Sergio Higuita won the Tour of Catalonia, a victory that means a lot to the 24-year-old rider, who this year came to the Bora team and has become its biggest star.
Higuita got his first title in the World Tour, the highest category of cycling, and his third podium, after the second place in the Tour of California in 2019 and the third opposite of the Paris-Nice in 2020.
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At the same time, he became the ninth rider in the country to enter the select group of champions in the category, alongside Nairo Quintana, Egan Bernal, Esteban Chaves, Rigoberto Urán, Carlos Betancur, Santiago Botero, Daniel Martínez and Sergio Henao.
The cyclist was born on August 1, 1997 at the Las Américas Clinic in Medellín. When he was 2 years old, his parents gave him a toy motorcycle and he dragged it through the corridors of his house in the Castilla neighborhood, in the capital of Antioquia. Then the turn was for a trike, and later he had the first mountain bike.
When I was in elementary school at the San Judas Tadeo school, the physical education teacher extended an invitation to the students.
The idea was to participate in the cycling classic organized by the newspaper El Mundo. Sergio raised his hand. He fell like a glove, because he went out to ride a bicycle with his father.
He arrived home and told Marleny García, his mother, to sign him up. He was only 5 years old. She told him that the recommendation was that he go with Leonardo, his father, and the boy convinced him. Her mother couldn’t go because Laura, Sergio’s sister, had been born a few days before.
That was a theme every year, until the eldest in the family turned 14. Laura, his sister, followed in his footsteps. They were both going to take part in that test. She also fell in love with the sport. Today she practices karate, but she played basketball and tried skating.
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Sergio’s dream was to be a cyclist. He finished high school at the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz school. But it wasn’t easy. Little support he received in that cloister. Letters of permission from the club were worthless, much less personal requests from his parents to give him the opportunity to train, run and study at the same time, but he got over it all.
His career
He started in the Manzana Postobón team, went to Europe, after Education First loaned him to the Euskadi Foundation, in which it lasted only four months, as Rigoberto Urán’s squad required it.
The title in Catalonia is the seventh triumph of his sports career. The first was stage 18 of the 2019 Vuelta a España, then he won the route of the 2020 cycling nationals and won the fourth day of the Tour Colombia and managed to win the race.
The key fact is that this victory in Catalonia is Bora’s first on the World Tour this year. After Higuita, the Russian Vlasov stood out, who won a stage and was the champion of the Vuelta a la Comunidad Valenciana, a category 2 Pro competition.
“The victory is special, I had done podiums, but we had not won on the World Tour, but this is another level”.
Sergio Higuita joined Hernán Buenahora (1998), Álvaro Mejía (1993), Nairo Quintana (1916) and Miguel López (2019), who also climbed to the top of the podium of that competition.
“I had a bad night, I couldn’t sleep, I was very tired, but when you are a leader, the mind draws strength. Today I did the stage with all my heart because we were all weak”, he said.
And he added: “The victory is special, I had done podiums, but we had not won on the World Tour, but this is another level”.
The new champion’s greatest challenge is the Vuelta a España, but before that, from April 4, he will deal with a strong group in search of the Vuelta al País Vasco title.
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Lisandro Rengifo
Editor of THE TIME
@lisandroabel
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