Anna Gibert Sau: "On the bike, more intimate conversations are had than over coffee"

Girona / CelràWhen I returned to work from Girona four years ago, after years covering political information in Madrid, I set out to understand the cycling boom that the city has experienced. One of the first people I spoke to was Anna Gibert Sau (Riudarenes, 1977), a police officer specialized in sexist violence and co-founder of Girona Gravel Girls, a community made up exclusively of women that today already exceeds 430 members.

It all began during the post-pandemic period, in 2021, with a WhatsApp group of seven friends. Now, on the second Sunday of each month, they meet at Pont de Pedra to go cycling together. “We are a community of women where cycling is the excuse to get together, laugh, and do therapy,” explains Gibert. She discovered something for me that, over the years, I have verified time and time again cycling with the Girona Gravel Girls: it is on a bicycle that the most sincere conversations often arise. With others and also with oneself.

From this arose a question: what if the bicycle could also be a journalistic tool? Like a TV studio or a radio booth, but with the ability to open different conversations. This is how “Xerrem mentre pedalem” (Let's chat while we pedal) took shape, a series of interviews that will accompany you on summer weekends. Eleven routes, urban and interurban, and eleven people who explain their way of understanding life through the bicycle. Anna Gibert sums it up in a sentence that, in a way, gives meaning to the entire series: “On the bike, you have more intimate conversations than over a coffee”.

I accompany you to to inaugurate the footbridge that connects Girona with the neighboring town of Celrà. Half a kilometer of cantilevered walkway suspended over the train tracks, passing through the gorge, the last narrow stretch of the Ter before opening onto the Empordà plain. The Anna Gibert of today has little in common with the 23-year-old who decided to cycle the Camino de Santiago alone and discovered the power of connection that comes from pedaling on wheels. “Believe it or not, I used to be one of the shyest and most introverted people you can imagine – she recalls. Cycling has helped me to value myself and have more confidence”.

He lived the bicycle experience when he was young, especially alone. He would go up to the sanctuary of Argimon, go to Farners Castle and later, when he settled in Girona, he would make the trip to his parents' house in Riudarenes. "At that time, twenty-seven years ago, there weren't people like me who went cycling and just enjoyed it," he explains. He mostly saw men, riding road bikes or mountain bikes. The big change came with motherhood and the day a colleague came to work with a Brompton. "I said, wow, this must be very practical, very versatile!". So, with his first child, he bought one – the same one he still has. "If I left work with enough time, I could go up to the Àngels and come back home," he adds.

And so began Brompton trips throughout Europe, even competitions. Always documenting it: if he made an extensive album of the Camino de Santiago, it is now on Instagram where the day-to-day of what he calls “kilometer zero cycling” appears. With the children older, he returned fully to sport with the expansion of gravel in Girona, a bicycle model prepared to ride mainly on forest tracks: “I told myself, I’m not missing this, and I returned to the big-wheeled bicycle.”

An exclusively female group

Just as Girona has been transformed by the professional and also tourist cycling boom, so has Gibert's life. In a way, she has become an ambassador for the city and, with the Girona Gravel Girls – which is now a club – a welcoming space for female cyclists who arrive in Girona drawn by the good climate, safety, and good routes.

In a way, Gibert has created, with the help of a spectacular board where sisterhood reigns, the community she would have wanted as a young woman. “We are women only because we still need to create leisure spaces from which we have traditionally been excluded and which men have occupied – she argues–. Before, women could only meet to wash clothes in the laundries, we now meet to go cycling”.