Javier de Dalmases i Subirana (Barcelona, 1948, Corbera de Llobregat, 6 November 2025), sold a toucan to the Count of Godó. It was 1989, when cycling wanted to spread to the American continent and a race called Tour of the Americas was organized, halfway between Venezuela and Florida. The organization invited a large group of journalists, including Dalmases, who upon his return, after receiving the request of the governor of Puerto Rico, to pay his respects to 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 during the return flight. But the animal grew and then the Count of Godó, owner of the newspaper, appeared. World of sportthe newspaper where he worked, which discovered that the journalist had the bird at his house. He wanted to buy it and Javier de Dalmases came to his house, 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 illness which had progressively diminished his faculties. Dalmases started working at the sports newspaper of Barcelona and ended his career there in 2009, with some sporadic collaborations in other media, such as TVE and his program Time and sign. He has become a reference in cycling, with 38 appearances at the Tour, more than 30 at the Vuelta and fifteen at the Giro, as well as dozens of world championships, road classics and stage races.
In 1984 he participated in the Tour together with another journalist, Antonio Vallugera, and the singer Joan Manuel Serrat, who came because of his passion for cycling and with the task of writing a column on The Catalan Newspaper. There they formed 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 during the journey”. His adventure companions dissuaded him from reducing his luggage and leaving the instrument at home, because it didn’t fit. During the Tour, Serrat slept in the same room as Dalmases, because neither of them could stand the Caliqueños 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, born at number 333 Calle Valencia 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, originally from Canada, whom he met at the Olympic Games in Barcelona in 1992.
A year later, during the Cycling World Cup in Oslo, he later explained sardonically, he felt, as when the governor of Puerto Rico gave him some souvenirs for President González, that he was involuntarily attracting the high authorities, because at the reception that Juan Carlos I gave to journalists at the Spanish embassy, the then monarch made his way through the journalists and hugged Javier, who was in the third row. “Like he’d known me my whole life. I was perplexed,” he recalled.
Thousands of kilometers by car, hundreds of hotels, many of them dirty, meals in luxury 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 participated in or of which he was informed. It ended in 2009, the year the Tour arrived in Barcelona. It was already the era of computers and cell phones, even if he had begun to transmit his always accurate news with his portable Olivetti and the booths of the bars.
