ANALYSIS: NAIRO QUINTANA
After his dramatic breakthrough in 2013, is it now too late for Nairo Quintana to take Colombia’s first ever Tour de France victory? Procycling asks if this year is the last chance saloon for Quintana’s yellow jersey hopes
It’s been six years since the Colombian’s Tour breakthrough. Is it now or never to win yellow?
Six years ago, deep into the 2013 Tour de France, cycling legend turned commentator Sean Kelly – like everybody else in the press room – was asking for background information about the new kid on the block, Nairo Quintana. The Colombian had earlier flashed on to Kelly’s Tour radar for being the one rider trying to break Team Sky’s stranglehold, after launching a long-range move on the Pailhères pass on the first stage in the Pyrenees. His attack was neutralised, but it was strong enough to impress Kelly.
However, when one journalist predicted that Quintana could well make the final podium, the Irishman simply grinned and said, “That won’t happen.”
But it did. Quintana’s runner-up spot behind Chris Froome that year made him the first Colombian on the Tour podium since Fabio Parra finished third in 1988, and the first Tour rookie to finish in one of the top two places since Jan Ullrich in 1996. On top of that, at 23, Quintana was also the youngest rider to win the King of
the Mountains competition since Charly Gaul in 1955, aged 22. And as he won the KoM and best young rider jersey, he did what hadn’t been done since Eddy Merckx in 1969 and took two secondary jerseys on his Tour debut.
Put that all together and it made for one heck of a CV. And when Quintana followed that up with his Giro d’Italia win in 2014, it seemed as if a Tour de France victory for the Movistar racer was only a question of time. “He’s going to be the first Colombian to win the Tour de France,” former Tour and Vuelta winner Pedro Delgado predicted to Procycling four years ago.
But since then, Quintana has slowly but surely fallen out of the running in July. He was second in 2015 after almost toppling Froome on the ascent to Alpe d’Huez, the last major climb of that year’s race. Quintana’s last Tour podium was when he finished third in 2016.
His last grand tour win came in the Vuelta that same year. It raised hopes he was rallying and could achieve what Colombians dubbed ‘el sueño amarillo’ – the yellow dream – the following July. But a near miss in the Giro in 2017 was followed by 12th in the Tour that year, then 10th overall in the Tour and eighth in the Vuelta a España in 2018.
In fact, 2018 was the first season Quintana did not finish on a grand tour podium since 2012. His Tour stage win in the Pyrenees last year merely served to highlight how badly Movistar’s muchvaunted triumvirate of leaders, Quintana, Mikel Landa and Alejandro Valverde, had underachieved that July. But the sense of disappointment surrounding Quintana was the most intense of all.
Publicly at least, Movistar’s faith in Quintana as a Tour winner remains unshaken despite the drop off in results. Team manager Eusebio Unzué tells Procycling, “There aren’t any reasons to think that it can’t happen.
I still believe in him. How could I lose hope in him?” he says.
“Last year’s results were down to a series of special circumstances – one being that you can’t ever say that top form is something eternal. And we’ve seen this year he’s really gone for it in Paris-Nice and in the Volta a Catalunya. It’s like he’s gone back to his old ways, and I’m sure we’ll see more of that racing style in the Dauphiné and then, I hope, even more so in the Tour.”
It’s true that in Paris-Nice this March, Quintana staged a dramatic final pushback against overall winner Egan Bernal on the last day. But Quintana’s failure to succeed, as well as his fourth place in Catalunya behind Miguel Ángel López and Bernal, showed how crowded the Colombian GC hierarchy is these days. Once there was only Rigoberto Urán to rival Quintana, but now there is López, Esteban Chaves, Bernal and in the future probably Ivan Sosa, too.
But has Quintana missed the Tour boat completely? And if so, why? “Everybody’s body is different and he could be like Damiano Cunego, who did so well very young, winning the Giro d’Italia and then was not so good in his latter years,” Mitchelton-Scott rider Esteban Chaves tells Procycling.
“It’s all about genetics. Some riders start out well then fade. Other racers like Chris Froome start off gently to become the best of the grand tour specialists. But really it’s a very complex subject to ask if Nairo will get back to what he once was.
“A lot of people are pointing fingers and raising questions. But that’s typical when you get second in the Tour. Suddenly everything is laid on for you, no request is too great. Then when you miss out on a race, it’s, ‘Next, please.’ Sport is very cruel in that way. And everybody’s memories are way too short – doctors, racers, journalists, directors, riders’ agents… everybody’s,” Chaves adds.
But it’s not just about whether Quintana still has the physical capacity to win the Tour, as Chaves believes. Alberto Contador, who first raced regularly against Quintana in 2012, argues that Quintana has grown increasingly conservative in his tactics. “His strategy against me was very predictable,” Contador told Eurosport Spain. “I think the only order they’d give him was, ‘Stay on Alberto’s wheel.’”
The most blindingly obvious case of that, Contador said, came in the Vuelta in 2016, when Quintana stuck like a limpet to Contador on the crunch stage to Formigal, thus getting in the right break to win the race and defeat Froome.
Yet Contador believes there were signs that Quintana preferred to take few risks even in the year of his breakthrough in the Tour. “Maybe that style of racing also stopped Quintana from winning the Tour he could have taken in 2013. It’s easy to talk with the benefit of hindsight, but if he’d been more ambitious that year, that Tour would have been Colombia’s first.”
Colombian journalist Luis Barbosa, who has reported on cycling for more than 20 years, believes that Quintana’s use of a more defensive strategy began in 2015, when he was beaten by both Froome and then Sky domestique Richie Porte at the summit finish of La Pierre-Saint-Martin on stage 10 of the Tour. Even against Froome’s domestiques, Quintana was helpless.
That huge blow to his morale could explain why Quintana took his time to follow Vincenzo Nibali up the road when the Italian began attacking Froome in the Alps in the third week that year. (Another, less kind theory is that Quintana was under orders to protect Alejandro Valverde’s third place overall.) Whatever the reason, given Froome then said he was struggling with a respiratory infection, that decision could have cost Quintana that Tour win.
As Quintana has slowly come off the boil and scaled back his attacking, there’s speculation that Movistar’s determination to bring in fresh riders such as Mikel Landa and their continuing faith in Alejandro Valverde’s GC capability have eroded the Colombian’s self-confidence. The loss of his brother Dayer from the 2019 team line-up was another change that he reportedly did not appreciate. Meanwhile Movistar’s failure to retain the allrounder Jonathan Castroviejo, one of
“He’s like the footballers Falcao or Rodríguez, he even has his own statue in the central square in Cómbita, his parents’ village” Manolo Mar tinez
the few team-mates with whom Quintana was close but who joined Sky last year, was another blow.
A more outgoing rider might have tried to manoeuvre himself into a stronger position in his team through a few well-timed messages in the media. But instead Quintana has opted to keep quiet, as he so often does. Back home in Colombia, the internal politics of Movistar and Quintana’s lack of race aggression barely matters, such is Quintana’s popularity and high profile. Whether he is surrounded by Movistar co-leaders in the Tour or fighting alone for the sueño amarillo, whether he is defensive or aggressive, Quintana remains the number one favourite to win the Tour. He is an idol to the Colombian public in general.
“Rigoberto Urán actually started getting Colombia back on terms with the Tour GC, and he’s got more of a rock star aura about him,” Movistar’s Winner Anacona tells Procycling. “But I think when the Spanish guys on our team came over for the Colombia Tour, they were really surprised to see how much Nairo matters to normal people, how much of a star he really is.”
“Nairo is a public personality,” journalist Manuel Martinez wrote in L’Equipe earlier this year. “He’s like the footballers Falcao or James Rodríguez or the pop singer Carlos Vives – he even has his own statue in the central square in Cómbita, his parents’ village. And he’s also a social crusader.”
Martinez cites the fact that this February, when a car bomb exploded outside a Bogotá police station and killed 20 people, Quintana formed part of the cortège-cum-protest against the violence.
Yet those who know him well are adamant that these extracurricular activities are not distractions, nor have they affected his performance. “He’s a tremendously hard worker,” says Chaves. “It’s not just that he’s naturally talented,” adds Anacona, “He’s really earned his own place in the sport.
“I never raced against him as an amateur but I do remember him from a one-day race, Clásica de Tunja, which has different races for all categories
- U23, junior and so on - on the same day. Curiously, he wasn’t the best, but even us seniors could see Nairo had what it takes and that he was very determined to succeed,” Anacona adds.
“So when he finished second in the Tour in 2013, it was a surprise, but not that big a surprise. For me, it was more a confirmation of what he’d done the year before and what he’d always been.”
On the other hand, that level of popularity and degree of expectation, coupled with such early success, represents colossal extra pressure. There was almost a sense of obligation for Quintana to take the yellow jersey in Paris. “I don’t know if you can say the Tour is an obsession for him, but it’s a kind of necessity. He’s already shown the peloton and shown the rest of the field, as well as Colombia in general, that he can do it. He can win the Tour,” says Barbosa.
As if in the nick of time, and perhaps due to the sense he is being superseded by a younger generation, there has been something of a change in Quintana’s racing strategy this year. This March’s Paris-Nice, where he finished runner-up, was one indication of that; his change of trainer to Italian Michele Bartoli is said to be another. So, too, says Barbosa, is the increasing amount of time Quintana spends in Colombia. He has headed back to his roots prior to this year’s Tour for lengthy spells of training at altitude.
On the downside for Quintana is that if he wanted to race as sole leader in the Tour again, circumstances and team politics have already decided otherwise. “It is hard to comprehend how Movistar have opted to put all three of their leaders into the Tour again after the failure of that strategy last year,” observes Barbosa. “In a hypothetical power struggle, Nairo’s results are such that he should have the upper hand. But
the team’s apparent lack of confidence in him is what weakens him.
“However, when the others can’t do what the team wants them to do, it’s Nairo who has to save the team’s bacon. It’s no coincidence he was the sole leader in each of the grand tours he’s won. But in the Vuelta a España last year, how can it be that Valverde starts off saying, ‘I’m here to help Nairo’ and then he gets ahead of him in the overall for three weeks, and then in the last three days, Valverde starts to crack and it’s up to Nairo to save the day again. Mentally, how can somebody handle that?”
There is an increasing sense that Quintana is not going to handle this situation for much longer. He’s out of contract at the end of 2019, and as early as February, reports emerged that Quintana was already openly speculating on his need to move on from Movistar at the end of the year. He then retracted his statements, but the rumours he is quitting the team continue to swirl as the months tick on.
Given the complexity of the situation, Quintana’s racing this summer could have critical repercussions for his future. “It’s not his last chance to win the Tour, but it could well be his last chance to win it with Movistar,” argues Barbosa.
But then physically, can he do it? “Once a champion, always a champion,” argues Chaves. “It’s difficult to predict. Time alone will tell. But my instinct says he still will do it. And he deserves it, if only for withstanding so much pressure and expectation for so long. And remember he’s only 29. He’s still only a child.”
It would be unfair, then, to say that 2019 is the end of the Tour line for Quintana. But this July he stands at a major crossroads in his career, perhaps the biggest of them all. And a whole nation really is watching.
“When the others can’t do what the team wants them to do, it’s Nairo who has to save the team’s bacon. It’s no coincidence he was the sole leader in each of the grand tours he’s won” Luis Barbosa