Pure Suffering
How hard is La Purito Andorra? Well, the typical average speed is just 16kmh and Cyclist ends the day sucking emergency oxygen in the medical centre
The Spanish principality of Andorra is so mountainous that it doesn’t have room for an airport, but thankfully there is oxygen on hand at the finish of the brutal La Purito sportive
n paper, there are harder gran fondos than La Purito. The Tour du Mont Blanc, for instance, is a 338km beast with 8,400m of climbing that Cyclist took on in issue 85 and is still giving us nightmares today. By contrast, La Purito’s 140km parcours certainly isn’t super-long, but into that distance it packs a formidable 5,400m of vertical ascent, plus the somewhat daunting triple-threat of a 2,083m summit finish, extensive double-digit gradients and precisely zero flat roads.
The route wriggles around most of Andorra and looks like someone tried to sign their name on a map during a particularly violent earthquake. It consists of three loops and three passages of the main spine A-road, chiefly because Andorra doesn’t have enough roads to make up the distance any other way.
This convoluted parcours has interesting origins. La Purito is the eponymous creation of Spanish former professional Joaquim ‘Purito’ Rodríguez, who moved to Catalan-speaking Andorra during his career. The first edition was held in August 2015, a year before Rodríguez retired, and the same course was used for Stage 11 of that year’s Vuelta a España. At the time it
The course was met with disbelief by some of the pros who were obliged to ride it on the 2015 Vuelta
was talked of as the toughest stage in the race’s history and was met with disbelief by some of the pros who were obliged to ride it.
‘We could have spread this over three days rather than cramming it into one,’ OricaGreenedge’s Mat Hayman said before the start. Late that afternoon one of his teammates called it ‘the hardest day of my life’. That the rider in question was 54kg climber Esteban Chaves speaks volumes.
Gran fondo fans are suckers for punishment, though. Indeed, before the start of that Vuelta stage, Purito himself commented, ‘If tonight any of my colleagues should complain about the route, I’ll get them to talk to some of the 1,200 amateurs who happily finished it and said they were just charmed.’
Four years on, Cyclist is waiting at the start line on a narrow street in Sant Julià de Lòria, part of a La Purito field that has grown to more than twice that inaugural number, and it’s a sea of orange. Like the Granfondo Fausto
Coppi in the Italian Alps, La Purito mandates that participants wear the official event jersey.
Some riders are chatting among themselves, others simply waiting in silence. I tend to prefer the latter option anyway but in this case I have no choice since 99% of the riders around me speak Spanish or Catalan and I don’t. Yet herein lies another aspect to the event’s appeal: it has yet to catch on with Brits. Unlike the fields at the Marmotte Alpes or Étape du Tour, which typically are up to a third British, no one on your club run is going to say, ‘Yeah, I rode that years back,’ about La Purito.
While that’s equally true in my own case, I have ridden a handful of similar events over the years. Even so, the severity of the profile has me worried. I’ve never done so much climbing in a single ride and Lee from Eat Sleep Cycle, who organised our trip, has already expressed dismay that my lowest gear is ‘only’ a 34x28. Still, at least my bike itself – Canyon’s featherlight Ultimate CF Evo – is well suited to the terrain, and I’m as well prepared as I can be and hoping for a good position.
As we roll out through the town, the field quickly stretches out on the narrow streets, but the road soon widens and I’m able to move up to the front. Indeed the peloton is half-asleep and
I’m feeling mischievous, so I click a gear, rest my forearms on the tops and soon I’m out of sight.
It’s fun rolling solo past the smattering of spectators and a few are grinning at my kamikaze tactics, but actually there’s some logic to it. This kind of event inevitably sees those at the front smash up the first climb at a ridiculous rate so by pulling ahead I’m giving myself a buffer so I can climb at my own pace.
I also have the luxury of following the lead course car, police truck and about a dozen motorbikes, which saves me having to look for direction signs.
Turn for the worse
No sooner has this last thought trickled through my brain, however, than one of the motos takes a wrong turn. The rest duly follow, so the course car has no choice but to do the same as it tries to signal ahead that they’ve taken a wrong turn. Which of course means I too make the turn, and we’re a few hundred metres up a horrible 15% grade by the time it’s clear I need to backtrack. I rejoin the official course just as the bunch
It’s 8.30am and I’m already sweating hard. One by one riders are forced to sit up as the pace takes its toll