If there were a Pantheon of sport in Spain, 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 now. Alberto Contador, for example, won two Tours but in the modern era of sport in this country, which began with the 1992 Olympic Games. Before: few victories, many epics and plenty of tragedies.
We lived misfortune with ease...
Luis Ocaña had vedette legs, slender, a handsome face and a devilish character. He embodied the post-war emigration to France, Germany, Switzerland... the result of rural underdevelopment and a source of foreign currency, which, together with tourism, allowed the "developmentalism" of the 70s. A family from Priego, province of Cuenca, who He 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 comparable myths, Ocaña was one of ours – in open and logical competition with France, like Picasso – that summer of 1971. The Belgian Eddy Merckx, nicknamed “the cannibal” because he won everything – he did not give up even the triumphs of stage – seemed invincible. And Luis Ocaña, a fighting cock, was the first to challenge his hegemony. with insolence
In the final stretch of the Tour, the leader of the Bic team -French multinational pen company- led Merckx by 7'23'' in the general classification. Mountain stage in the Pyrenees. Hellish, rainy day. The Belgian demarcated and only Ocaña followed him down the Col de Menté. His team manager advised him not to risk it. After all, he could afford to give up a minute. Impossible: he had challenged the Belgian from the first stage and he was not going to manage time now, like a pen pusher. An error and an anthological sports photograph: the gesture of pain, fallen on a sidewalk, of Ocaña with a fractured clavicle and turned into a holy Christ.
The TVE connection, highly anticipated by all the fans, began just after the fall. The commentator cried, many viewers, too. The fallen angel. The eternal complex of honor without ships. Merckx won his third Tour in a row. And Luis Ocaña was forged in the school of cursed athletes, despite winning the 1973 Tour, without the Belgian in the peloton. That curve, that fall, stained with mud and all the pain in the world when he abandoned the Col de Mentè...
Luis Ocaña, the first Spaniard to win the Tour after Federico Martín Bahamontes, took his own life on his vineyard estate, a business that did not whistle. Unlike Urtain, who threw himself into the void days before the 1992 Olympics, the Spaniard from Mont de Marsan shot himself back in 1994.
