Not even the pandemic has been able to break his will to live. Heinz Stücke, world record holder in traveling cycling, the man who spent 51 years traveling the world by bicycle, has experienced the worst of the health crisis in Hövelhof, the north Rhine city where he was born in 1940. Confined, surrounded by the Illness and with a disabling hip injury, he has dedicated his days to a formidable project, the opening of a museum dedicated to his travels. In it he proposes to exhibit a selection of the more than 100,000 photographs and around 18,000 pages of newspapers that he accumulated during his journey, that exercise in extreme nomadism that led him to travel half a million kilometers clinging to his saddle, visiting more than 200 countries .
In 1962, he quit his job in a factory and began pedaling in an uncertain direction. In his five decades on the road, he suffered road accidents in Canada and the Atacama Desert, a serious accident in Iran, an outbreak of dysentery and a tsunami in Indonesia, the Vietnam War, lynching attempts in Zambia and Haiti, robberies in the United States. States, England and Siberia or the arbitrary violence of the authorities in Egypt and Cameroon. From the beginning he financed his lifestyle by publishing chronicles and photographs of his travels in the world press.
Catalan filmmaker Albert Albacete met the eternal cyclist on one of his first visits to Barcelona. It was the beginning of a long friendship that ended up bearing belated and moving fruit, The Man Who Wanted to See Everything, the documentary he has dedicated to Stück. The chronicle of the tenacious resistance of an individual who wanted to live in his own way, without bowing to the pressures of those who tried to narrow his horizons and treated him as an eccentric. "Heinz never gave up," says Albacete, "he always pursued his dream."
The mayor of his town refers to him, with a certain derision, as "the ghost of Hövelhof", because when he returned all his fellow citizens had heard of him, but almost none had seen him. Stücke is, without a doubt, "very aware of the sacrifices that his vital choices have implied", concedes Albacete, "and there are times when he looks back with some vertigo and a certain melancholy". However, not even at twilight has he lost his zest for life.
"That is the great lesson that I draw from all this," concludes his film chronicler and friend. “I have not wanted to idealize Heinz, and now that I have had a stable partner, a son and the possibility of making films, I would tell you that I am not changing for him. But having met him, having cultivated his friendship over the years and understanding his world has been one of the most enriching experiences of my life, ”he says. How does the film seem to Stücke himself? “He finds her a bit sad”, explains Albacete, “he would have preferred to give a more positive and enthusiastic image of himself. But I know he likes it: he saw her at the house of a mutual friend, in Lausanne, and one of the last times we spoke he told me, with that point of emotional restraint that characterizes him, that he hoped she would give some money because he is a good job".