Delgado remembers his surprising reunion with Pippa York, the ex Robert Millar

Cycling in the 80s and 90s could become a trench against the clock. Endless roads, tension inside and outside the peloton, old hotels and rivalries that accompanied the runners for weeks. Pedro Delgado and Robert Millar shared that stage during some of their best years on the bicycle. Decades later, after the gender transition of the legendary Scottish climber, today Pippa York and respected columnist, the winner of the 1988 Tour remembers one of the reunions that surprised him the most once he hung up his bike.

Delgado looked back during a talk at the Bajo el Maillot reading club with journalist Laura Meseguer. There he remembered that face to face that took place in the south of Spain, far from the grand tours and the cold and introverted image that Millar had projected during his years in the peloton. "I knew him when he was a man, when he was a cyclist, and then I had the opportunity to meet him at a meeting held by the newspaper MARCA in Malaga a few years ago," says Delgado with the closeness that characterizes him.

That day in Malaga changed the perception that the Segovian had of his former rival. The physical change was evident and Perico already knew it. What caught his attention was the transformation in character and the peace that Pippa York conveyed. "I really met another person, not because she was a woman—I already knew that—but above all a little because of what she says in the book about her character."

The meeting lasted for hours and allowed both of them to talk without the emergencies that had marked their relationship as runners. "We spent a day talking, eating, having dinner... with my English, and the truth is that I didn't recognize her."

To understand the dimension of those words, we must go back to the years in which Millar shone in the grand tours with the Peugeot or Z jersey. In a much more hermetic form of cycling, the figure of the Scot conveyed the sensation of living isolated from the rest. Delgado, who also starred in his own tug-of-war with the press and with some rivals, remembers how that way of relating to the peloton was perceived from within: "He was a Scot who had arrived in France who didn't fit in there either. As a rival, I understood that he was introverted."

Reading York's experiences, collected together with the journalist David Walsh in the work The Escape, allowed Perico to look at those years from another perspective. What could then be understood as a shield against the pressure of the elite hid an internal struggle to fit into a society and a time with hardly any room for gender dysphoria.

That distance that Delgado had known from the other side of the road acquired, many years later, a different explanation. A different look decades later

The relationship between the two was far from those battles on the bicycle, the Pyrenees and the heartbreaking Madrid mountains. In Malaga, Delgado found a Pippa York who was far from the image she had retained of Robert Millar for decades. The old rival with whom he had shared tension, suffering and kilometers now appeared before him with a different character, to the point of finding it difficult to recognize the person with whom he had met so many times in the race.