The Failed Vuelta Ciclista a España of 1913 and the Launching of the Volta a Catalunya (1911–1913): Centre Versus Periphery in the Struggle for the Governance of Cycling in Early Twentieth-Century Spain

Abstract

This article offers the first scholarly account of the earliest recorded attempt at setting up a Spanish national tour in 1913, only ten years after the creation of the Tour de France. The paper demonstrates that the initiative for this failed project came from Catalonia, not Madrid, and that one man is to be singled out as its promoter: the pioneer sports journalist and enthusiast Narcís Masferrer Sala. Masferrer, a key figure in the configuration and the diffusion of modern sport in Spain, used his prominent positions as editor of the most influential sports daily of its times, Barcelona's El Mundo Deportivo, and as leader of the Spanish cycling governing body, to launch a campaign aimed at imitating the French tour. The first ever stage race held in Spain, the Volta a Tarragona (1908), and the first two editions of the still running Volta a Catalunya (1911 and 1912) were actually promoted by Masferrer as rehearsals of the projected Vuelta a España. Therefore, despite the contemporary rise of Catalan nationalism, they need not be understood as Catalanist initiatives, but rather the opposite: as just another failed example of the Catalan bourgeoisie's attempt at steering the modernization of Spain from its industrial and commercial capital, Barcelona.