La libertad, la bicicleta

At the age of 32, the Asturian journalist Paco Ignacio Taibo felt that the smell of stale cassock has ominously seized the editorial office of the newspaper where he works, El Comercio de Gijón. The republican past of his family prevented him from prospering professionally in a newspaper that faithfully followed the guidelines of the Franco regime, and that lack of freedom overwhelmed every second of his life. Without knowing anything about cycling -he never learned to ride a bicycle- he convinced his bosses to let him informatively cover the Vuelta a Ciclista España that in 1957 kept the Spanish population on edge. And so, between pedals, on two wheels, little by little, he added championship after championship until he managed to cross the Spanish border and breathe the air of freedom in France. At just eight years old, her son, the novelist Paco Ignacio Taibo II, now relates those days when his father left the house in an Army jeep to attend the duel between Toledo Federico Martín Bahamontes and Basque Jesús Loroño, in times where cyclists came from home with a pedal stroke, dressed in soccer pants and shoes with espadrilles.