This middle-aged man, taller than expected, also wider, with Elvis Costello-style wire glasses, now drives a taxi but gave 21 years of his life to cycling. Álvaro González de Galdeano (Vitoria, 1970) was Spanish amateur and professional champion, he won a stage of the Giro and another of the Vuelta, he raced in the all-powerful ONCE team of Manolo Saiz, he lived through the leaden years of doping, those of affair Festina, the Belgian pot and the searches with French police dogs. “I noticed that the peloton was going very fast but we were not aware that there was anything else that made people run faster than normal. For me it was more a matter of drug trafficking than sporting performance. My father was amazed by the news. We didn’t talk about it much among ourselves, the cyclists, either. Nobody was offering you prohibited substances… everyone was doing their own thing and you weren’t looking to see what the person next door was doing,” he explains. He was not what he dreamed of when his uncle gave him a red Zeus when he turned 13 and he gave him his first jersey… from the Irunés Cycling Club.
We turn the page. “I was gregarious, of course, but I loved getting away,” he smiles as he drinks a coffee at a hotel in Vitoria where the interview takes place. One day after participating in the Barcelona 92 Games, Álvaro was a professional with Artiach and could display an Olympic diploma: he was fifth in the 100 kilometer team time trial. There may be no test more agonizing than the 100. Very few truly understand how terribly difficult it is to participate in the Games, what a great athlete you have to be, the pressure you have to endure. “The psychologists prepared us (he ran with David Plaza, Eleuterio Mancebo and Miguel Fernández) for months to handle the pressure. We couldn’t even attend the opening ceremony so as not to get tired, because we were running the next day and everyone was asking for a medal. As soon as we started, a teammate failed us and when we reached the finish line I burst into tears, to release so much accumulated tension. A cyclist amateur He only thinks about being professional, he does not realize the importance of the Games, what it represents for a country. We are 40 seconds away from bronze…”, he recalls.
As amateur, he was already running with Armstrong, Ulrich, Zabel… “And he beat them,” he laughs, pointing to his chest with his index finger. There is no arrogance, just irony in his purposes. “Now, however, it is very difficult for me to go out and ride my bike,” he admits. “I never imagined, when I ran in the Barcelona Games, that at the end of the road there would be a taxi. But I have to admit that I am happy with the taxi, I have a quality of life that I have never known. “I don’t want to spend 200 days away from home, away from my family,” she argues. Before the Games he had already signed to become professionals with Artiach (where Chozas, Laguía, Jokin Mujika, Alfonso Gutiérrez… his TV idols were waiting for him): he found a cycling team in which he competed 100 days a year. “With so much racing, Easter, my coach only sent me short quality training sessions, a bit like how young people train now,” he explains, “but now cycling has become globalized and many things have gotten worse: it’s a shame that our national calendar is so meager
When I was director of Euskaltel I saw Samuel Sánchez with his computer, the watts, so and so and I told him to look more at his feelings, to really know himself instead of what the computer tells you. The physical trainers are going to take the place of the directors, they told me once. Valverde is the example of a cyclist who performs without technological help, just because he knows himself. And I don’t know how long these young people who are now sweeping will last in the peloton… it is also true that now every race is at its best, from the start. In my time, we only pushed the last 40 kilometers: there was a joke in the peloton… I gained weight in the races! I ate breakfast like crazy and then we stood until the helicopter appeared. It seemed like a privilege to live like this: Cipollini would escape, hide behind a house and appear from behind the peloton. Mind you, it’s not that we weren’t professionals. While at the Vitalicio the masseuse appeared with the scale to weigh us in the room in the morning and when he had eaten a lot I had my tricks to hide: I asked him to raise the blinds and told him to write down 100 grams more than the day before. You couldn’t be overweight,” he says.
Going to the professionals was easy for Álvaro, but once in the peloton he saw no reason to renew his contract, so he decided to stand out in any way, no matter how desperate it sounded. “My first year as a professional I also worked as a sports clothing salesperson. I went to the shops in the Basque Country in winter and they asked me what he was doing there if he was already a cycling professional. I wasn’t sure I would last long in the platoon, I didn’t control my future. In my first professional year I always said: I carry a sign of is transferred. The first thing I did was buy a solid watch in case I fell, and since José María García always entered the Vuelta live at 2:05 p.m., I started at less than a quarter of each rush hour. Winning wasn’t going to win, but at least it made me my audience,” he smiles.
Seventh in the 1998 Vuelta, 24th in the 1999 Tour and six wins in his career… it is difficult to define Álvaro as a simple gregarious… “but the word gregarious doesn’t bother me. I was very clear that winning was very complicated, but I wanted to reach my best version wherever I was. I was lucky to be a good gregarious and had a nose for smelling good escapes. My father gave me advice when he was still amateur: You are earning the same salary as me, but you earn it in 4 hours of work while I have to put in 10. If you are not distracted, they will offer you more. So I didn’t go to the races to tell jokes. Look, he was a gregarious person who went out to train beforehand, came home, took the Vespa and took my brother Igor and Joseba Beloki with me so they could ride the bike,” he laughs.
Javier Mínguez, Txomin Perurena and Manolo Saiz were Álvaro’s great directors, guys with enormous character. “Manolo Saiz was struck by how methodical he was with technology: he was a true innovator in terms of material, but then he was capable of telling you not to try the potentiometer (it was offered to him by the Basque Government, with a scholarship to use it) because “I was going to go crazy.” He threw tantrums from time to time, like everyone else… I’ve never had a nice director, I don’t know how to say it any other way… they were all very demanding, but I can’t complain about any of them. At the Euskadi Foundation, Perurena was special, human, because he transmitted authentic values and since at that time we didn’t fly as much either, he would pick up my brother and me in the car and we traveled a lot together. Mínguez was also special, although his anger was notorious,” he points out.
They say that running a Tour is a free way to delve into the most intense pain. Not in the case of Álvaro. “I finished a Tour well. My first Tour I worked for Ángel Casero, and since everything was new for me I had enormous motivation, I finished it with the feeling that I had enjoyed it and that it had fallen short. I was fifth overall thanks to the time trials. Now, it is true that there were tremendously hard days.”
What is it like to win for someone who doesn’t usually win? “Three times in my life I signed with a Today I want to win at the start and I achieved it twice: once in the Giro and another in the Vuelta. At the Giro Mínguez scolded me: he told me to get involved in getaways, that’s why he had signed me up, and that we didn’t advertise Olmo bikes. I went down to the car and he put food in my pockets and he told me not to take supplies and to attack when everyone was busy with the bags. I jumped and from behind Orlando Rodríguez, from Banesto, started to pull and we were 200 meters away for a while: then I raised my arm at him, as if disgusted, and he let up and I opened a gap, looking at the odometer at 40, 40, 40. I reached the circuit and I didn’t even know if it was the last lap, I didn’t know if I had heard the bell or not because I was so nervous. I won with a 29 second advantage. But better than winning, is seeing your brother in the Tour with the yellow jersey (Igor wore the leader’s jersey for 8 days in 2002) and being with him in the room, just like Prudencio and Miguel Indurain.”
Álvaro greatly admired Miguel Indurain and “I asked him how he managed to be so good against the clock… he looked at me and said: get on the bike, kid. Large plate and small sprocket and fully loaded. Listening to the Indurain heart rate monitor caught my attention, the pi, pi, pi sharp when it went above its threshold. And I said this one is dead.” Even if he drives a taxi, he is a cyclist forever, even if it is in the subconscious: “Sometimes I dream that a team wants to sign me and I get scared, and I see that I am not in shape and I think: I’m going to notice and then I wake up. “I think I have been very lucky to have been a cyclist, I would be one again.”
He hung up his bike at 34, in 2004. “I’m not crazy about cycling, but before I was a gazelle and now I’m a harvester and I don’t handle it well. If I go out, I go alone. I don’t want to go with anyone. “I like that solitude, it’s like an opportunity to meditate.”
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