Tardienta (Huesca), Jul 6 (EFE) What he had to do was put all his expertise into practice in what he was a true professional: hairdressing.
Miguel Ángel Vidal (Poleñino, 1945) raced as a professional cyclist, in the then independent category together with another Aragonese, Antonio Martín from Zaragoza, in the team of the electrical appliance brand where there were already some of the considered figures and others that were in the making to be like Luis Ocaña, whom the Tour remembers this year with a stage start, tomorrow July 7, in Mont-de-Marsan for the 50th anniversary of his victory in the gala race, and the recently deceased Txomin Perurena.
They were so new that in the interviews prior to the start of the season, the newspapers cataloged Vidal and Martín as ‘Mondragón’s strangers’.
OPPORTUNITIES FOR THE MODEST
Vidal, however, was clear about it: “If all the modest Spanish cyclists had this opportunity that they have given us, many more professional riders would come out.”
The first concentration of the team was at the Monastery of Nuestra Señora de Aránzazu in Oñati (Guipuzcoa) for two weeks in December before Christmas. “We went there without bicycles and what we did above all was do gymnastics and play fronton,” Miguel Ángel Vidal explained to EFE.
“The first photo as a team we all took dressed in suits because we still didn’t have the bikes,” he recalls.
In the Fagor were the Basques Patxi Gabica, Txomin Perurena, Jesus Aranzabal, Jose Maria Errandonea, Ramon Mendiburu and Jose Antonio Momeñe, who “played ball by hand”, and the rest, Luis Ocana, Antonio Martin, Mariano Diaz, Joaquin and Manuel Galera, and Jose Manuel Lopez Rodriguez. “We played to spade, we weren’t used to playing by hand and that ball so hard wrecked us, only played the Basques because they always did”.
During the long hours spent at the concentration, one of the first things his new colleagues learned about Vidal was that in Tardienta he worked as a hairdresser with his father. “Someone said to ask the monks for scissors that were the ones they used to cut each other’s hair.”
“I hadn’t taken mine with me because I didn’t plan to use them and the ones they left us didn’t look at all like the ones I used in Almudévar, and I had to make do with what they left me: scissors, razor and razor,” he says.
OCAÑA, ‘BEATLE’ STYLE HAIR CUT
The haircut that his ‘clients’ were asking for was “the classic cut that was worn at that time”, with a very short nape and little else. “Until it was Ocaña’s turn, who was already married, and he asked me for a haircut that was a little longer at the back, like the style the Beatles wore.”
Ocaña, who only two years later, in 1971, already had it in his hands to win his first Tour de France and repeat the one that Federico Martín Bahamontes had won in 1959 until he won it now 50 years ago in 1973, already began to make clear his quality at Fagor with which he was second in the Tour of Spain to win it in 1970 with the French Bic.
Ocaña’s personality was evident at all times and he remembers the anecdote of when they went to take measurements for their suits and he told them: “’Give me the fabric and my tailor will do it for me.’ “I wanted it with two openings in the back and more modern than what they had done for the rest of the team. He could tell that he came from France, ”says Vidal.
Regarding his condition as a hairdresser, Vidal remembers the comment that the veteran José Antonio Momeñe made to him: “Being a hairdresser, why do you go running? Only those of us who have nothing else are here”.
“In the Gabica, Perurena and Ocaña team they earned 45,000 pesetas, another 35,000, but there were also some of us who did not earn anything. That was the reality of cycling in those years ”, he points out.
De Ocaña, who “the Basques called French”, remembers how the cyclist from Priego (Cuenca) but raised in Mont-de-Marsan lamented: ‘In Spain they call me French and in France they call me Spanish’, a duality of the one that almost never ended up coming off.
“He had a very calm temperament, although when he got angry, especially on a bicycle, he didn’t leave a puppet with a head, at those moments he was absolutely temperamental,” says Vidal.
He also had the experience of meeting Luis Ocaña, a driver of cars with the accelerator always at full throttle. “Coming back from a race in Barcelona, Ocaña took Perurena’s R-8 that was left there and a few kilometers later, in Igualada, he had blown it up,” he says.
THE TEAM BIKE
Vidal keeps the bike he was a professional with like gold, although the reason he has it is not because he bought it from the team at the end of the season.
“I went to the first concentration with my bike that I had ridden and had it brand new, a Macario with all the Campagnolo material. The team bike was a Marotías, which at that time was the Mercedes of bikes and they kept my bike, I suppose Pedro Matxain (team manager) would end up disassembling it and selling it in his shop”, he comments.
Jose Luis Sorolla