Teresa González Aja

From Dictatorship to Democracy in Spain: The Iconography of Motorcyclist Angel Nieto

Motorcycling in Spain was a minority sport from its very inception. However, the emergence of certain personalities, especially Angel Nieto, and their subsequent successes attracted the attention of high-ranking government officials who began to take an interest in it. Relatively quickly they identified the sport as a convenient method of advancing propaganda for the regime. The iconography associated with a sports hero, someone who began with nothing only to overcome great suffering and attain fame and recognition through sheer willpower, carried considerable symbolic resonance. Such sporting stars represented a set of values that state departments considered useful, and for which they did not hesitate to use both the press and even educational institutions to advance a relationship, as they saw it, between success in motor sport and the well-being of the nation. The subsequent emergence of a democratic system of government in Spain brought with it considerable levels of freedom, which in turn would have a profound impact on sport, including motorcycle racing. It would allow circuits to be built, foreign bikes to be imported into the country and a new type of sports star to emerge, one who now owed his/her success not alone to his/her own efforts but also to the considerable sporting infrastructures that existed in the ‘new’ Spain.