Federico Bahamontes, who has died aged 95, was the first Spaniard to win the Tour de France. Eccentric, driven and solitary, the “Eagle of Toledo” was widely regarded as the tour’s finest mountain climber of the postwar era, taking the King of the Mountains prize six times between 1954 and 1964, a record that was not equalled until the 1980s. He was also the first to win the Mountains prize in all three grand tours – France, Spain and Italy.
Bahamontes is celebrated for an episode on the Col de Romeyère in the Alps in his first tour in 1954: he was part of a four-rider break that led up the climb, with – so he recalled – 14 minutes’ advantage on the bunch, crossed the King of the Mountains line first, then pulled in and went straight to an ice-cream van; he was mobbed by the crowd as he tackled the cone.
He later explained that he had broken two spokes in his front wheel and was waiting for his team car to give him a spare wheel or a bike, but the vehicle was stuck way behind the peloton. With the ice-cream eaten, he went to a nearby stream, filled a bottle with water, and sprayed the bunch as they struggled over the summit, which earned him a fine from the race jury.
He was born in Val de Santo Domingo, Toledo, one of the four children of Victoria Bahamontes and Julián Martín, and used his mother’s surname as there were a lot of Martíns in his local town. His father was a roadmender before becoming, briefly, the foreman on an estate owned by the Duke of Montoya.
The estate was requisitioned by Republican troops besieging the Alcázar fortress in Toledo, prompting the family to flee to Madrid before returning to Toledo after the civil war ended, where – as for many in Spain – life became a constant fight against starvation.
Later, Bahamontes recalled stealing vegetables from trucks, eating orange peel, stale bread, vineshoots, rotten fruit and cats – which the family called “baby goats”. He sold live ammunition for scrap, worked in the fields and helped his father mend roads, and when he was 18, he acquired a bike in order to further his career buying food in local villages and selling it on the black market.
Bike racing was initially just another way to make money; his first race was on the Fiesta Nacional, in July 1947; he finished second, and 12 months later became a full-time amateur racer, at times travelling to compete by hitching rides on freight trains, occasionally “throwing” a major race to make money.
In 1953 he turned professional with the Balanzas Berkel squad, sponsored by a manufacturer of scales, rapidly making a name for himself with marathon breakaway attempts that led followers of the sport to question his sanity.
In 1954, he earned a place in Spain’s team at the Tour de France, then contested by national squads. This was his breakthrough; he earned his first King of the Mountains title, and described the race as “the most powerful moment of my life, the moment people realised who I was, the turning point”. He also realised the value of being a showman, at a time when a rider’s contract depended partly on his ability to play to the crowds.
It was during this Tour that the organiser and journalist Jacques Goddet coined the nickname “the Eagle of Toledo.”
Struggling with a knee injury, Bahamontes did not win the Mountains title at the tour again until 1958, when he finished eighth overall and won two mountain stages. A year later, he won the time trial up the Puy de Dôme mountain and linked up with the “Angel of the Mountains”, Charly Gaul, in a break through the Alps to clinch the overall standings. After riding for eight different teams in nine years, in 1962 he settled at the French squad Margnat-Paloma, for whom he won three more mountains titles; in 1963 he finished second in the tour to Jacques Anquetil, claiming that the Frenchman owed his win to illegal drafting behind a motorbike on a key mountain stages.
In 1956, he had married Fermina Aguilar Sánchez, whom he had met while working in a market as a teenager; the wedding in Toledo Cathedral was attended by the mayor of the city and the head of the Spanish Cycling Federation, reflecting his rapid social rise.
Having ended his cycling career in 1965, Bahamontes retired to run a bike shop in Toledo, and founded his own professional cycling team, La Casera-Bahamontes. The team won stages in the Giro d’Italia and the Tour de France with Miguel-María Lasa and Pedro Torres, and the King of the Mountains prize in the tour and Vuelta. The team folded in 1974 after Bahamontes fell out with his riders; later, he organised the four-day Vuelta a Toledo stage race and opened a cycling museum in Toledo. His name was sufficiently famous by the 21st century for a Belgian cycling magazine to be named after him.
Bahamontes remained a constant presence on the cycling circuit into his 90s, and was elected the best climber in Tour de France history by a celebrity panel in 2013, but as he said in an interview with Cycle Sport magazine in 1993: “I’m never going to hear the last of that ruddy ice-cream.”
Fermina died in 2018.
• Federico Martín Bahamontes, racing cyclist, born 9 July 1928; died 8 August 2023
