“Do you have a cigarette?” Bernardo Ruiz is sitting in the living room of his usual home, on the sixth floor of a beautiful block in the center of Orihuela and he addresses the visitor with the same hope, and need for nicotine, with which Liza Minnelli and her Sophisticated green nails assault Michael York, who has just arrived at his pension in Berlin. Cabaret. “He started smoking Lucky Strike a long time ago, when he hung up his bicycle,” explains his son, also Bernardo, “but we have it rationed for him, because if he smoked as much as he wanted, he would cough a lot at night and could barely sleep.” Behind the chair, a motionless walker that Bernardo refuses to use. Until recently, he walked calmly through his town at 99 splendid years, always wearing his hat. trilbylike Billy Wilder, but after a small surgical intervention he needs help to walk, and before his neighbors see him in need he prefers to stay home. What a great Bernardo Ruiz! What a titan he has been, the strongest man in Orihuela and all its lands, from Orihuela to Cartagena every day round trip through Torremendo and the port of Rebate, rocky hill roads, loaded with corn, barley, wheat, sacks of 50 kilos on the support, trip to the mill, to survive in the postwar, the barter economy. What a pride for him, that as a young man strengthened in the black market, he pedaled up the seminary hill (250 meters of unevenness in two kilometers, average slope of 13%, maximum of 25%) that even Luis Ocaña refused to climb for a while. race, terrified, so much slope. “There weren’t enough developments in bikes, but I didn’t care, it cost me more but I climbed,” he says. “And one day I climbed it 13 times, and everyone who was in the seminary stayed there all morning as spectators, seminarians in cassocks sunbathing.”
Bernardo Ruiz turns 100, the cyclist who won the Vuelta a España in 1948 and climbed to a podium in the Tour, in 1952, along with none other than Fausto Coppi, the campionissimowhom all of Italy mourns every January 2nd for 65 years, since the day of his early death. The last survivor of the generation of Julián Berrendero and Dalmacio Langarica, and preceding Miguel Poblet, Jesús Loroño, Federico Martín Bahamontes, Julito Jiménez. All dead and some forgotten. The bells ring.
“What do you want me to do?” he says as if apologizing for having lived so long. “I live whatever I have to live. What do you want me to do, if that nature has been given to me?” And he does not accept that something in his life is his, his stubbornness, his determination, his generosity, his loyalty. And the hunger that guides him at the age of 16 when he disobeys his father, he changes with his brother on Sunday guard in the field scaring away the birds and with his bicycle he goes far away to compete in a turkey race. He returns at night with the trophy, a beautiful bird to eat, and, after his father’s anger, he announces his determination: I am going to become a cyclist, which is a good way to earn money.
Money earned a lot. More of a roller than a climber, and with a 49-tooth chainring he got averages of more than 37 per hour in his breaks, his specialty, more strong than elegant, he was the first Spanish professional cyclist. In 1951 he won two stages of the Tour and signed for La Perle, the Swiss Hugo Koblet’s team managed by Francis Pélissier. The Witcher,and in which a few years later Jacques Anquetil would debut. Sign a contract for 600,000 francs. Although the Tour ends in July, he does not return to Orihuela until October, as he spends the summer running criteriums. He is one of the greats, Coppi, Geminiani, Magni, Bartali, Bobet, and Bernardo. He is third, after Coppi and Stan Ockers, from the ’52 Tour, who runs with tactical mastery, saving strength in the mountain stages to overtake Gino Bartali and Jean Robic in the final time trial (63 kilometers from Puy de Dôme to Vichy), who were ahead in the general standings. And in Italy they discover many years later that in the photo metaphor of post-war Italy, the passing of the water drum from Bartali to Coppi, the two Italys united in the effort, Bernardo should also have appeared, his shadow behind Bartali’s wheel giving him water to Coppi on the ascent of the Télégraphe during the 11th stage, on the way to Sestriere. “It was common for teammates to help each other and, furthermore, Coppi was so magnificent, the biggest, that if he had needed water I would have given it to him myself,” Bernardo recalled a few years ago. “Shortly after Coppi attacked and left alone, I tried to resist his wheel but he finished me off. I arrived second at the Sestriere finish line, 90 kilometers further, more than seven minutes behind the campionissimo. I became friends with him, and then I did the criterium round with him, who was kind enough to take me everywhere in his car with his Lady Bianca, although I didn’t repay him very well for the favor, because a few weeks later I fell in the velodrome. from Perpignan and I dragged Fausto with me, and he broke his collarbone.”
Third place more than glory guaranteed him a good cachet for the summer criteriums. He held 52 meetings, at a rate of 30,000 pesetas each, and months later, the government of General Perón organized a meeting to inaugurate the Buenos Aires motovelodrome. Bernardo attended with Bartali, Fiorenzo Magni and Luigi Casola. They each received 400,000 pesetas and Juan Domingo Perón gave them a leather-bound collection of the fundamental laws of Justicialism signed by Isabelita Perón that Bernardo still keeps in his library, and considers it one of his treasures. On the ship that transported them they did a roller to arrive in shape. With all the profits from that Tour, a million and a half pesetas, he bought a house, a farm, a car. All of his children went to university. “I earned more than the soccer players,” Bernardo recalled a few years ago. “Di Stéfano and Kubala would be around 200,000 pesetas… I was the one who was in charge, the one who dominated.”
And before the war, in the fields of Orihuela where as a child he acted as a scarecrow so that the seeds would not fly away or, since he was so thin, so tiny, he let his companions tie his legs with a rope and he would venture into narrow caves in search of a treasure that they never found, Miguel Hernández, barely 15 years older than him, had herded the goats. His mother, who knows how to read and write, collaborates in the UGT premises and helps with whatever is needed, and after the war his father has to go to the Civil Guard barracks every 15 days, and he does so until the son, so strong, he wins the Vuelta del Frente de Juventudes in Valencia, and his photo appears in the Brand.It’s famous. It is important, and the mayor tells Tomás, his father, leave it alone, it is no longer necessary for you to go through the barracks.
Today is a holiday, the painter Miguel Soro inaugurates an exhibition dedicated to him, and in the memory of Bernardo Ruiz the stories, the characters, the life he has lived are crowded together, as if the future was mocking his memory to spare him from living anchored in she. “I’ve ridden with so many cyclists, I’ve met so many people, that I can’t get my foot in the door,” he says to also avoid the perpetual repetition of so many anecdotes after having forced him to talk about the figures with whom he was one of the greats, of Coppi, “a phenomenon”, from Cañardo, about whom he does not say anything good, from Marinelli, a Frenchman who is 99 years old and who was third in the ’49 Tour, and is still alive, “nothing at all, a second or less” . “But I’m not there to remember things anymore,” he says. “There are fans who have more memories than me. And my son helps me a lot.”
His son, also Bernardo, is a pharmacist and curator of his father’s memory, his medals, his trophies, his exploits, his life. “He was very discreet and only quite late did he begin to tell his children more about his life,” he says, and tells the history of Spain summarized in the life of his uncle Tomás, his father’s older brother: “Tomás joined the International Brigades, which had a hospital here, in Orihuela. He fought and survived in the Battle of the Ebro, and was imprisoned at the end of the war. Advised by his father, the most important thing is to survive, son, he signed up for the Blue Division to have his prison sentence commuted, and like him many Republican soldiers. And there he went, to Russia, to fight with the Nazi army. He participated in the siege of Stalingrad (now Volgograd) and survived, and with honors, because he destroyed a machine gun nest and was awarded the Iron Cross. The pay that the Germans provided him he sent home. 1,000 pesetas. 500 for the family and the other 500 for Bernardo to buy a racing bicycle, an Alcyon, his first bike, with which he climbs the hill to the seminary.”
It was a better bike than the Gaitán with which he won the Vuelta del 48, organized by Acción Católica and a white leader’s jersey with the newspaper’s banner Already. The Gaitán, made in Seville with solid iron tubes, was called the suicide bike, because it had the gear lever next to the plate and you had to lower your hand and take your eyes off the road to do it. They also called it the flute, because to lighten the weight, instead of a single fat vertical tube, it had two thinner ones and the air passed through the middle and it sounded like a flute.
Bernardo Ruiz, who turns 100 years old, survived all of this strong and combative, and it lightens everyone’s happy memory.
