Federico Bahamontes, winner of the 1959 Tour de France (open in new tab), says that unless the coronavirus epidemic is resolved, the debate over how and when to hold the Tour will mean little.

"The most important thing is health. If you're not healthy, you're stuffed," Bajamontes told Cycling News in his usual candid style.

"So now it's better to be healthy indoors than outside drinking beer, whiskey, etc." [The Olympics are gone and the Tour is in limbo. It's a very tough situation and we'll have to see what happens first."

Born in 1928, Bajamontes experienced the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39 as a child, and there are plenty of militaristic comparisons between the coronavirus and the current situation right now. [In war there are always winners and losers. In this war [against the coronavirus], as in all wars, we know when it started, but we don't know when it will end. [I was in that war and I was nine years old. In this war people got food, but this war is a war without bullets."

For several years after the war, Bajamontes was forced to ship food to Toledo and work on the black market, avoiding police patrols, and came down with a kind of typhus.

"On one shipment, I was hiding from the Civil Guard, and when I became infected, I hid under a drainage ditch," he recalled to Cyclingnews.

"Eventually, for two months, I became so ill that I couldn't leave the house, suffered bouts of fever so severe that I thought I was going to die, and when the fever broke, I was so hungry that I broke the padlock my mother had on the pantry door and stole whatever I could get my hands on," Bahamontes said in his autobiography, Toledo The Eagle of Toledo.

His hair also fell out, "and when it came back it was more curly."

Aside from his hair swell and improved lock-picking ability, as a result of his illness, Bahamontes also received a doctor's note stating that he had a chronic chest condition and recommending that he avoid all physically demanding sports. As Bahamontes would happily say in later years, he apparently ignored the recommendation, although it clearly included cycling.

Bahamontes is currently spending three weeks at a friend's house in northern Spain, is in good physical condition, and is looking forward to returning to his hometown of Toledo soon.

Tireless as ever, Bahamontes' current goal is to open a museum in Toledo dedicated to his career, and he plans to continue working on that vision upon his return home.