Victor Hugo Pena: 2004 Tour de France

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Outside Magazine, July 2004

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2004 Tour de France: The Ultimate Guide
Mountain Grown (cont.)


	Speedy Gregarios: Colombian racers on the Bucaramanga velodrome (Antonin Kratochvil)

IN A WEIRD WAY, it was a compliment that the gunmen chose Peña: It proved he'd arrived. Three years earlier, Colombia's best-known cycling hero, 38-year-old Luis Herrera, had been kidnapped from his home, south of Bogotá, the country's capital. But he was released within 24 hours, as if the kidnappers realized they'd made a mistake in targeting such an icon.

In 1984, Herrera was a member of the first Colombian amateur team to race in the Tour. Then a skinny 23-year-old, he stunned the cycling world by spanking two of France's best riders, Tour winners Bernard Hinault and Laurent Fignon, on the grim switchbacks of L'Alpe d'Huez, to win the race's toughest mountain stage. The following year, riding for the brand-new Café de Colombia professional team, Herrera won the Tour's prestigious polka-dot jersey, awarded to the best climber in the race.

To this day, Colombia remains the only developing nation to produce world-class cyclists, from Herrera and his teammate Fabio Parra, who finished third in the 1988 Tour, to current stars like Peña and Santiago Botero, of Medellín, who won the climber's jersey in the 2000 Tour and claimed the world time-trial championship in Belgium in 2002.

One reason for Colombia's success is topography: The vast equatorial nation is divided by three ranges of steep Andean mountains, with peaks topping out at almost 19,000 feet. To get anywhere, you have to climb, and for decades Colombia has produced riders with the endurance and power to fly uphill.

Another has to do with the poverty brought on by Colombia's long-running civil war, which began as a political disagreement in the late 1940s but has escalated into what Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez has called a "biblical holocaust" of violence that has claimed well over 300,000 lives. Only about half the country is under government control; the rest belongs to a collection of leftist guerrilla groups, the largest of which is the 18,000-strong Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, better known as FARC.

Colombia is also beset by right-wing paramilitary organizations that battle the guerrillas and also engage in "social cleansing"—death-squad murders of drug addicts, prostitutes, and homosexuals. Both sides use kidnapping and cocaine as sources of funds, while the government has sopped up more than $2.5 billion in U.S. aid since 2000 to fight rebel groups on both sides. Last year, the war claimed between 3,000 and 4,000 casualties.

It doesn't help that Colombia's annual per capita income is only $1,950 and that only one urban household in 12 owns a car. But that fact explains why nearly all of the country's great riders, including Peña, have come from working-class families that use bikes as basic transportation.

The upshot for bike racing is that tough times produce tough people. "Their lives are so hard that I think they appreciate the physical and mental suffering the racers go through," says retired American rider Andy Hampsten, 42, who raced in Colombia in the mid-1980s and again in 1995.

Still, there are plenty of poor, mountainous countries where cycling hasn't seized the public imagination. So why Colombia? Because it has a great bike race all its own: the Vuelta a Colombia, a grueling two-week stage event that's been run every year since 1951. Like the Tour de France, the Vuelta got its start with help from a national newspaper (El Tiempo) that was looking to boost circulation. Thanks to heavy press coverage of the race, cycling grew in popularity throughout the 1950s, with help from visiting European riders like the legendary Italian Fausto Coppi, who'd won both the Tour de France and the Giro d'Italia in 1949 and 1952. In 1958, Coppi got schooled by the locals on epic high-altitude climbs like Medellín's 19-mile Alto de Minas.

Over its 53-year life span, the Vuelta has survived coups and economic chaos, and its very existence has helped reassure a jittery nation. "If the Vuelta is going on, then Colombians know all is well with their world," says British journalist Matt Rendell, 38, author of Kings of the Mountains, a 2002 history of Colombian cycling. "The Vuelta means that roads, electricity, food, hotels, and all the infrastructure you need to run a national race are functioning properly."

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