Javier de Dalmases i Subirana (Barcelona, 1948, Corbera de Llobregat, 6 November 2025), sold a toucan to the Count of Godó. It was in 1989, when cycling wanted to spread across the American continent and a race called the Tour of the Americas was organized, halfway between Venezuela and Florida. The organization invited a large group of journalists, including Dalmases, who upon returning, after receiving a request from the governor of Puerto Rico, to greet Felipe González, – whom he had never seen in his life – had the idea of buying a baby toucan, which he hid as best he could on the flight back. But the animal grew and then the Count of Godó, owner of the newspaper, appeared. World of Sportsnewspaper where he worked, who discovered that the journalist had the bird in his home. He wanted to buy it and Javier de Dalmases went to his mansion, relieved, to get rid of the animal.
It was one of the anecdotes from the professional life of the sports journalist who died in Corbera Baja at the age of 77, after a year of enduring an illness that gradually diminished his faculties. Dalmases began working at the Barcelona sports newspaper and ended his career there in 2009, with some sporadic collaborations in other media, such as TVE and its program Time and mark. He became a reference in cycling, with 38 participations in the Tour, more than 30 in the Vuelta and fifteen in the Giro, in addition to dozens of world championships, road classics and stage races.
In 1984, he traveled to the Tour together with another journalist, Antonio Vallugera, and the singer Joan Manuel Serrat, who came because of his love of cycling and with the task of writing a column for The Catalan newspaper. There they established a friendship that lasted over time. Dalmases recalled that when they picked him up at his home, in a Talbot Horizon, Serrat showed up with a large suitcase and his guitar, “to exercise his fingers on the trip”. His fellow adventurers dissuaded him that he should reduce his luggage and leave the instrument at home, as it didn’t fit. Serrat slept, during the Tour, in the same room as Dalmases, because neither of them could stand the Caliqueño cigars that the other traveler smoked, nor his nocturnal noises. “He snored like a locomotive,” explained Daniel Samper Pizano, the Colombian writer who shared the Tour with them.
Javier de Dalmases, who was born at number 333 Valencia Street, in Barcelona, very close to Diagonal, had two daughters, Marta and Anna, from his first marriage, and a son, Mateo, with his second wife, Franny, from Canada, whom he met at the Barcelona Olympic Games in 1992.
A year later, during the Cycling World Cup in Oslo, he later explained with sarcasm, he felt, as when the governor of Puerto Rico gave him his regards for President González, that he unintentionally attracted the high authorities, because at the reception that Juan Carlos I gave to journalists at the Spanish embassy, the then monarch pushed his way through the reporters and gave a hug to Javier, who was in the third row. “As if he had known me forever. I was perplexed,” he recalled.
Thousands of kilometers by car, hundreds of hotels, many of them unclean, meals in luxurious or low-class restaurants; dozens of cycling friends and his ring notebook, in which, in the days when there was no internet, he carefully wrote down the results of all the races he attended or was informed about. It ended in 2009, the year the Tour arrived in Barcelona. It was already the era of computers and cell phones, although it began with his Olivetti laptop and bar booths to transmit his always accurate chronicles.
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