2023-07-01 09:39:02
Creative innovation is often associated with great ideas from great guys. However, as the literature has amply shown, we must also look at the socioeconomic and often family context. The start of the Tour is allowing us to reconstruct the factors that explain why Euskadi is, with the overflowing enthusiasm that we see these days, a land of cycling. And it is, to a large extent, thanks to three important business adventures, one for each province.
From Gipuzkoa, the Orbea family brings the solidity of the industrial element to the hobby with the manufacture of bicycles, which they arrived at by reusing the ‘know-how’ acquired in the manufacture of weapons and ammunition at their facilities in Eibar. In Vitoria, brothers José María, Luis and Román Knörr ‘manufactured’ the first popular heroes of Basque cycling with the legendary KAS team with one of those elemental innovations that change history: a race bus for the team. A career created in 1955 by two great Bilbao businessmen: Alejandro Echevarría Zorrozúa and our grandfather Luis Bergareche Maruri.
They copied a good idea, adapted it to its context, and looked for network effects through cooperation.
If they had lived in Silicon Valley in the 1970s, there would undoubtedly be books and documentaries telling their story. A story that, like that of the newspaper ‘L’Equipe’ with the Tour and ‘La Gazetta dello Sport’ with the Giro, deserves, at the very least, a ‘case’ from Harvard on the business of journalism and advertising. Bergareche and Echevarría, married to two sisters of French origin, Pepa and Carmenchu Busquet Meabe, watched with concern how EL CORREO systematically stayed out of the national campaigns of advertisers by prioritizing ‘La Gaceta’, first in the Basque press. My grandfather was a born sportsman, author of the first goal in the League for Athletic (1928-29 season, header against Real), runner-up in Spain in shoveling, resistant climber with the bike. In 1955, after visiting the keys to the organization of the Tour de France in situ, the two brothers-in-law saw it clearly. And EL CORREO -the publishing company that four hands ran- relaunched the Cycling Tour of Spain.
To do this, they activated the context and recruited the key figures in their immediate environment: their close friend Isidro Salinas, a rural doctor in Lekeitio, would be the doctor for the Vuelta together with the well-known Bilbao doctors Paco Pando and Gonzalo Gangoiti; among the sponsors of the Grand Prix of the Vuelta, Jose Rafa Guzmán and Eduardo Ortiz de Tulipán; Alejandro Sota as press and radio delegate; and, in charge of supporting the national and foreign teams, they placed Gonzalo Bergareche -Luis’s brother- and Charles Nicholson. And Alejandro Sota as a press and radio delegate, and Francisco Fernández Amirola as an essential motorcyclist chief…
Like the best innovators, they copied a good idea, adapted it to their context, and sought network effects through cooperation. At that time, the formula was the creation around EL CORREO and ‘El Diario Vasco’ of ‘Prensa Reunida’, a sports and advertising alliance of regional newspapers that influenced decades later, of course, in the creation of the Colpisa agency and in the development of Grupo Correo by the sons of our protagonists, Alechu Echevarría and Jose Bergareche.
EL CORREO organized the Vuelta, with my grandfather Luis as general director, until 1978, when business improvement and the threat of ETA reduced the incentives to continue. After a long meeting of the newspaper’s board of directors, my grandfather Luis and my father, Jose Bergareche, went hand in hand to Bluesville from Bilbao. And there he pronounced the phrase that my page partner picks up. He had lost his only ‘daughter’ from him. But the hobby lives on. Still today, a great-grandson of the founder of Orbea, a son-in-law of the Knörrs and two sons of Luis Bergareche travel together through Europe on a bicycle (electric, of course), at their seventies. And several of Luis and Alechu’s grandchildren do what we can on weekends, on the back of modern carbon fiber cars, like the ones that will travel these days in this land of great entrepreneurs and loyal fans. Live cycling!
#Entrepreneurship #cycling #fans #Basque #Country