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23/08/2024
All ages
Everyone called him Bebeto.
He was 15 when I met him, and always surrounded by younger children. He would hang out with them on the soccer pitches of Sant Pere, a small town on the outskirts of Barcelona, where I spent my youth in chasing the ball.
We all made fun of him: of his physique, which was all out of proportion; of his clumsiness; of his inability to grow up. Being too impatient ourselves to leave our childhood behind and enter the adult world, we never really tried to understand him.
I was 12 and had just lost my big brother when I first approached him, out of curiosity. In fact, I wanted to get to know his cousin Sorrow, a striking girl who had worked in a beach bar the last two summers.
That was the start of an unusual friendship, which ended in 1996, the year Miguel Induráin failed to win his sixth Tour de France. It was a strange and fleeting relationship, which is now gone forever but which I will never forget.
