For those of us who were born in the sixties, cycling came into our lives like a comet from out of the blue. The sport had been reduced to the perimeter of a football field or perhaps —as was my case— to a tennis court, since my mother is Swedish and those were the years when Björn Borg inaugurated the IKEA aesthetic. But cycling was unknown to us and so it remained until, at the start of the eighties, television began to regale us with the stages of the Tour de France and the Vuelta a España [Tour of Spain], with names —now mythic— like those of Ángel Arroyo, Perico Delgado, Alberto Fernández, Álvaro Pino,  Vicente Belda or Marino Lejarreta, who in the imaginary of Spanish fans replaced the names of  Bahamontes, Ocaña, Poblet, Julio Jiménez or the brilliant Tarangu. It was television that set off this fervor (I remember that the first stages I saw were those of the Tour in which Ángel Arroyo came in second, and the Spanish Vuelta that Alberto Fernández lost to Éric Caritoux), but it was the radio, above all, in its hour-by-hour news bulletins, with that unforgettable «Onward, friends» and  the unmistakable voice of Javier Ares on Antenna 3, broadcasting the different stages of the race.

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