The life of Alfonso de Borbón y Dampierre, Duke of Cádiz, was a complete calamity after his failed marriage. He went through the loss of his eldest son in a car accident in which he was driving in 1984. And his death was no less tragic when he died semi-decapitated in a ski accident in the American resort of Beaver Creek, in Colorado. This Tuesday marks 35 years since that disastrous episode. Alfonso’s troubled lineage, which did not allow him to be king despite his claims, added to the fact that in his life there was more pain than glory, ended up fueling in him the sambenito of the cursed prince.
Around four in the afternoon on Monday, January 30, 1989 in Colorado, Alfonso de Borbón was descending a ski slope closed to the public with Austrian skier Toni Sailer; from his wife, the golf player Gaby Rummeny; and the Canadian Ken Read, the person in charge of security for the downhill event of the world alpine ski championship, which was held the next day. At that moment, a station worker, Daniel Conway, was manipulating the cable that was going to support the finish line banner of the competition. Only three skiers in the group managed to avoid it when the cable was still at ground level.
A few seconds later, when Alfonso de Borbón arrived at that point, the cable was raised to a height of 1.65 meters above the snow. As Alfonso measured 1.83 tall, he signed his death sentence when he came across that sad finish line. It was 3:56 p.m. Assistance to the duke was rather slow, as he remained for more than half an hour waiting, still with a pulse, for the ambulance and the local police to arrive to his rescue. When they finally arrived, Alfonso was taken to Vail Medical Center, where his death was certified at 4:48 p.m.
The subsequent autopsy would reveal the cause of death: “A large crescent-shaped incision measuring 20.32 centimeters in length and penetrating up to 4.44 centimeters.” And according to José María Zavala, author of the book Alfonso, el Borbón non grato (2008), local radio initially mentioned the event as an “attack” and the police themselves classified the case as homicide in their first report. That Conway, the employee who manipulated the cable and who could have been blamed for involuntary manslaughter, disappeared from the map did not help to dispel the assumptions of a conspiracy theory surrounding that death.
After the accident, his ex-wife and mother of his only living child, Carmen Martínez-Bordiú, filed a civil lawsuit for negligence in the courts of Denver, capital of Colorado. In it she requested compensation of about 3.6 million euros (around 600 million pesetas at the time) to pay for the life and studies of her son Luis Alfonso de Borbón until he turned 25.
On the verge of opening the oral trial, the parties reached an agreement by which Luis Alfonso would receive a confidential amount, which according to Zabala was close to 600,000 euros. For this reason, a thorough investigation of the case was never carried out and it was resolved with the payment of an amount for negligence. Alfonso’s mother, Emanuela de Dampierre, acknowledged in her memoirs that despite her speculations, she accepted that it was an accident. “There was a lot of speculation about the matter and, in my opinion, some of the ideas that were thrown around were very bizarre. “Honestly, I think it was a tragic accident,” she said.
Curiously, Alfonso de Borbón responded to the question of whether he felt old in his last interview: “Old, no. But he does more than 10 and 20 years, of course. Today life is much longer than before. My paternal grandfather (Alfonso XIII) died at 54”. But that inopportune cable during his last ski descent meant that Alfonso did not live beyond the age of 52.
For some historians, the wedding of Alfonso de Borbón y Dampierre with Carmen Martínez-Bordiú and Franco in March 1972 was the last attempt by the Pardo clique to perpetuate the Franco family in the head of state through Alfonso’s messy lineage. . It was an alleged machination about which the dictator, already on his last legs and like a good Galician, never spoke out.
But despite the dream that was that wedding, years passed, times changed, and, well into the transition, Carmen left Alfonso in 1979. For Carmen, her love “ended up with many third parties,” surely referring to tedious relatives like the his mother And Alfonso attributed that ending to the fact that “Carmen frequently saw some divorced friends,” like Isabel Preysler, divorced a year before her. The truth is that by then, Martínez-Bordiú’s second husband, the French antiques dealer Jean Marie Rossi, had already appeared on the scene.
After their separation, Carmen and Alfonso lived a few nightmare years. They lost his first-born child at age 11 in a car accident when he was returning from skiing with his father and his brother at a resort in Astún, near Pamplona. Alfonso was also badly injured. He recovered but would never get over that death.
Since then, Carmen would also speak of it as “the tragedy that marked my life.” Just a few months later, Jean-Marie Rossi lost his daughter, Mathilda, in a boating accident. And five years after those misfortunes, another one came. Alfonso de Borbón died after cutting his neck on a cable that crossed a ski slope he was descending on in Colorado, United States. Now Carmen lives in Cascais, Portugal, retired from everything except love, trying to stay away from the controversies in Spain due to the privileges of the Franco family in the past.
