“The Greatest Tour de France Climber of All Time” Has Died at Age 95
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Federico Bahamontes, who was the first Spanish rider ever to win the Tour de France, died Tuesday at the age of 95.
“It is with deep sorrow that we mourn the loss of Federico Martin Bahamontes, the Eagle of Toledo, a benchmark in sport who has taken the name of our city to the very top,” Toledo’s mayor Carlos Velázquez said in a statement following Bahamontes’s death. “Adopted son of the city of Toledo, admired and loved, Fede has thrilled us with his extraordinary climbs. His bicycle shop, in our Plaza de la Magdalena, has been a place of pilgrimage for all fans … Thanks to him we all won the Tour.”
Federico Bahmontes was born in 1928 in the central Spanish province of Toledo. That geography would earn him the nickname “The Eagle of Toledo” later in his career.
Due to the Spanish civil war, Bahmontes’s family spent much of the mid-1930s fleeing from their hometown of Santo Domingo-Claudilla to Madrid and then, eventually, to the village of Villarubbia de Santiago.
In the wake of the war, the country was under food rationing orders. This led Bahamontes to buy his first bike at the age of eighteen in order to transport and sell food illegally between towns and villages.
Soon after, in July 1947, he entered his first bike race, finishing second.
Bahamontes spent the next half decade racing as an amateur, which allowed him to earn more than his black-market food trade.
In 1953, Bahamontes entered his first professional race, the Vuelta a Asturias. After winning the opening stage, Bahamontes finished the race in twenty-first place out of a field of sixty-nine racers.
That same year, Bahamontes won the King of the Mountains classification in the Volta a Catalunya, which, as the Vuelta a España was not run between 1950 and 1955, was the country’s biggest race at the time.
He competed in his first Tour de France the following summer, initially declining an invite to the race on the grounds that he didn’t have any luggage. He won that year’s KOM classification and finished the race twenty-fifth overall.
In 1959, Bahamontes won the Tour de France, becoming the race’s first-ever Spanish yellow jersey.
However, over his career, the Eagle of Toledo was best known for his climbing acumen. He won the Tour de France’s KOM jersey a total of six times (1954, ’58, ’59, ’62, ’63, and ’64), the Giro’s KOM in 1956, and Vuelta’s KOM in 1957, where he also finished second overall.
Following his retirement in 1965, Bahamontes returned to Toledo to run a bicycle shop.
In 2013, in celebration of the Tour’s hundredth anniversary, French newspaper L’Equipe named Bahamontes the greatest Tour de France climber of all time.
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