3 Grand Tours; 18,200 km; and 205,000 m elevation gain. Did he win anything?

(Part 3)

This is the third and final chapter of the IGARE Challenge, which started with the Giro d’Italia, then went to the Tour de France, and now finishes with a story about La Vuelta a España.  This installment of the IGARE Challenge failed before it even got started because its original theme was about the kinds of mechanical problems that can happen when pedaling massive distances. Who rides 18,200 kilometers+ (14,913 miles) without a mechanical breakdown? Javier “Xinolugo” García Reboredo only had one instance where his plans could have been derailed were it not for an after-hours phone call to get a replacement tire and a connection that spanned two continents. And here’s where the story of Javi, his Ritchey Montebello named Aurora, and the IGARE Challenge continues — with an alternate take on a phrase that made history in 1937, “Oh the humanity!”

Read Part 1: 3 Grand Tours, a Montebello Named Aurora, and Butterfly Skin

Read Part 2: The 2025 Tour of France (that’s not a typo)

“In four hours, I had covered 60 kilometers (37 miles – ed.).” — Javier García Reboredo commenting on Stage 20 of the IGARE Challenge.

Like an invisible bully, headwind can relentlessly poke at a cyclist’s will to keep going. Monotony can do that too; so can fatigue, weather, and questioning one’s life choices. The IGARE mission was clear: raise awareness for epidermolysis bullosa (butterfly skin disease) by riding all three Grand Tours + stage transfers unsupported. Measuring its success was a little less straightforward, but let’s try. 450,000 Instagram views, 40,000 Instagram accounts reached, 2200 podcast minutes, a couple thousand blog readers, and more than a hundred people who went searching for Javi by bike, motor vehicle, or on foot — just to be in the presence of the person who sparked this unprecedented project.

Grand Tours: aren’t they about the bike?

Although Spain is a mighty cycling nation on its own, the 2025 Vuelta a España started 750 kilometers (466 miles) away in Turin, Italy before crossing the border to diddle a little in France before everyone headed to Spain. It’s with some resignation that these far-flung stages are tolerated because they have consequences, like an enlarged carbon footprint and logistical nightmares for team management.

“In sports, what matters most is money and not so much the athletes,” Javier remarked. “In the end, they are mere actors who are there to be taken wherever event organizers say. They say, ‘Well, you’ve to go from here to there, and that's it.’ But in Spain, there are thousands of places to do the Vuelta without crossing any borders.”

Of course, if it wasn’t for the 2025 Vuelta (and the Tour de France and the Giro d’Italia), the IGARE Challenge would look very different. For instance, once in Spain the Vuelta stayed in the northern half of the country. At least five stages were within striking distance of Javier’s family in Lugo, in Galicia, in the northwest of Spain. The rest of the stages looked less like a Grand Tour and more like a wall drawing by Sol LeWitt.

L'Angliru

The most damaging of all the Vuelta stages (of all bicycle climbs ever) is indisputably l’Angliru, a 12.5-kilometer (7.8-mile) climb that averages around a ten percent grade — a deceptive number that fails to describe the suffering inflicted by this climb.

“You round this curve and they’re setting up a bar so that people can stop and have a drink because what’s coming next is really tough,” Javier said. “You start the next 600 meters and there’s a sign for ‘200 meters,’ where the maximum gradient is 19.9 percent, but the average is 13 percent. I managed to climb those, but as soon as they finished, another sign appeared with a maximum gradient of 23.5 percent and an average of 16 percent.”

Depleted from riding skyward for quite a while by this point, he rode 50 more meters and dismounted.

“I couldn't do it anymore,” Javier said, “I was going uphill, and I had to hold onto the bike because I had gotten dizzy from the effort because — apart from that — the kilometers I’d done so far were already pretty hard. They were 15 or 16 percent gradients.”

Anyone with the cojones to sneer at this effort from the safety of anonymity is welcome to load up their bike, pedal a few thousand kilometers, ascend to the base of Angliru, and then — if you still have the will — start climbing.

Javier’s Vuelta a España by the numbers

Bad people are just louder

“There are more good people than bad people, but the bad ones make more noise than the good ones. This has become quite clear to me from the people who came to see me — that’s stayed with me.” — Xinolugo

During the Tour de France, there was a poll for what to call the fans of the IGARE Challenge and its founder, Javier “Xinolugo” García Reboredo. “Xinistas” was so obvious that the other choices didn’t stand a chance. Now that this community had a name, its members had a mission: find Xinolugo.

“There was the Follow My Challenge app that you could use to follow where I was going any time of the day,” Javi explained, “and there were people waiting, looking at me, saying, ‘Are you Xino?’ I said ‘Yes,’ and they came over. Others saw the jersey and turned around and came toward me. In Bilbao there was a guy sitting on a bench — he didn't say anything, and after a while — 10 or 15 minutes — he appeared behind me and said, ‘You're Xinolugo, from IGARE?’”

Xinistas

Bilbao attracted the most Xinistas — 15 in all, including Josu, who had shown up the day earlier in Ezcaray with two chocolate-covered palmiers, two packets of ham, and a sports drink.

“The next day at 6:00 a.m. he texted me and said, ‘Stop at this bar, you have a surprise.’ I went there and he’d already paid for my breakfast. He told me to take whatever I wanted to make a sandwich to take with me, and then at noon, when he woke up (he works nights), he came and rode with me until the evening.

And he brought me more ham.”

The Vuelta developed into a team effort to get Xinolugo to Madrid before the pro racers; everyone pitched in in their own way. For instance, he’d accidentally left his raingear at home in Madrid, so his girlfriend mailed it east to a friend in Lleida. Seeing that there were thunderstorms in the Pyrenees, the friend jumped in his car, drove two hours to Andorra, delivered the raingear, and then drove two hours back. Then there was Tito, a total stranger who went looking for Xinolugo in a village near Porriño. Tito finished the stage with Xino and invited him back to his house, served him dinner, washed his clothes, and gave him a bed for the night.

“You don't know anything about them; they follow you on social media, and then they come up to you and say you're a role model, but I don't feel that way,” Xino said. “That I can have such an influence on people is what surprises me most about what I've learned here. In the end, you unintentionally help other people who weren't there for the cause, or you motivate them, or they take you as an example, or — I don't know — but you're someone to them.”

Up next: Aurora

The Montebello was a new bike for Ritchey in 2024. So, when Javier and the IGARE Challenge started to come into focus, the possibility for a long-term, real-world test turned into a collaborative effort. Starting in the fall of 2024, Ritchey worked with Javier to dial in an XL Montebello specifically for endurance road riding. Javier named his bike “Aurora,” and she gets her own chapter in an upcoming feature about how she performed throughout the IGARE Challenge and beyond.

The IGARE Challenge wasn’t just about endurance or elevation — it was about cutting through current clutter and quieting the noise around us to prove once again that the bicycle performs best when it’s used as a vector for experiencing selflessness, individual achievement, and lasting bonds with people and with nature.