NED BOULTING

OUR MAN IN COLOMBIA FEELS THE EFFECT OF ALTITUDE FOR HIMSELF

Egan Bernal, the brilliant young Colombian who will probably win every race he enters next year, including the Tour de France, recently admitted to me that he gets out of breath walking upstairs. He wasn’t joking, either.

Bernal spends much of his life these days in hotel lobbies, car parks and on roads throughout Europe, at sea level, with occasional excursions up into the Alps, either for racing, or for training purposes. His professional existence is thus played out far from home, in an alien environment, where the air is thick with oxygen, silky with nourishment like full fat yoghurt. Where he comes from, the atmosphere is distinctly semi-skimmed, an appallingly meagre affair.

Twice a year, Bernal gets the opportunity to return home, climbing aboard a Boeing. He takes his seat (at the front of the plane, these days) in a fuselage pressurised to fit the pampered tastes of the global bourgeoisie, again stuffed with air. It’s only when he steps off at the other end, and heads towards the ludicrously long immigration queue at Bogota airport, that his body will remember what it’s like at 2,600 metres. Even trundling his Team Sky branded carry-on case down the marble hallways of the arrivals terminal, it’ll be noticeable. Each breath feels a little less than satisfactory, like squeezing on a doctored ketchup bottle that’s been watered down. It’s just a bit crap.

Above all, this old-man-on-the-stairs breathlessness must be strange for men like Bernal, of whom Colombia has suddenly started to produce so many. He is the product of the Colombian Highlands. At the top of the Andes, the range splits into three distinct forks, separated by two huge river valleys. These mountains are home to the majority of Colombians, housing the nation’s two biggest cities, Medellin and Bogota. And riders like Bernal, and indeed Nairo Quintana, hail from isolated communities outlying the big metropolises. These rural outposts are even higher still.

Altitude conditioning forces the body to adapt to a restricted supply of oxygen, thereby producing a dividend when that same blood operates under the less exceptional circumstances of, for example, Europe. But it doesn’t last forever, hence Bernal’s rather touching confession that, even after a month away from home, he finds he gets out of puff climbing stairs on his return to Colombia. The fact of the matter remains, however, that he certainly adapts more quickly than most to the conditions which his body used to take for granted.

Bernal and I had this conversation in a small town called Paipa, in the Boyoca department, north of Bogota. I had just, somehow, completed Nairo Quintana’s 145km gran fondo, a ride which started at 2,600 metres; the height of the summit of the Col du Galibier. Then it went up the El Crucero pass, and continued around Lagoon de Tota for 48 kilometres, set at 3,200 metres. It was on the descent back towards the finish line at Pantano de Vargas, where Simon Bolivar had defeated the Spanish in 1819, that I had started to the feel the full effects of altitude. The first sign that all was not well was a nosebleed. My right nostril had started to weep blood. Then the left one joined in, just for fun. After that, I grew progressively more and more feeble, if that were possible, until I could only turn the pedals four of five times in succession before needing a rest.

By now, we were on the flat final 40km of the ride. It was very slow progress. I was overtaken by almost everyone in Colombia on this stretch; kids on mountain bikes, octogenarians, whole packs of office workers chatting merrily away. Then came me, claret streaking from my hooter, gasping like an expiring goldfish.

So it was nice of Egan Bernal to console me, and to suggest, however ridiculously, that he shared my pain. And now I know what I actually mean when I say, in commentary, that ‘altitude can have a profound effect’ on cyclists.

The Colombian story is unique in many ways; these exceptional riders’ backgrounds, the grinding poverty into which many have been born, their cycling culture, are completely different from the European mainstream. But the mountains sure as hell play their part, as I found out to my horror and my cost.

It was slow progress. I was overtaken by almost everyone in Colombia