The Power of the Pedal

I wake up early three times a week and jump out of bed, driven by an irresistible impulse. After quickly getting dressed, I venture out into Bogotá’s perpetually cool morning air. I hop onto my bicycle, ride through the still-sleeping neighborhood, and the first smile of satisfaction crosses my face. Cycling is a sickness, I know, but I’m not the only one who suffers from it.

Hundreds of thousands of cyclists travel the streets of Colombia’s capital every morning. Most are going to work at factories, construction sites and offices; some are students. Others, like me, are athletes who choose long routes to test ourselves on Bogotá’s mountainous periphery. In a metropolitan area of more than eleven million residents, we bikers clock 1.2 million trips a day. It’s a thrill to live in the cycling capital of Latin America.

Cycling has long been popular in Colombia. Much of the country, roughly the size of South Africa, is graced by rainforests and savannas. To the west, however, lush mountain ranges have nurtured a booming bicycle culture. Cycling, as in few other places on Earth, has allowed Colombians to travel on steep, hard-to-navigate roads in rural areas: the bicycle has been the most widely used means of transportation for campesinos, or peasant farmers, in this rugged, high-altitude land. For many who have not been able to afford either cars or expensive gasoline, the bicycle has been a lifesaver, the people’s ally in commuting to school, heading to coffee plantations for work or picking up produce at the market.

The Colombian Andes have also bred some of the world’s best professional cyclists: the reyes de la montaña. It’s a title that Matt Rendell gave Colombian climbers in his 2002 book of the same name, Kings of the Mountains: How Colombia’s Cycling Heroes Changed Their Nation’s History. By winning some of the world’s most prestigious cycling races, these reyes, especially skilled at climbing, have helped put Colombia on the map—and lifted themselves into global prominence. The history of cycling in Colombia is the chronicle of a social ascent. Almost all of our racers are from the countryside, from places where cycling is almost the only opportunity for kids born into poverty.

“The sons of the peasantry have found in cycling a refuge from rural decline, a place where they can apply the traditional peasant virtues of patience and persistence, lucid observation and the stoic forbearance of physical pain,” Rendell writes in his 2020 book, Colombia Es Pasion!: How Colombia’s Young Racing Cyclists Came of Age. “It has allowed them to transition to the heart of global capitalism and earn considerable livelihoods from the marketing arms of companies looking to sell their goods to national and transnational markets.”

Kings of the Mountains shows how Colombia’s two types of cyclists—the racer and the rural campesino—came together. As the book opens, a team of professionals is barreling down a road, escorted by a car carrying their trainer. The cyclists advance up a steep slope at a good pace. Suddenly, they’re joined by a boy dressed in sandals, poncho and hat. A big can of fresh milk is strapped to the rack of his old bike. The cyclists accelerate, but they can’t shake the kid. They insult him, hoping he’ll abandon the group, and he challenges them: “If you’re so strong, pull away from me,” he shouts. Then he accelerates so quickly that he reaches the top first without any trouble. The weight of his load pushes him swiftly down the other side of the mountain. The young man’s name is Rafael Acevedo, and a few years later, he will ride in the Tour de France and other competitions with the best Colombian teams.

In its earliest days, the bicycle was an expensive toy, called a velocipede, that only wealthy people bought. In 1894, Bogotá hosted its first races at two velodromes built next to the city’s horse racing tracks. It was a portent: Colombians called the bicycle the caballito de acero, or “little steel horse”—a reliable workhorse that could serve their purpose for years. Before long, the bicycle became a democratic vehicle: even the poorest people could afford one.

In the beginning of the 20th century, the bicycle became a popular mode of transportation. It also helped bring Colombia together as a nation. During La Violencia, the civil war that consumed the country between 1948 and 1958, roughly 200,000 people were killed as the opposing Conservative and Liberal parties faced off in the countryside. In 1951, the country’s first cycling tour, the Vuelta a Colombia, arose as an urgent distraction to calm the nation. The competition sought to emulate the great tours of Europe, even though our highways were almost impassable. 35 pioneers rose to the challenge, often carrying their bikes on their shoulders to cross regions beset by quagmires, rivers, and rocks. This mythic feat drew a national radio audience, with exuberant commentators’ descriptions recreating the route for listeners. For the first time in the nation’s history, a radio audience took interest in places that many had neither been to nor heard about. Colombians began to feel invested in these disconnected regions, taking pride in their country and the athletes who traversed it. Cycling had united the nation.

The Vuelta a Colombia quickly became the country’s most popular sporting event. Packs of cyclists crossed Colombia’s most remote areas, followed by caravans, all of them welcomed by fans who wanted to see their idols close up. Efraín Forero Triviño, Ramón Hoyos Vallejo, Rafael Antonio Niño, and Martín Emilio “Cochise” Rodríguez, pioneers of the pedal during the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s, became celebrities and laid the foundations of a lasting phenomenon. Coming up behind them were new generations of athletes who strengthened the country’s position as a producer of elite cyclists.

There were some bumps in the early years. Forero and Hoyos, along with other Colombians, were invited to race in the 1953 Route de France, a version of the Tour for amateurs. They traveled there thinking that they were prepared, but in reality, they lacked the training, experience, and structure that supports professionals. Mere rookies, they placed last. 20 years later, with help from sponsors, two racers from Medellín, Cochise Rodríguez and Giovanni Jiménez, were the first Colombians to try their luck in the Tour de France. Their roles in the race, however, were secondary. As unknown competitors, Rodríguez and Jiménez participated only as support for European team leaders. They rode ahead to break the wind, allowing the leaders to draft behind; they dropped back to the support car for water and food, then raced ahead to deliver it to the leaders. They even gave up their bicycles when the leaders suffered mechanical problems.

We Colombians had to wait until the 1980s for the chance to win. Sponsored by, among others, Café de Colombia and the battery company Varta, several homegrown teams were able to put together squads in optimal conditions and competed in the three great races of France, Italy, and Spain: the Tour de France, the Giro d’Italia and the Vuelta a España. From that era, we remember the names of Lucho Herrera and Fabio Parra, the first Colombians to ascend the podiums of those European competitions. Herrera won the Vuelta a España in 1987; Parra was third in the Tour de France in 1988.

Colombia’s ascent in the cycling world was not without obstacles along the way. In the 1980s and ’90s, as drug violence raged across the country, professional cyclists were forced to submit to rigorous inspections at airports before traveling to compete outside the country. Sponsors feared a drug-trafficking scandal would damage their reputation. Some Colombian cyclists were, in fact, arrested for trafficking, among them Rafael Tolosa, Gustavo Wilches, Juan Carlos Castillo, Gonzalo Marín, Carlos Julio Siachoque and Juan Pablo Valencia. Perhaps the saddest part of that dark time was experienced by Alfonso Flórez, a young racer who in 1980 won the Tour de l’Avenir, the youth version of the Tour de France. A lot of faith was placed in Flórez, who showed that Colombians could be victorious in the great international competitions. In 1992, by then retired in Medellín, Flórez was in his car when a gunman opened fire and killed him. The case has never been solved.

And before all this was the bizarre case of Roberto Escobar Gaviria. The older brother of Pablo Escobar, the notorious drug lord, Roberto was a passionate cyclist. In 1965, he took third place in the team time trial of the National Cycling Championship. He had other triumphs and was runner-up as Athlete of the Year in his home region of Antioquia. Roberto raced in various national trials, but he was routinely beaten by his fellow Antioquian, Cochise Rodríguez. Yet that’s as far as Roberto’s sporting career got—his famous brother recruited him to be chief accountant for the Medellín Cartel, the criminal corporation that ravaged Colombia with drug trafficking and terrorism during the ‘80s and early ‘90s.

Those dark moments, however, are few, compared with the successes that followed. No one other sport has given Colombia such international recognition. Racers from the country have won the three premier European races. In 2019, Egan Bernal, raised in Zipaquira, became the first Latin American winner of the Tour de France. At 22, he was also the youngest winner of the Tour since 1909. “This is not only my triumph,” he said. “It’s the triumph of a whole country.”

We have also been champions of many other races, including Olympic competitions. Cundinamarca, Boyacá, and Antioquia, three mountainous regions known for their love of cycling, are talent pools where recruiters look for new athletes for their teams. Professional squads around the world have at least one or two Colombians, many of them as leaders.

Women also stand out in the sport. María Luisa Calle has been world champion in track cycling and an Olympic medalist. Mariana Pajón won a gold medal in BMX racing at the London Olympics in 2012 and another in 2016 in Rio de Janeiro. Colombian racers, among them Jessica Parra, Ana Cristina Sanabria, Paula Andrea Patiño, Diana Peñuela and Laura Camila Lozano, have also begun to join professional teams around the world.

Cycling in Colombia wound up producing a virtuous circle: amateurs get excited when they see the professionals triumph; later, when some of them turn professional, their success inspires new amateurs. This expanding phenomenon is notable on the country’s roads. When I go riding outside Bogotá, I come across ever-larger groups. Packs of 100 cyclists are common, and annual races for amateurs have emerged in many regions. The most famous cyclists, such as Rigoberto Urán and Esteban Chaves, organize these races and attract hundreds of riders. Some of these professionals have become influential figures and successful entrepreneurs. They’ve created clothing brands and stores that bear their names.

Cycling is now a multimillion-dollar industry in Colombia. Multitudes of cyclists go out each weekend and activate the consumer economy in countless establishments. Small and medium-sized businesses lead foreign cyclists on tourist routes. There are restaurants and cafes that cater exclusively to cyclists. Many bicycles and accessories and uniforms are made in Colombia. Neighborhoods are crowded with biking shops. In the process, an enormous accumulated knowledge of cycling has been built up.

But not everything is competition. For Colombians, bicycling is also a relaxing outing. In 1974, the city of Bogotá inaugurated Sunday cycling, an initiative in which the city’s great avenues are closed to cars every Sunday. Roughly two million riders take part in it every weekend. The idea became so popular that many other cities in the world have adopted it.

Bogotá now has the continent’s largest network of infrastructure for bicycles: 635 kilometers of exclusive bike lanes. This grid is expanding. During the 2020 quarantine brought on by the coronavirus pandemic, Mayor Claudia López, who gets around the city on two wheels, led the construction of a bicycle lane on Carrera Séptima, the city’s most important and oldest thoroughfare. The artery originates among grand old homes in the historic downtown and makes its way through the northern and more modern section of the city. According to the 2019 Copenhagenize Index, which ranks cities around the world, Bogotá is the 12th most bicycle-friendly city on the planet; Montreal and Vancouver (tied at No. 18) are the only other cities in the Americas that make the list’s top 20.

Bike-friendly cities and towns also exist well beyond Bogotá. La Ceja, in the northwestern province of Antioquia, is one of the most cycling-mad communities in the country. La Ceja depends in large part on the cultivation of flowers—a mainstay of Colombia’s economy. Every day, early in the morning and at the end of the day, flower workers travel by bicycle between the town and farms. There are more than 40 bicycle repair workshops in this small community. La Ceja has also produced a singular cyclist. For decades, the country was known mostly for its “beetles,” small, light racers who fly up mountain ascents. But Fernando Gaviria, a different sort of athlete, appeared in the mid-2010s. Tall, strong and with a body made for speed, he ushered in a new era of cycling. At his first major tour, the 2017 Giro d’Italia, he won four stages, a feat no other Colombian had ever come close to accomplishing.

Perhaps more than any other Colombian cyclist, though, Rigoberto Urán, runner-up in the 2017 Tour de France and silver medalist in the 2012 Olympics, demonstrates Colombians’ drive. Urán is the son of a campesino who gave him a bicycle when he was a boy. One day, on the outskirts of Urrao, the town in Antioquia where they lived, a group of paramilitaries murdered Urán’s father because he refused to help them steal some cows. With his father’s death, the boy was forced to work to support his family. Urán could easily have been recruited by gangs that assailed the region, but he threw himself into cycling instead. Urán’s story is a metaphor that defines us. Colombia is still one of the most economically divided countries on Earth, but we trust in our potential. We’ve fallen a thousand times, yet like Lucho Herrera, bloodied in the 1985 Tour de France, we have gotten up, determined to push on. This underdeveloped and often troubled nation, with discipline and effort, succeeded in becoming the hub of Latin American cycling. It is the bicycle that has given us the opportunity to fulfill ourselves. We are a country built on wheels.