Cycling is in mourning again. If Federico Martín Bahamontes died less than a month ago, this Thursday another legend of this sport died: Guillermo Timoner (97 years old), the icon of Spanish track cycling, the six-time world champion of ‘after motorcycle.’ He retired from professional cycling in 1968 and was a national track team coach (1971-1978).
EL CORREO was with him in 2006, about to turn 80, in his town, Felanitix, in the center of Mallorca. “On the way out of town. There is the store, “a neighbor told this journalist. It was not the first time he had given such instructions. Many devotees came to the ‘Deportes Timoner’ window, most of them from Central Europe. “You are a journalist. Well, you don’t have to ask Timoner anything. Just listen to him.” The warning echoed in parallel to the first steps through the store. It was more like a museum, a tunnel in time. When the bell was called, the myth appeared: small, smiling, with a necklace of trophies and prizes orbiting the walls of the establishment. Another journalist. He was used to it. «So that you don’t ask me the usual, I already give you a ‘dossier’ about my life». The warning was valid. No questions; just open your ears: Guillermo Timoner speaks.
It was a whirlpool. “Come in, come in. So you are from Bilbao. Well, I won the Anoeta World Cup ». A poster, a gold medal and hundreds of photographs were witnesses of that. Crossing the threshold of the back room was taking a leap into the forties, fifties, sixties… «And I continue riding my bicycle. It’s my vice and it won’t go away.” With 79 years. And it was true. A school notebook attested to it. “Today I have done an hour and a half of rolling in the morning and I will do another two hours in the afternoon.” The numbers were printed on the sheet. In red the kilometers in roller; in black those that he carried out on the asphalt during the weekends. “Look, in 2005 I did 637 hours, in total, 4,463 kilometers,” he explained, pulling out the data from the spiral of the notebook. Not bad. He was about to turn 80 years old. “It’s been years, yes. It’s like when in a race you see the sign that indicates ten kilometers to the finish line. “Look, look. Here I train.” In front of two screens, that of a television and that of a mirror. «It is that everyone always tells me that they have seen Timoner run in Madrid, in Belgium, in Germany, everywhere. But I had never seen him. So I put on this mirror. To see Timoner roll ». With television marking the pace.
‘helmsman, the wonder’
I rode every day. «I especially take advantage of cycling on television. Of course, when they broadcast the entire mountain stages it is difficult for me to keep up », he joked. But the journalist was not there to see, but to listen. Back to the back room. There time was just a space between memories. Timoner’s life was bound in dozens of volumes. Snipped into cuts. Each one of his pedal strokes slept grafted with ink on the paper. “Look here”. Images of the beginning, of his first Spanish championship, that of 1945. «I did not have a car. You had to take the suitcase, the bike and go first by train and then by boat ». The easements of the island. Mallorca was a velodrome that one day soon became too small for a cyclist. It reads a headline from 1947: ‘Timoner, the wonder’. “And look”. He appears in a photograph together with Coppi and Bartali, at the Vigorelli velodrome (Milan). A temple. “Look here. The El Retiro Criterium, in 1954». Full, with 44,000 spectators. “There he still had hair.”
«So from Bilbao, huh». And he took some photos in which he appeared wearing a txapela. «They are from San Sebastián, from Anoeta, from when I won my last World Cup». Sixth. In 1965. “In the afternoon they took me to see the La Concha drifters.” The conversation continued screwed to the albums. Each book held several years, but the shelves were overflowing with paper. And it is that Timoner ran a lot. So much so that he saw how generations of rivals were staying on the edge of the velodrome while he continued rolling. So much so that he had to fight against time. And even lie. In fact, his sports name was pronounced with a lie. They were 14 years old; it was 1940 and then you had to be 16 to get a license. The boy from Felanitx clung to a post-war deficiency: there was no identity card. And he lied when asked by the president of the Balearic Federation. All for running. Against everyone and against the passage of time. 56 years after that lie, they didn’t want to let him compete either. Paradox: for old. He was 70 years old and he wanted to celebrate it at the Algaida velodrome with a challenge: 100 kilometers on the track. He did, of course.
He kept untwisting memories. From his time as a migratory cyclist, as a tenant in the house of the future father-in-law of Eddy Merckx, of Lucien Acou. From when he formed an ‘American’ couple with another legend, Miguel Poblet, or with Miguel Bover. “I am the first Spanish cyclist to win a world championship,” he said then. And one of the first to have a television set. They gave it to him in 1955, after winning his first World Cup. A gift from Phillips. But he left ‘tele’ in Amsterdam. “In Spain they were still running tests for emissions.” A constellation of trophies was the choir for his story. His hair, sparse but long then, looked like a white streak… “I have many records.” In the 1960 World Cup he set a speed after moto of 82,600 kilometers per hour over 100 kilometers. «In 1955 I was named the best Spanish athlete». He ahead of Joaquím Blume, Fred Galiana, Bernardino Adarraga and the pelotari Moreno del Val. The notebook rescued photos with Franco, with Errol Flynd; snapshots of velodromes from half the world, from Belgium, from Buenos Aires ….. The old cyclist continued to peel his biography in layers, like those of an onion, while the journalist, obedient to the story, enjoyed and listened.
Such was the island of Timoner. A velodrome, a magic ring. His store was a place of pilgrimage. German and Belgian cyclists, genuflecting and dedicated, came up there. To see him. It is the refrain that he always hears: «I saw him run in…». And he, for that reason, to see himself, spent the afternoons on a roller and facing a mirror. To see Timoner. Seventeen years after that meeting, the myth has died at the age of 97 in his Mallorca.
2023-08-17 09:24:22
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