Nairo Quintana
Colombia finally has its first Tour de France winner, it just isn’t Nairo Quintana. That’s not a statement the crystal ball of cycling was predicting back in 2013, when the diminutive climber from Combíta, situated over 2,800 metres up in the Colombian clouds, exploded into the Tour and finished second overall, and also won the King of the Mountains jersey, on his debut. Back then, Quintana was the young prodigy of Colombian cycling. The talented wunderkind who looked set to make history for his home country, and go on to dominate cycling for years to come.
The first time Team Sky came across Quintana was at the 2012 Critérium du Dauphiné, the last race Bradley Wiggins won on his path to yellow that summer.
On stage 6, ending in Morzine after the Col du Joux Plane, the toughest climb of that year’s race, Quintana jumped away from the peloton, dropping the likes of Wiggins, Cadel Evans and Chris Froome, to win the stage. The team sat up and took note: here was a very dangerous threat. “We won’t be giving him any room for manoeuvre at all,” was how one staff member at the British squad summarised to Procycling how they’d handle Quintana in the future.
His runner-up result in 2013’s Tour sent expectations soaring. Quintana has always been abundantly talented, but he was also the antithesis of Sky’s methodical, controlled tactics that were starting to take over grand tours. He was attacking, dynamic, unpredictable as soon as the road went uphill, and at just
23, had years ahead of him to get better and win. In Froome’s first two Tour victories, Quintana was the rider who gave him most trouble. The Colombian dropped him at Le Semnoz at the end of the 2013 event, and limited Froome’s win in 2015, when he was arguably at his peak, to 72 seconds, pulling back significant time in the final two mountain stages. When he won his first grand tour at the Giro d’Italia in 2014 he did so by going on the offensive.
However, Quintana hasn’t been the same in recent years, arguably since his last grand tour win at the Vuelta a España in 2016. Prior to this season he’d won just two GC titles since that Vuelta win, at 2017’s Volta Comunitat Valenciana and Tirreno-Adriatico, compared to nine in the four years before. His trajectory of Tour results has gone down, too; second, second, third, 12th, 10th, eighth. He won stages at the 2018 and 2019 race, but both were the product of bizarre scenarios where the peloton let him go up the road or in the breakaway as he’d already fallen so far down the GC.
Quintana’s deteriorating relationship with his Movistar team clearly didn’t help. Their recruitment of Mikel Landa in 2017 muddied the waters, giving the team three leaders, confusing tactics and a bad atmosphere. Notably, Quintana’s family have often been publicly at odds with messages coming from the team, too.
Still, that doesn’t change the fact that Quintana’s career has stalled. There’s an impression that he never pushed on as thought, that he peaked early and was successful while he was young but never had the room to develop further, and is on the decline. He’s faced repeated criticism in the media and from fans for being too conservative, for following wheels. But then again, his reputation was so high could he ever live up to it?
Eyebrows raised everywhere when Quintana’s move to French ProConti squad Arkéa-Samsic was confirmed for 2020 - a lesser team, with fewer resources, plus a culture shock for the Spanish-speaking Colombian. Yet Quintana’s form this year proved that all wrong. He won five races in 2020 - more than any other GC rider - two GC titles at the Tour de la Provence and Tour des Alpes Maritimes, the former including a victory on Mont Ventoux. He won atop La Colmiane at Paris-Nice, the climb that is due to be the first main challenge of the 2020 Tour, on stage 2. All solo wins thanks to big, mountain attacks we used to know him for. His wins weren’t all in A-class races, and at Paris-Nice a number of major teams were absent, but signs of the Quintana of old were very much there. Maybe a change of environment was all he ever needed.
Who knows what would have happened this year, if the season hadn’t come to a premature close. But if we’re going on the form and results alone, Quintana was back and looked to be a major threat again.