EGAN’S FIRST COACH
PABLO MAZUERA
Awell-known Colombian song announces, ‘The roads of life aren’t as I imagined them.’ Pablo Mazuera should know: he took a few of them before discovering his vocation, in his late 20s, for producing world-class cyclists. It turns out that where Egan Bernal came from and where the next Egan Bernal might come from may not be unrelated – not if the six cyclists doing their stretching in front of us, on a hillside near Paipa, 180km northeast of the Colombian capital, Bogotá, have anything to do with it. Bernal’s first sponsor is hard at work nurturing the next generation of South American talent.
The main thing Pablo Mazuera learned from his first chosen path - taking a business administration degree, an experience he describes as “torture” - was that there had to be a more enjoyable way to earn a living. “I’d been a DJ as a kid, so I took myself off to Florida’s Full Sail University for a year and became a sound engineer. I got a job at Telemundo in Miami, then came back to Colombia and started a company called Mezuena Producciones, and started producing audio for advertising and for films.”
In 2010, pursuing his second career path, Mazuera went to Guatemala with a commission to make a video of the PanAmerican Mountain Bike Championships. There he befriended Hilvar Yamith Malaver, a 16-year-old cross country specialist from Ubaté, 80km north of Bogotá, and came up with the idea of a small mountain bike team for kids
of limited means as a kind of charitable project. Back in Colombia, he said to Malaver: “Find me four kids, and we will help them any way we can: uniforms, travel expenses, whatever.”
He tells me now, “Hilvar brought me four skinny, dark-skinned 12-year-olds. They were tiny, but they had already been competing for four years, and they already had great Cundinamarca Cup and National Cup results. Their names were Diego Vázquez, Jhonatan Sotelo, Brandon Rivera, and Egan Bernal.”
Late in 2010 Mazuera went to visit Bernal’s home, in a poor neighbourhood called Bolívar 83, in the margins of the town of Zipaquirá, midway between Ubaté and Bogotá. Bolívar 83 had been founded in 1983 by radical left-wing activists who, as well as building housing for the poor, used it as a hideout and arms dump for a terrorist group called M-19. After being arrested there in October 1985, in possession of arms and improvised explosive devices, one of those founding figures, Gustavo Petro, became mayor of Bogotá and later finished runner-up in the 2018 presidential elections.
At the time of Mazuera’s visit, the Bernal home lacked floors and a bathroom. The next time they met, early in 2011, Mazuera and Bernal posed for a photograph. The complicity between them is plain to see.
The team was born, called Pura Actitud – Pure Attitude. “For three years, I poured my own money into the team,” Mazuera says. “As soon as my salary from the company arrived, it went in journeys and competitions. We drove to races in my minibus. To start off with we could only offer uniforms, travel and entry fees, although, as time went by, the sponsors increased their contributions, and the riders had racing and training bikes, better clothing.”
Mazuera found extra sponsorship and support in the Colombian importer of Specialized bikes, and a furniture showroom called Tugó, whose owner, Santiago De Angulo, by coincidence, had gone to the same high school as him. “We hit it off immediately. Santiago was crazy about cycling and madly impulsive. The moment he heard about the project, he said, ‘Count me in. How much do you need?’ and pulled out his wallet. He gave me 500,000 pesos. It wasn’t a huge sum, but we made it go a long way.”
Bernal stayed with the team for five seasons.
Under
Mazuera he won national, Latin America, and PanAmerican titles, culminating in silver and bronze medals at the 2014 and 2015 MTB Junior World Championships. Then he moved on, joining the Italian team Androni GiocattoliSidermec for the 2016 season, and then, a contract wrangle later, Team Sky two years later.
Mazuera has never claimed to have discovered Bernal. Even so, Bernal’s Tour de France win has left Mazuera, nine years on, with a problem: how not to be overshadowed by his greatest pupil.
The goal, he says, was never to produce a Tour de France winner. That was just a by-product.
“It was to help disadvantaged kids. To give the best of myself. The philosophy hasn’t changed – even if everything else has.
“Ten years ago, for instance, there was no such thing as core. Look at them now.”
They have been doing floor exercises for 90 minutes – and that, after a four-hour ride this morning. It is day five of Team Specialized Tugó SRAM’s December training camp. The riders arrived here yesterday after three hard days at an elite training facility in Chía, close to Bogotá, called MET – short for Medical, Exercise and Sport – a new sponsor for 2020, run by some of Colombia’s leading sports scientists, who work with the national football team and some of the top clubs.
There have been complete physicals, six batteries of blood tests, a nutritional evaluation, and daily rides and gym sessions. The team is training hard – and the season was not even supposed to start until February.
Mazuera ensures his riders have the best, most meticulous preparation the
“I DON’T CARE IF WE NEVER PRODUCE ANOTHER EGAN BERNAL”
country can offer. It seems paradoxical, then, when he says, “I don’t care if we never produce another Egan. I don’t care if we never produce another professional cyclist. It’s true: with Egan and Brandon Rivera both riding for Ineos, I have a pretty good average. But I don’t know what chances of success this year’s riders have. I don’t know what is going to happen. All I can do is strive every year to be better: better coaching, better medical care, better everything.”
Yet, when I ask him if the goal is to produce good athletes or good people, he pauses, then replies, “Both!”
But cycling is not just training, testing and numbers. Especially in a place as complicated as Colombia. Mazuera explains: “Professional teams want
Colombian cyclists, but, as well as talent, many of our riders are from difficult backgrounds. Every child is a project, a jigsaw puzzle.”
Mazuera seems always to be enjoying life, and ensuring that his riders enjoy theirs. He cuts fruit, mends punctures, takes photographs – and, in this, little can have changed since the half-decade he spent working with Bernal. And, like Bernal, the riders taken on by Mazuera are champions before they reach him. 16-year-old Camilo Andrés Gómez was Pan-American champion in 2018 and national champion in 2019, when he made his first incursions abroad.
This year, Gómez rode the National School Games road race, joining the midrace breakaway that decided the race (“We were going 57kph on the flat,” he says), before dropping out and finishing 18th, in the main group.
“I wasn’t in training. I just wanted to do some racing on the road to gain experience. That is where I see my future. I want to do two more years of mountain biking, then move over,” he says. “I was in the nursery team when Egan was still riding from Team Specialized Tugó SRAM. We all know each other. He has lit the road all the way from here to the Tour de France – and that is where I want to go.”
How do Gómez and the others compare with Bernal at the same age?
“Egan was a bit more shy than today’s kids,” Mazuera says. “Not very outgoing, but very, very, very talented. He observed everything. One thing I remember about Egan was that we argued a lot. When I saw black, he saw white. He was always angry. He was the head of his family from the age of 13. He always had his family responsibilities on his mind. Even now, he’s buying a house for his mother and a house for his father. He was very focused. Like Hugo.”
Hugo is Hugo Andrés Rodríguez, the son of a peasant farmer who lives on Las Margaritas, the climb Bernal calls his gym. Rodríguez’s time of 25 minutes for Las Margaritas is some seven minutes slower than Bernal’s record, although, he says, he does not know Bernal’s time at the same age. In any case, Rodríguez
has another model closer to home: his cousin Jesús David Peña, who was seventh in the 2019 U23 Giro d’Italia, despite riding as a helper for the winner, his team-mate Andrés Camilo Ardila (now UAE-Team Emirates), and Einer Rubio and Juan Diego Alba (both Movistar), in second and third.
Rodríguez credits the local geography with producing the riders Mazuera draws into his teams. “I grew up at Barro Blanco, at 2,700m, and there are five climbs where I live: Las Margaritas, Neusa, Tierra
Negra, San Jorge and the Alto del Águila. There is Hierbabuena at Chía, 25 kilometres away, and a bit further away there is Canicas.”
However, where Rodríguez sees mountains and altitude, Mazuera sees a far more complex human landscape. He introduces me to 13-year-old Nestor Alexander Gómez, the winner of the 2019 Mezuena Cup, and runner-up in the MTB nationals. Gómez lost his father as a child, and spends a lot of time alone while his mother works.
“His closest friend, Santiago Velásquez, rides for our nursery team. They spend a lot of time together, so I brought Santiago here to be with him. On paper, he is part of a different programme, but I do what I want so he’s here.”
Mazuera leaves the number crunching to the scientists: his vision of coaching is humanism personified: “For me, it is about being with these kids, sharing with them. I go with them to all the races. I make them feel I am really with them. Everything is teamwork, from sharing a wheel to going to the supermarket. I am also the team masseur, and I use that quiet time to talk with them, and discuss their most private thoughts.”
Mazuera has worked with just 18 young athletes over the years. Quality, rather than quantity, on the back of good scouting through knowledgeable local networks. Like an expert perfumier, he tweaks his team’s ingredients to bring out its riders’ best qualities. The latest addition is a first: a rider from a wellto-do family, who doesn’t need the Foundation’s help. Antonio Gómez Órtiz is the son of a wealthy family from the cacao-growing department of Santander. He was a national sailing champion - his elder brother was twice world champion, in the Sunfish dinghy class – before taking up cycling. His father built a MTB track for him. In 2019 he won a gold medal at the National Games.
“Antonio is unlike the other kids. He is from a family of means. When the Foundation committee met to discuss this year’s intake, I said yes straight away to Hugo, Camilo and Nestor, but I had to think hard about Antonio. He lives far away, he already has money. But I had a connection with him that I couldn’t find anywhere else. He brings something to the team, a culture, that the others can learn from. So we have welcomed him in.”
However, this new blending of rural poor with urban privilege is not without precedent, for Mazuera is himself the great-grandson of a President of the Republic: at a time when political violence in Colombia was commonplace, Laureano Gómez, President from 1950 to 1953, opposed universal suffrage, admired the Axis powers during the war and supported Spanish dictator General Franco. His great political adversary, former Bogotá mayor and Liberal presidential candidate Eliecer Gaitán, was assassinated in 1948, triggering nationwide upheaval.
In many respects, Gustavo Petro, the founder of Bolívar 83, where Egan Bernal grew up, is Gaitán’s political heir. A generation or two ago, the confluence of those two sides of the political spectrum would have spelled violence. Today, it signals peace, and cycling success: the perfect illustration of just how far Colombia has come.
“IT IS ABOUT BEING WITH THE KIDS, SHARING WITH THEM”