Anna Gibert Sau: "On the bike, you have more intimate conversations than over a coffee"

Girona / CelràWhen four years ago I returned to work from Girona, 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 Mossos d'Esquadra officer specialized in gender-based violence and co-founder of Girona Gravel Girls, a community made up exclusively of women that now 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 out 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 confirmed time and time again cycling with the Girona Gravel Girls: it is on a bicycle where the most sincere conversations often arise. With others and also with oneself.

From this, a question arose: 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 "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 cycling. Anna Gibert summarizes it in a sentence that, in a way, gives meaning to the whole series: "On a bike, you have more intimate conversations than over coffee".

I accompany you to to inaugurate the footbridge connecting Girona with the neighboring town of Celrà. Half a kilometer of cantilever 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 to do with the one at 23, when she decided to cycle the Camino de Santiago alone and discovered the power of connection that cycling on wheels offered. "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 cycling above all alone when he was young. He would go up to the sanctuary of Argimon, go to Farners Castle and later, when he moved to live in Girona, he would make the journey to his parents' home in Riudarenes. “At that time, twenty-seven years ago, there weren't people like me who went cycling and just to enjoy themselves,” he explains. He mainly saw men, cycling on the road or mountain biking. The big change came with motherhood and the day a colleague came to work on 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 Àngels and come back home,” he adds.

And so began Brompton trips all over 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 “zero-kilometer 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 went back to the big-wheeled bicycle”.

An exclusively female group

Just as Girona has transformed with the professional and also tourist cycling boom, so has Gibert's life. In a way, she has become an ambassador for the city and, alongside the Girona Gravel Girls – which is already 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 there is still a 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".