How Did Colombian Cyclists Suddenly Get So Good?

Nairo Quintana celebrates his victory in the Giro d'Italia.

Colombian riders did phenomenally well in the Giro d'Italia, which ended yesterday. Boyacense Nairo Quintana finished first, Antioqueño Rigoberto Urán second and fellow Antioqueño Julián Arredondo took the King of the Mountain jersey. Perhaps we should have seen it all coming since last year, when Quintana finished second and won the best climber's jersey in the Tour de France and Urán took second in the Giro d'Italia.

Rigoberrto Urán celebrates winning
stage 12 of the Giro d'Italia.

These guys are only the best known of a crop of young riders. What's happened to produce such great cyclists all of a sudden? Here are some ideas:

Colombia's economy has strengthened - enabling local businesses to sponsor young riders and help them up onto the first rung of the ladder toward professional racing.

Colombia is safer - This has made Colombia's own tour, the Vuelta a Colombia, more attractive to foreign riders, giving Colombian cyclists more opportunities to be discovered by racing teams.

Cycling authorities have cracked down on doping. According to this theory, Colombia's many

Julian Arredondo, the Giro d'Italia's King of the Mountain.

mountains and opportunities for high-altitude training give its riders a natural advantage - but that advantage was for many years nullified by the common use of drugs like EPO, as well as transfusions, which artificially boost red blood cell levels. In the post-Lance Armstrong era, doping seems to have dropped - or at least changed - perhaps restoring high-altitude trainers' natural advantages.

Whatever happens, Colombia's cycling boom has potential to last, and even grow. That's pretty good for a relatively small, relatively poor developing nation.

Even so, as others have observed, cycling still receives only a fraction of the attention of futbol. Hundreds of Colombian journalists are following the national football squad during its World Cup training, but only few covered the Giro d'Italia - even tho Colombia's not likely to win the football World Cup. El Tiempo, the country's main newspaper, covered its front page today with a picture of Quintana kissing the Giro's trophy, and even dyed the paper pink (representing the winning rider's pink jersey). But by this afternoon, the paper's website had returned to World Cup coverage.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Last of an Era in Colombian Bike Racing

Jose Duarte with one of his elegant hand-made frames. 

More than futbol or the official national sport tejo, Colombia may be best known internationally for its accomplishments in cycling. So, it's sad to see a cycling era end.

Bicicletas Duarte on Calle 68 in Bogotá.

With its red, green and blue front, Bicicletas Duarte looks like just one more in a strip of store/repair shops on Calle 68, one of Bogotá's several 'bicycle rows.' Like the neighboring stores', Duarte's showroom displays imported, Asian-made bicycles.

So, hard to believe that in the store's rear workshop you can find a legend of Colombian cycling.

The Duarte frame which won
 France's Tour del Avenir.

At 77, Jose Duarte walks with difficulty. His lower back aches from decades of leaning over bike frames. His voice is soft. Some of his memories of his decades in Colombian cycling are foggy. But he talks with quiet pride of his many accomplishments, both on the race course and in the workshop.

Born in the town of La Mesa outside of Bogota, as a teen Duarte bicycled to his electrician job. But at age 17 he discovered that his real vocationlay not in the plugs and wires he worked with, but the pedals and wheels he used to get there.

Duarte's hand-made frames
hang on a wall.

Duarte became a bicycle racer. During his 1956 to 1960 competition years, he rode with and befriended cycling legends such as Italian Fausto Coppi. Duarte competed in several Vueltas a Colombia and in 1959 won Colombia's national road racing championship. But his relationship with Colombia's cycling classics had just begun.

A Career Shift

In 1965, Duarte switched from riding bikes to building them, opening his first workshop.

The afternoon I dropped into Bicicletas Duarte, Duarte had just placed the latest classic lugged racing frame he was building into an acid bath. It may be one of the last of some 6,000 frames molded by his hands.

Strikingly, even more than his own accomplishments on two wheels, Duarte seems proudest of what others have accomplished on Duarte-made frames. In the 1978 Vuelta a Colombia, 35 of the the 90 racers rode Duarte frames. Duarte bicycles have won 6 Vueltas a Colombia, as well as the vueltas of Chile, Mexico, Costa Rica, Panama, Guatemala and Venezuela - and undoubtedly others as well. But the greatest achievement is memorialized on his shop wall in the form of the dark blue frame which won France's 1985 Tour del Avenir. The facing wall exhibits snapshots of Duarte with cycling legends including Bernard Hinault and Eddy Mercx, who visited his shop.

Duarte built bikes for Rafael Niño, who won the Vuelta five times, as well as Miguel Samaca, Cristobal Perez and other Colombian cyling legends.

Inside Bicicleta Duarte's bike repair shop.

But not all of Duarte's famous clients were athletes: He also built bikes for politicians, including charismatic presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galan, assassinated in 1989 by cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar. Duarte and Galan also trained together.

Galan "was not such a good cyclist," Duarte recalls, "but he was a good politician."

Duarte's showroom, which sells mass-produced
bikes from Asia. 

Duarte then built bikes for and trained with Galan's succesor, Cesar Gaviria, who went on to win the presidency. Duarte recalls how presidential assistants would call him at 5 a.m. to announce a top-secret training ride. He would board a presidential helicopter and be transported to some country road, where he and Gaviria would pedal amidst a phalanx of armed guards.

Ironically, in the early 1980s Duarte had also built bike frames for drug capo Escobar himself, altho

Duarte says that at the time Escobar's business was little known.

Duarte, left, fitting politician Luis Carlos Galan. 

"He was my friend," Duarte admits. "But that was before he became a big capo. He was just starting out."

Escobar financed a bicycle racing team and a bicycle factory named Ossito, as well as football teams and other sports. His brother Roberto was a talented bike racer until he got involved in Pablo's business.

"He exported those frames," Duarte says of Escobar. "Nobody knew what they put inside."

When they traveled overseas to race, Escobar's cyclists doubled as cocaine smugglers. In the end, some were killed, others did prison time.

Jose Duarte examines a racing bike's wheel. 

Financed partly by drug money, the 1980s and '90s became an outstanding period for Colombian cycling. Today, with apparently much cleaner finances, Colombian cyclists are once again accomplishing great things in European road races. Leading the charge is the extraordinary Nairo Quintana, who finished second in this year's Tour de France, where he also won the best climber and best young rider jerseys. Quintana, like Duarte, came from a poor family and pulled himself up by his bootstraps (or bicycle pedal straps). Duarte believes that the best bicycle racers come from such humble backgrounds.

Sadly, cycling culture has become profoundly corrupted by doping since Duarte's era. Inevitably, suspicions surround every outstanding cyclist, including Quintana.

Duarte with bike racing buddies Hernan Herron
and Jorge Luque.

Back in his day, Duarte recalls, "we drank panela and oatmeal," he recalls. "The strongest thing we took was Alka Seltzer."

Meanwhile, bicycles have also evolved into hi-tech, computer-equipped machines built around frames made of aluminum and sophisticated alloys. Asian, factory-made aluminum bikes have captured the popular market. The racing frames Duarte makes by hand out of steel and chromium-molybdenum tubing are sought only by those who love classics.

"These cost a million pesos," he says of his frames. In comparison, fat-tubed aluminum frames "cost 300,000 pesos." He motions again at his own elegant creations. "Nobody wants these."

Perhaps that what's left Duarte feeling a bit resigned and tired.

Jose Duarte in his shop. 

During Duarte's first decade building frames, four competitors appeared in Bogotá - "but they didn't last," Duarte says. "Some went bankrupt, some died."

Today, others also make custom bicycle frames in Bogotá - mountain bikes, fixies, etc - but Duarte doesn't rate them highly.

"Those are common frames," he says. Except for himself, "Nobody makes fine frames."

Grudgingly, Duarte's family business has evolved with the times. His two sons who have pursued careers with bicycles repair aluminum and carbon fiber frames. As for himself, Duarte says he's about done with frame building.

"I'm tired," he says, standing in his workshop beside a row of steel Duarte frames. "I don't want to make any more frames."

But his decision is not absolute. He will still build frames for friends, altho that will depend on the outcome of the spinal surgery he has scheduled for the coming weeks to repair several lower back vertebrae damaged from decades leaning over bicycles.

Duarte doesn't make hand-made steel tube frames to be fashionable or retro. He does it because they're all he knows and because he likes their slim, simple elegance. I left Duarte's shop with terribly mixed feelings - impressed with the man's skill and dedication, but sad about the twilight of an era of artesanal framebuilding.

"People have lost their love for these artesanal frames," laments Claudia Reyes, Duarte's daughter in law, who manages the bike shop. "Working on them isn't easy."

Thanks to the great Colombian bike racing blog Cycling Inquisition, where I first read about Jose Duarte. 

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Nairo Quintana Es El Man!

Quintana, wearing the white 'Best Young Rider' jersey, celebrates today.

Nairo Quintana, a short, soft-spoken guy from a campesino family near Tunja, carried Colombia's flag high today by finishing a close second in the Mont Ventoux, one of the Tour de France's epic mountain stages.

Quintana battled out the final kilometers one-on-one with Briton Chris Froome, who looks like the tour's inevitable winner. With barely more than a kilometer to go, Froome surged and Quintana fell back, finishing 29 seconds behind. Many observers had given Quintana, a short, skinny natural climber, a strong chance to win the stage. But finishing ahead of all but one of the riders, including beating cycling legend Alberto Contador, isn't bad. At age 23, Quintana's got a great career ahead of him. And, according to The Guardian, Quintana's failings today were as much strategic as physical, giving him potential to grow both ways.

Nairo Quintana holds the trophy
high after winning the Vuelta del
Pais Vasco earlier this year.

Quintana grew up in a small town in the hills of Boyaca Department. His father had been left invalid by a traffic accident, so Quintana and his two siblings had to do most of the work on the family farm. When Quintana was 15, his parents could no longer afford to pay his bus ride to school. Buit the hardship became a stroke of good fortune when his parents bought him an old clunker bicycle. The ride to school was a steep downhill - and the return home a touch climb. And Quintana discovered that, despite his heavy old bike, he was able to keep up with the racing cyclists who trained on the climb. His parents saved up for a better bike, and Quintana was off.

Altho Quintana's not yet widely known in Colombia, he's already accomplished a lot: Last year he won or placed high in several important European races, and helped Movistar leader Valverde to second place in the Vuelta a España. This year he won the Vuelta al Pais Vasco, his greatest victory so far.

Today's second-place finish earned Quintana the tour's white jersey for best young rider. He's in 6th place overall in the tour, 6 minutes behind leader Froome, but only 90 seconds in back of the 3rd-place Contador. Who knows - Quintana might possibly even make it onto the winners' podium. Quintana's also been the leader for the Spanish team Movistar ever since its original leader Alejandro Valverde tanked and lost 9 minutes in a single stage. As Movistar's new leader, the rest of the team should sacrifice to push him ahead. However, the rest of the Movistar team finished today's stage almost 20 minutes behind Froome and Quintana. Do these guys have the caliber to compete in the mountains? In any case, three hard mountain stages remain, giving Quintana time to gain time on the leaders.

2013 had already become a banner year for Colombian cycling, thanks to Quintana's accomplishments and to 2nd and 5th place finishes by Colombians in the Giro de Italia.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

The Lance Armstrong Scandal and Drug Prohibition

Champ Lance: Did he beat the system
as well as the competition?

The mounting evidence that cycling superstar Lance Armstrong doped his way to his Tour de France victories certainly says a lot about Armstrong's character.

But it also contains a message about drug prohibition. After all, Armstrong likes to boast that he's the most drug tested athlete in history and that he's never failed a test. And he's certainly lived under lots of scrutiny from the media, competitors and cycling authorities.

Yet, if we believe the testimonies of Armstrong's ex-teammates Floyd Landis and Tyler Hamilton, as well as lots of other evidence, Armstrong doped routinely throughout his racing career, and so did many other top bike racers.

If authorities could not stop a man who lived in the spotlight from using prohibited substances, what's the chance that they can stop the whole population? Especially when performance-enhancing substances like EPO and steroids are much harder to find than heroin, cocaine and marijuana. 

U.S. Postal Service racing team,
featuring Lance Armstrong. A
laboratory creation?

Of course, the factors in favor and against prohibition in sports and the general population are very different. Drugs like cocaine and heroin are banned primarily because of their dangers to users' health and the way they affect people's behavior. But if performance-enhancing drugs dramatically affected health or behavior, they wouldn't work for athletes in the first place.

If police and judges simply decriminalize drugs, use will likely increase, and some users will enjoy themselves and others will wreck their health. But law enforcement costs and lots of other damaging impacts, such as the funding of criminal organizations, will decrease.

Will the best doper win?

On the other hand, if sports authorities just give up and allow unrestricted use of performance boosters, it could undermine the very nature of sports. Instead of competing by training and strategy, athletes will outdo each other by using more expensive and sophisticated laboratory techniques.

Of course, it's always possible that, against all evidence, Armstrong is clean, as he has always insisted, and that there's a huge conspiracy against him. But that wouldn't change much, since it's clear that the sport is packed full of cheaters.

Just imagine Real Madrid defeating Barcelona in a dramatic match, and the reporters rushing to interview, instead of the coaches and players, laboratory technicians, who analyze the substances each teams' players used.

'Well, Barcelona injected themselves with Substance A, which made them run faster. But Real Madrid popped B pills, which made them stronger. Next time, Barcelona had better take the pills - or both drugs."

Prohibitionism doesn't seem to work wherever it's tried. Do the arguments in its favor outweigh those against it?

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours