Angel Maria de Pablos, the first voice of cycling television, dies

The cameraman focused on developing the bike and Angel Maria de Pablos, who died this Wednesday aged 82, immediately identified the runner by his cadence during the first continuous coverage of a stage finish at the Vuelta Cyclista de España, between 1983 and 1988.

Journalist, poet and writer Angel Maria de Pablos (1942-2024) spoke for TVE about cycling in the early eighties, about the thing with rakes and visors, about the fact that T-shirts didn’t breathe, about the bike without an automatic gearbox. transmission and with cables Above the steering wheel is the one with thick tubes and guides without a king pin.

These were the rounds of Teca with Marino Lejarreta and Alberto Fernandez; Kelme Vicente Belda and Jose Recio; and Reynolds’ explosion with the emerging Pedro Delgado, the combative Angel Arroyo and the eternal promise of Julián Gorospe, who put Hino on the ropes in the 1983 Vuelta before the Serranillos (Avila) stage.

TVE turned to Ángel María de Pablos to voice these first systematic broadcasts, accompanied by Javier Mínguez, Emilio Tamargo, Ramón Pizarro and Rafael Recio, until Pedro González took over in 1989 and, starting in the nineties, Carlos de Andrés.

He not only narrated the situation of the race, but also filled the dead spaces of so many minutes of broadcast, then not much advertising, with subtle historical, cultural, literary and landscape descriptions of the places where the bicycle caravan passed.

He did not want and could not avoid De Pablo bringing certain doses of lyricism to everything that happened on the road and off, because he was first and foremost a poet, since he was very young when he began writing poetry with the help of his father , also journalist, essayist and poet Angel de Pablos Chapado (1911–1983).

It was his father who enrolled him in El Norte de Castilla at the age of 14, which began a journalistic pilgrimage that was recognized by the profession in 2020 with the Francisco de Cossio Award for Distinguished Service, which is held every year. Council of Castile and Leon.

Much more than all this was Angel Maria de Pablos, who in the field of cycling successively became Vice-President of the Spanish Federation, President of the Valladolid Federation and Director of the International Cycling Union (UCI), and also wrote several reference and non-fiction books, such as “History cycling tour of Spain” (1985) and “110 years of cycling in Valladolid” (1994).

He was a fine poet, as evidenced by the many books he published, including Garbage Pail Children and Other Complaints (2002), from the point of view that he often projected himself onto the most helpless, the fruit of a Christian and maintaining the feeling that he too for decades performed as a brother of the 7th brotherhood of Palabras during Holy Week in Valladolid.

In addition to poetry, he enjoyed frequent theater in texts such as La Fontana (2007), about the last days of Antonio Machado, and even took on managerial roles, heading, among other cultural institutions, the Ateneo de Valladolid and the Association of Friends of the Theater of Valladolid.

Almost three decades ago, he was one of the founders of the editorial team of the newspaper El Mundo de Valladolid, in which he headed the sports and culture department.