with strong cycling traditions,” he says. “But Navarre and the Basque Country contain around 70 per cent of our cycling, built on the deep-rooted understanding of the sport that everyone has here.”
Unzué is not, it must be underlined, talking about Spanish families taking their mountain bikes out for a Sunday ride in the country or younger generations of urbanites riding their fixies. Rather, as he explains, he’s talking about “the number of races, the number of teams and clubs, infrastructure: the essence of our sport”.
There are other countries where cycling is a majority sport in one region and a minority sport in the rest, too. In South America, Ecuador’s Carchi province, home of 2019 Giro winner Richard Carapaz, is perhaps the prime example. Furthermore, no matter how concentrated it is in one or two areas, it can’t be emphasised enough that cycling is not, in any way, a socially divisive sport in Spain: quite the opposite.