Miguel Delibes Centennial

Miguel Delibes, friend of bicycles

Miguel Delibes Foundation, Valladolid

Today Saturday, Don Miguel Delibes Setién He would be no less than 100 years old. But it's been 10 years since Miguel Delibes left.
We know that Delibes was a great bicycle fan, he himself told us about it in a short and delicious book titled “My Dear Bicycle”
My beloved bicycle is the third chapter of My outdoor life, a memoir that Destino published in 1988. At that time it was also published separately, as a booklet, by the Miñón publishing house. I have a later edition from 2014, from The Bike Shop, one more piece of genius from our friend Manu who continues enjoying his American adventure. In this edition the illustrations are by Luis de Horna, another bike lover. A delight.
Delibes tells us, with his close, clear and fun style, his relationship with cycling. The bike was part of his childhood and the rest of his life. Characters like Trueba, the Torrelavega Flea, appear in the book, whom we got to know so well thanks to Marcos Pereda en “A Flea in the Mountain”.
For Delibes, the bicycle was first a diversion, a sport and as he himself wrote: “From the age of eighteen, the bicycle stopped being a sport for me and became a means of transportation.”
Already at the age of 21, the bicycle allowed him to go from his family vacation spot in Molledo-Portolín (Santander) to Sedano (Burgos), where his girlfriend Ángeles spent the summer. 100 kilometers with important climbs such as the Hoz de Reinosa. A choice, that of cycling, motivated by the transportation difficulties of the time and the scarcity of economic resources.

Today they are part of the MAX Classic that remembers that first Delibes bicycle trip between Molledo and Sedano and that took

Miguel Delibes Foundation, Valladolid

to already ten editions. If you want to know more about this story and the MAX Classic, be sure to watch the documentary “Aupa, Delibes”. Look it up on youtube; a short film made by Ignacio Navarro, Antón Rodríguez, Clara Serena and Daniel Rivas, with the participation of Ruth Gabriel and Guillermo Rivas. The film premiered at the 60th edition of the Seminci in Valladolid.
And one more curiosity, that MAX was the signature of Delibes. When he met the love of his life, Ángeles de Castro, he began to sign his first works with the acronym MAX. A simple and romantic equation where M was Miguel, A was Ángeles and X was the unknown that the future could hold for them. The bike also brought them together, when she asked for her hand, Ángeles gave Miguel a typewriter, he gave her a yellow Velox bicycle. They took them on their honeymoon, which was in Molledo; Those were different times and they spent the days enjoying the bicycle, in addition to the activities typical of newlyweds.

This 2020 is also being the Delibes year. Highly recommended a visit to the exhibition about the writer at the National Library of Madrid which is open until November 15. There you can learn many more curiosities about the author. From his French grandfather who came to build the railway to Molledo and stayed. He has always insisted a lot on the importance of French-style education in the Delibes family. Surely this also influenced the love for bicis.

I see Miguel's father, Adolfo Delibes, in a photo with the intellectual Narciso Alonso Cortés and other Valladolid cyclists and it is clear to me that the father who taught Delibes to ride a bike, one summer day while he was reading Don Quixote, was a great fan. to the bicycle. Both collaborated in the biweekly newspaper Valladolid cyclist and promoted the city's two cycling societies, organized parades, races in the Campo Grande, fought for the construction of a velodrome...

Along with them, the Gómez Sigler, founders of the Café de El Norte where the Spanish Velocipedic Union was also located, "the first great cycling society in this country that came to Valladolid at the hands of Narciso Alonso Cortés."

This environment probably allowed Valladolid to be the end of the first stage of the First Tour of Spain, Madrid-Valladolid, in 1935.

Those first laps that he introduced us to, in a magnificent way, Juanfran de la Cruz in his book “Gustaaf Deloor from Return to the Moon”.
Ángel María de Pablos, the voice that told us about cycling in the eighties, a journalist who worked alongside Delibes in El Norte de Casti

lla, remembers his conversations with the man who was the director of the newspaper. «When I returned from a big race like the Tour or the Giro or the Vuelta he would call me to his office, he would sit me on the couch in front of me.

visits and he told me: now tell me everything that you have not been able to tell on television and that has happened in the hotels. I told him some things and he enjoyed it enormously. And he adds: "I think it was written by him and this is my assumption. My little bicycle is part of those conversations." Ángel María de Pablos talks in detail about this relationship between cycling and Valladolid in his book '110 years of cycling in Valladolid'.

From my visit to the National Library I brought back a little book, even smaller, called Delibes on a bicycle, written by Jesus Marchamalo with illustrations by Antonio Santos and that delves into Delibes' love for bikes.

And one more thing, I want to continue reading Delibes, as I still lack many of his works. Especially his travel books.

Today we continue to miss that Delibes committed to nature, a pillar of the awakening of ecological awareness in our country. His humanism, his defense of traditional knowledge, popular culture and the rural world continues to be an urgent need, perhaps today more than ever. The message he reflected in “A world that is dying” is still valid.