BarcelonaWhen Gustaaf Deloor arrived in Spain in 1935, no one knew who he was. The press referred to him as “Gustavo”, as if to sympathize with this Belgian who became the first champion of the cycling Vuelta a España. When he returned in 1936, he was already famous. The children were already looking for him before each stage and their parents did not miss a single detail, so they could explain later in the bar that they had seen the great champion and his brother up close. Yes, Gustaaf always competed against his brother Alfons, who in the 1936 edition finished second overall. Two brothers, on top of the podium, turned into true heroes. Surely they would have returned to the Vuelta of 1937, but the outbreak of the Civil War prevented that.
And a second war, in this case world war, put an end to the brilliant career of Gustaaf Deloor, a man who lived a thousand vicissitudes later, as he explained in his book Gustaaf Deloor, from Around the Moon the journalist and writer Juanfran de la Cruz. Deloor, that athlete who knew how to suffer on the bike, would end up working in a company that collaborated with the project to send the first man to the moon in the United States. A surprising twist in a life marked by the wounds of the 20th century.
In 1935 Spain organized the Vuelta for the first time. For decades, the French and the Italians already had the Tour and the Giro, two races organized by the media, initially: L’Auto i The Gazzetta dello Sport. In Spain, the newspaper took over Information, from Madrid, planning a very tough race despite avoiding the Pyrenees. The first Vuelta left Madrid for Valladolid, going up to Galicia first, to go all the way north. Santander, Bilbao, Sant Sebastià, Zaragoza… and Barcelona, and then go down to Tarragona, Valencia, Murcia, Granada, Seville, Cáceres and finish in Madrid. Stages of more than 250 km, since then the stage started in the same city where it had finished the previous day. It was a tour faithful to the word, because he cycled around the country. Of the 50 registered, only 29 were able to finish. And the best was a Deloor who finished ahead of the great local idol, the legendary Marià Cañardo, the Navarrese born in Barcelona who had just won a lot of times in the Volta a Catalunya but was one step away -get orange at the Vuelta. Yes, the first color chosen for the leader of the Spanish race was orange.
Deloor, with number 44, was just 22 years old. “I have won the first Vuelta and my name will always be linked to the creation of a great international race. For this reason I love this race more than any other”, the Belgian would remember years later, who would take the overall lead in the ‘stage between Santander and Bilbao, won in the sprint at the velodrome in the Basque city, since it was normal to finish stages in velodromes at the time. Accompanied by a good Belgian team that helped him, Deloor took advantage of a bad stage of the Valencian Antonio Escuret to climb into the lead and thus arrived in Madrid, defending himself from dozens of attacks from a full-hearted Cañardo. In 1936 Deloor would command again, fighting his own brother in the general. It was a good time for the young Belgian, who curiously had been brought up in what is known as the “Spanish quarter” of the small town of De Klinge, a town right on the border between the Netherlands and Belgium. You cross a street and leave De Klinge to enter Hults, already on the Dutch side. A town where there had been a Spanish garrison during the Eighty Years’ War in Flanders, when in the 17th century these provinces revolted against the Spanish Empire.
prisoner of war
In 1937, while Spain was suffering from war, Deloor would win a stage of the 1937 Tour de France between Geneva and Aix-les-Bains, but could never aspire to win the overall. And then, World War II broke out in 1939. Deloor traded his bicycle for a military uniform as he was sent to defend the Eben-Emael fort north of Liege. The Nazi blitzkrieg passed over the old Belgian fortification system and Deloor was among the 1,200 prisoners taken by German paratroopers in the battle on May 10, 1940. Their destination would be the Stalag II-B prison camp, in Pomerania, a German region that is now within Poland, where hundreds of Belgians died mistreated by the Germans. Gustaaf was lucky because a camp boss recognized him as he was a big sports fan. And he sent him to work in the kitchen, a privileged place because they had better food and less harsh working conditions. Here it would be nearly two years until the Nazis, seeking allies, promoted a policy favorable to Flemish nationalism in Belgium, allowing Flemish prisoners to return home. The French-speaking Walloons, on the other hand, continued to hell. Gustaaf was able to return only to find his house ransacked. I had lost everything.
In 1949, therefore, he emigrated to the United States, where he worked as a mechanic in New York. With the money he saved he bought a car with which he crossed the country from end to end, to the United States, where he continued working as a mechanic and got a job at the company Marquardt Corporation, which in time would sign a collaboration contract with NASA. This is how Deloor’s team ended up working within the Apollo project to send a man to the Moon, a project that would make history on July 20, 1969. As De la Cruz explains in his book, Deloor was in Belgium visiting the his brother when he saw on television the image of the first walk on the moon, when the Apollo 11 expedition with Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong and Michael Collins reached its goal. Deloor’s job was on the team that made the propulsion engines for the module that landed on the Moon by separating from the main spacecraft. According to his second wife, Roza Maria Buys, her husband spent long seasons in the Nevada desert working on the production of 800 propulsion units. And 16 of them were used on the Apollo 11 journey. Buys was the second wife of the cyclist, who first married a woman who was 25 years his senior, and then a woman 25 years his senior young man Buys was able to explain to De la Cruz how her husband was “the best coach on the team.” Who knows if he was right or if he said it lovingly remembering that cyclist who made history in the Vuelta. But then it flew even further.