HIGH HOPES
Colombian cycling is booming, with more top level pros than ever. But the country’s unique cycling culture also unites a divided nation. Matt Rendell looks at how the exploits of Colombia’s cycling stars inspire an entire country, but also conceal structural problems
Ayear ago, in February 2020, a tearful Jhon Anderson Rodríguez sat on his suitcase beside the check-in desks at El Dorado airport in Bogotá. The Medellín-based EPM-Scott team had travelled to the high altitude of Boyacá with seven other riders, after which the six who would ride the 2020 Tour Colombia would finally be selected. Rodríguez was a former junior national TT champion and a medal winner at the 2014 Youth Olympics. He had been Egan Bernal’s team-mate at the 2016 Tour de l’Avenir, where Bernal was fourth and Rodríguez had won a stage. But he was not selected for the 2020 Tour Colombia. The international peloton was flying into Boyacá, and Rodríguez was in the capital a few hours south, heading home with damp eyes.
His frustration was more than just personal. Cycling here has always been about a nation’s centuries-old desire to measure itself against the wider world. Globalisation came to Colombia early, don’t forget, in a fleet of Spanish caravels. For centuries a distant colonial outpost, ceaselessly despoiled of its gold, emeralds and territory – including the entire Panama Isthmus in 1903 – its history is one of endless discontinuity. It is hard enough to draw an unbroken line between the Colombia of the late 1990s, when guerrilla armies had the capital, Bogotá, encircled, and US diplomats called it a failed state, and today’s voguish backpacking and ecotour destination, although, somewhere along its course, the thread passes through the professional peloton. The role of Colombia’s phenomenal cycling success over the past decade in its transformation – 14 grand tour podiums with five different riders between 2013 and 2019, and the near doubling of tourism revenue between 2010 and 2018 – may be hard to quantify, but it can hardly be doubted. Nairo Quintana, Rigoberto Urán, Esteban Chaves, Miguel Ángel López and Egan Bernal have secured their nation formidable resources of what political scientists might call soft power.
If your main contact point with the country is cycling journalism, you might think it had completely solved its age-old issues. After all, while poor Jhon Anderson was waiting in domestic departures, Peter Sagan and three team-mates were training at altitude just outside Medellín, Annemiek van Vleuten was doing the same in the coffee town of Manizales, west of Bogotá, and the Italian women’s track team were finishing their third pre-Worlds camp in Duitama. Meanwhile, six WorldTour teams were preparing to dispute what would turn out to be a thrilling Tour Colombia.
Colombian cycling has helped rejuvenate the sport. During last February’s Tour Colombia, Bob Jungels, a veteran of two Colombian training camps and two Tours of Colombia, posted a selfie of his post-stage ride to the hotel, showing Bernal, Julian Alaphilippe, and a host of stars grinning from ear to ear in his wake. I asked him whether his experiences in the country rekindled his love of the sport. His answer was unequivocal: “Absolutely. The atmosphere and the enthusiasm of the people here is fantastic. This race feels more peaceful than in Europe. And it’s beautiful here.”
Yet, to get a feel for cycling’s place into the rebus of modern Colombia, you have to switch quickly and dizzyingly between
a thousand different perspectives. All over the world, the bicycle is linked to memory and to modernity, in part because of its role as a means of mass transport in the early days of industrialisation. But in Colombia, it has always meant something more.
Cycling prowess became a form of national projection as early as the 1950s. In 1971 Martin Emilio Rodríguez – known as ‘Cochise’ – won his country’s first world title in any sport when he became world pursuit champion in Varese. His two Giro stage wins in 1973 and 1975, and his presence at the 1975 Tour, made cycling a means of global projection. Alfonso Flores’s victory in the 1980 Tour de l’Avenir prised open the Tour to its first Colombian team in 1983, and within a year they had taken their first stage win on the hallowed ascent of Alpe d’Huez. Quintana’s podium places and Bernal’s Tour win are cherries on a cake that has given a sometimes tortured nation precious sustenance down the years.
On the other hand, Jhon Rodríguez’s Tour Colombia aspirations, which had all the potential for a breakthrough but phuttered out in abject disappointment, reflect the fate of the country as a whole. After teetering on the brink of change since the October 2016 peace accords between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, guerrillas, it has found implementing the 310 pages of the final agreement politically and practically impossible. The demobilisation has been followed by a series of remobilisations. And the FARC were only one of the armed groups roaming Colombia’s forested hills.
On 10 February 2020, the day before the Tour Colombia began, one of those armed groups, the National Liberation Army or ELN, announced a 72-hour armed siege of the village of El Cocuy, to start on the 14th. The ELN busies itself not with liberation but with extortion and drug running, and El Cocuy is barely 100 miles from Duitama, where the race entourage was billeted. The guerrillas set about incinerating trucks and planting bombs, but cancelling the race never crossed anyone’s mind. Mayors across Boyacá complained in vain that so many of the region’s police were following the race: cycling here has often acted as a sort of national counterweight to armed insurrection. The inaugural Vuelta a Colombia in 1951 was held in the midst of nationwide conflict known simply as La Violencia. The 1964 edition took place during the bombardment of a hillside enclave occupied by a rebel army that would later constitute the core of the FARC. Not even Pablo Escobar’s vicious bombing campaign could stop the racing.
For most of the press, trying to write about a bike race, the violence was a distant irrelevance. Not Camilo Tellez, who was covering the action for the social network Caballito de Acero. “My father is from El Cocuy. I’m due there next week,” he told me. “My cousin tells me that no one collected the milk on Friday, and there is no movement in the surrounding farmland. This hasn’t happened for decades.”
I asked Camilo if I could talk to anyone in El Cocuy about the situation. He told me, “No one wants to speak.”
The racing is easy to describe: EF Pro Cycling won the opening team time trial by 45 seconds, with Jonathan Caicedo taking the leaders’ jersey. After two sprints won by UAE’s Sebastián Molano, Sergio