SPAIN is mourning the loss of one of its greatest-ever sports personalities, a 13-times MotoGP world championship winner whose race victory total has only ever been beaten by two other riders in history.
Ángel Nieto always claimed he had won '12+1' motorcycling world championships out of superstition, but bad luck never featured in his long career – his first global title in 1969 in the 50cc with team Derbi would be the first of four consecutive wins and, with the exception of 1978 and 1980, Nieto went on to win the championships every year from 1975 to 1984 inclusive.
The first four were with team Derbi, then one with Kreidler, two with Bultaco, two with Minarelli and three with Garelli.
Nieto did not win the championship in 1985, and decided to retire the following year.
He spent the next two years setting up and running his own team, and in 1989, a museum of his life and career opened in Madrid, although it closed down four years ago.
As well as being MotoGP race commentator, Nieto ran the Honda 250 and Vía Digital teams between 1998 and 2001, and has netted numerous prizes for his life's work including the Great Order Cross for Sporting Merit (1993)and the National Sports Prize, or Francisco Fernández Ochoa Award in 2009.
The previous year, he had been given a place in the Spanish Council for Outstanding Sporting Personalities, in a ceremony where he was greeted by the then King and Queen of Spain, HRHs Juan Carlos I and Sofía, as shown in the second picture along with another in which Ángel and his wife met the then president in the 1980s, Felipe González.
Nieto's commentator career lasted for many years, firstly with Spain's national channel TVE and later with the country's fifth channel, TeleCinco.
“They had to forge my ID”
Nieto was born in Zamora, Castilla y León – close to Portugal's northern border – in 1947, but moved to Vallecas, Madrid with his family when he was just a year old.
Once in Vallecas, a very young Ángel started to get interested in motorbikes and to ride them as soon as he was big enough, spending most of his free time out of school in the bike workshop run by Tomás Díaz Valdés.
Nieto left home at 12 and moved to Barcelona, where he started working with several motorcycling teams and developed his talent.
Although this was only 1959 and children tended to leave school at a similar age to work unless they came from wealthy families, joining national sporting teams full-time was not something that was open to a little boy still short of his teens.
“As I wasn't old enough, we had to forge my ID,” he said many years later during an interview about how he started his career.
At age 17, Ángel was already riding in his first Grand Prix with team Derbi in the 50cc class and, at 20, made it to the podium for the first time, in Assen (The Netherlands).
He was 22 when he won his first Grand Prix, going on to win the world championship, in 1969.
Nieto would win a total of 90 Grand Prix, a record only ever broken by Italian MotoGP legends Giacomo Agostini and Valentino Rossi, the latter of whom is still racing today and has seven world championships under his belt.
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