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.)


	The pause that rehydrates: Peña chugging root beer on a training ride (Antonin Kratochvil)

The Vuelta is also a hell of a tough race; most of its 14 stages involve climbing. The most notorious ascent is the 38-mile La Línea, which rises 6,500 feet, topping out around 11,000 feet. Starting in the 1970s, foreign riders began coming to Colombia to train and race at altitude, since much of the country is above 8,000 feet. To their surprise, the locals often smoked them.

"You always wondered, How would these guys do against the Europeans?" says 43-year-old Chris Carmichael, Lance Armstrong's coach, who raced in Colombia during the seventies and eighties as a member of the U.S. national team. "And then they went to Europe and kicked some ass."

Herrera's success set off a rush on Colombian talent. In 1991, 45 Colombian riders started the Vuelta a España, Spain's three-week nationwide stage race. But the Colombians didn't always find happiness in Europe. In Spain, team directors treated them like mere water carriers, or gregarios, for their Spanish stars. Between Herrera's heyday and 2000, when Santiago Botero rose to prominence, dozens of Colombians were lured to Europe, only to fizzle out after a year or two of abuse and mismanagement.

Now things are looking up again. In addition to Peña and Botero, a half-dozen new Colombian stars—among them Félix Cárdenas, 31, who has won the climber's jersey in the Vuelta a España and took a mountain stage in the 2001 Tour de France—are knocking on the door of European success. Meanwhile, Peña and his friend Raúl Mesa, director of the Colombia-based Orbitel team, are pursuing a difficult but intriguing dream: to gather the country's best riders into a new all-star squad, one that they hope will resurrect the glory days of Café de Colombia. (Colombia/Selle Italia, the Colombian-Italian descendant of that team, has fallen to the second division of world cycling rankings and is not eligible for the Tour.)

With Peña, Botero, and seven committed support riders, such a team would have enough horsepower to contend for overall wins in races like the Giro d'Italia and possibly the Tour de France. While most of their compatriots have been pure climbers, Peña and Botero possess the speed to place well in time trials, which are crucial to success in major stage races. Botero has already finished fourth overall in the Tour, in 2002, and was favored for a podium spot the next year before a stomach virus felled him.

For Peña, the idea of a resurrected national team represents a chance to show the world what he can really do—and to inspire a new generation of Colombian riders. "That's my dream," he says. "To go to Europe with a Colombian team."

But for the time being, Peña's job is to ride himself into the ground to help Lance win his sixth Tour, while his good friend Botero, riding for Germany's T-Mobile team, will do the same for Lance's main rival, one-time winner and perennial runner-up Jan Ullrich. At 30 and 31, respectively, Peña and Botero are no longer young; both men are running out of time to unshackle themselves and go for it.

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