Supermán López: rise and fall of the Colombian cyclist, sanctioned for doping by the UCI

Miguel Ángel López Moreno was born on February 4, 1994 in Pesca, a Boyacá municipality 25 km from Sogamoso. He is one of the seven children of Santiago López and Marlene Romero.

He rode a bicycle from a very young age, to transport himself to the Indalecio Vásquez school, where he finished high school. He also helped his parents, who grew potatoes, with the work in the fields. He started a systems course at the Sena, but his love for cycling got the better of him.

López’s first competitions were in mountain biking and at the age of 17 he made the jump to the roads, after meeting Rafael Acevedo, one of Lucho Herrera’s golden gregarious and later, one of the most recognized technicians in the country.

Acevedo took him to live in a country house he had in Sogamoso. His sister Monica went with him to accompany him and keep the house up to date. He joined the Lotería de Boyacá team.

When he was preparing to run the 2011 Vuelta del Porvenir, two thieves intimidated him with a knife and demanded that he hand over the bicycle to them. López defended himself, resisted and confronted one of the criminals. The other wounded him in the leg, without serious consequences. Because of that fact, his nickname, Superman, was born.

He was on the verge of retiring from cycling in 2013, due to an injury to the ligaments in his right leg. The doctor Gustavo Castro treated him with therapies and, without needing to go to the operating room, López was ready to continue competing.

With the Kazakh squad he won the Tour of Switzerland and Milan-Turin in 2016. The following year he was the best young person in the Tour of Spain, in which he finished eighth and won two stages. And his best year was 2018, when he finished on the podium at the Giro d’Italia and the Vuelta. Then, in 2019, he won the Tour Colombia and the Vuelta a Catalunya and in 2020 he fought for the podium of the Tour de France, in which he won a stage, but did not finish well and finished sixth.

In 2021 he signed with Movistar, with whom he won the Vuelta a Andalucía, but the end of his relationship with this team was stormy: when he was fighting to get on the podium, he ended up getting off the bike in the penultimate stage, annoying, according to him, for not having collaboration from his colleagues.

He returned to Astana in 2022. He participated in the Giro d’Italia, from which he ended up abruptly retiring. In that race, according to the UCI, he tested positive for which he was now punished: the injury would have been caused by the use of menotropin. His last big one was the Vuelta a España in 2022, in which he finished fourth.

After a conflict with Astana, which separated him from his squad, López returned to the country and signed with Team Medellín, with whom he swept the Vuelta a Colombia, with nine stages won. But he had to face a series of surprise doping controls, even when he was on vacation, which generated the cyclist’s anger.

Now, the UCI sanction, which was provisional, is final and López is preparing to appeal.

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