CYCLING HEARTLAND

When Federico Bahamontes, the country’s first Tour winner, wanted to get ahead as an amateur in the 1950s, he said he had no choice but to move to Barcelona. He later said, “Catalonia had more money than the rest of the country combined. In cycling, it was where it was all happening.” And at that time, Spain’s second biggest industrial powerhouse, and where cycling slowly but surely overtook Catalonia in importance, was the Basque Country.

Politics played its part again in cycling’s development following the death of Spanish dictator General Franco in 1975, when agreements on how to carve up the running of Spain saw such breakaway regions - and all the rest - given a huge amount of devolved power. (It spawned a slang expression, still used today in Spain, to define this sort of large-scale power-sharing exercise: café para todos, a cup of coffee for everybody.)

Since then, modern-day Spanish governments have decided foreign policy and state laws and economic policies. But each of Spain’s 17 regiones autonomas [regional autonomies], like the Basque Country and Navarre, have the last word on expenditure for practically everything else in their region, from education through to - crucially in cycling’s case - sport.

“The Basque government spends a much greater proportion of its budget on cycling than any other region in Spain,” Fernando Ferrari, head of Ciclos21, the country’s biggest cycling website, tells Procycling.

“They consider it a national Basque sport as much as pelota vasca [Basque pelota]. There are some real historic strongholds of cycling beyond the Basque Country and