Rider Feature: The Spanish rider, Julio Jiménez, was three times king of the mountains and second overall in the 1967 Tour, a close friend of Jacques A question and initiator of the great Ávila cycling school, passed away two years ago in the Nursery Señora you de Sonsoles de Ávila hospital due injuries he suffered in a traffic accident. Jiménez was 87 years-old and had a very full and interesting life. We look back on a great cycling career of a true champion.
Spanish sports journalist, Carlos Arribas, wrote these words about Jiménez in ELEMENTARY PAÍS on the news of his death:
Julio Jiménez keeps looking, his eyes alive, mischievous and strangely innocent at the same time, the reflection of his life, and his memory, which is already beginning to enter the misty terrain where it could begin to be confused with fable. But no, it is still sharp, precise, with contours as clear as the certain unconsciousness that guided his years as a cyclist, optimism. Like the charm that made him a cyclist, a person, whom we all loved and whom we cry today when we find out that he has died as a victim of a car accident at the gates of his friend Ángel Arroyo’s large car wash in Ávila, a cyclist due to him, and a great cyclist like him, and also second in a Tour and first on the Puy de Dôme. And Cava Jiménez, the climber who died young, became a cyclists through Arroyo, Carlos Sister, who did win the Tour, Lastras, Man ebony, Na as…
Then he spent the day sorting through souvenirs, photographs, cups from his time, jerseys, shirts, his trophies. He lived among them, and daily answered several letters from fans who asked for autographs and dedicated photographs, and who sent him magazines and books, and he only missed the pink jersey that he wore for several days of the 1966 Giro, and a bicycle, and other things that he had lent Luis Ber language for props for his film Paris-Timbuktu, and that he never got back. And he had a sorrow in his soul for that. He was a man attached to his memory, so full, to the objects that woke it up, the chamois goats heads that were awarded to him as the best climber in the Alp stages of his Tours, the Caliber, the Telegraphed, Garnier, Destrier. And, always, ahead, the shadow of Bahama yes, who, yes, had won the Tour, and his envy and jealousy for the brashness of the young man who was also three times king of the mountain, the favourite throne of the Eagle of Toledo, 93 years, and he goes on. And the rally races with his BMW through Greco’s, and the day a kid from near Temblor appeared among them and ridiculed them all, and so Julio told it, always an admirer of the great talent of all the others, never envious. “And Carlitos Sainz (famous Spanish rally driver) spent one day with the Greco’s group with his little gang, and he left us speechless…”
Julio Jiménez was known by fans in the Spain of the 1960s as The ‘Watchmaker of ’, because, before becoming a friend and rival on the Tour, of A question, Simpson, Poulidor, Federico, before winning on the Puy de Dome, on Mont Vent out, had worked for a few years as an
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