If there was a Sports Hall of Fame, Luis Ocaña, the “Spaniard from Mont-de-Marsan”, would be there with honors, despite the fact that he only won one Tour 50 years ago. Alberto Contador, for example, won two Tours, but in the modern era of the country’s sport, which begins with the Olympic Games of 1992. Before: few victories, many epics and tragedies in abundance.
We lived misfortune with ease…
Luis Ocaña had celebrity legs, slender, a handsome face and a character of a thousand demons. It embodied post-war emigration to France, Germany, Switzerland…, the result of rural underdevelopment and a source of foreign exchange, which enabled, with tourism, the development of the 1970s. A family from Priego, province of Conca, who emigrated to the south of France in 1957, when Luis was 12 years old, after trying his luck in the Val d’Aran.
A country in need of homologable myths, Ocaña was one of ours – in open and logical competition with France, like Picasso – in the summer of 1971. The Belgian Eddy Merckx, called the Cannibal because he won everything – did not give up even the triumphs of stage–, he seemed invincible. And Luis Ocaña, a brat, was the first to challenge its hegemony. with insolence
In the final stage of the 1971 Tour, the leader of the Bic team – the French multinational pen company – was ahead of Merckx by 7m 23s in the general. Mountain stage in the Pyrenees. Rainy, hellish day. The Belgian left and only Ocaña followed his pace on the descent of the Col de Menté. The team manager advised him not to take any chances. After all, he could afford to give in for a minute. Impossible: he had challenged the Belgian from the first stage and now he would not manage the time, like a pissant. A mistake and an anthological sports photograph: the gesture of pain, after falling on a curb, of Ocaña with a fractured collarbone and a disaster.
The TVE connection, much awaited by all the fans, started right after the fall. The commentator was crying, many viewers, too. The fallen angel The eternal complex of honor without ships. Merckx won the third Tour in a row. And Luis Ocaña consolidated himself in the school of cursed athletes, despite winning the 1973 Tour, without the Belgian in the race. That bend, that fall, stained with mud and all the pain in the world when he left the Col de Menté…
Luis Ocaña, the first Spaniard to win the Tour after Martín Bahamontes, took his own life on his vineyard farm, a business that was not thriving. Unlike Urtain, who threw himself into the void days before the 1992 Games, the Spaniard from Mont-de-Marsan shot himself in 1994.
