Tour Colombia: against a cycling of automatons, the instinct of Richard Carapaz

The Sabana Park hotel lobby, on the outskirts of Bogotá, is a non-stop place for runners, their families, federations, the VIPS of the Tour Colombia, music, voices, so Richard Carapaz asks for a quiet place to talk. A room on the mezzanine seems like the ideal place until it proves impractical when a dozen people armed with technical equipment invade it and in five minutes turn it into a television set, spotlights, latest generation cameras and even travel rails. high tech “They are going to interview Rigo,” reports a technician. “He is going to record an interview in which he announces his farewell to cycling when the season ends.”

The last refuge they offer Carapaz is the jacuzzi room on the seventh floor. Absolute silence. Only the voice of Carapaz, 30 years old, the best Latin American cyclist, Olympic champion in Tokyo, sounds out, who laments for a splendor that is fading, a darkness that the retirement at the age of 37 of his partner Rigo Urán, a professional for 18 years, increases.

“Latin American cycling is going down. There are fewer and fewer of us who are in the WorldTour. Cycling has changed a lot and the level has risen a lot. In the last five, six years, the evolution he has had has been impressive,” says the Ecuadorian cyclist, who arrived in Spain, at Lizarte, at the age of 22, and four years later he already won the Giro d'Italia. “For us it is increasingly difficult to live up to it. “I don't see any young man who can make the leap to Europe.” And the fans hold on to what they have had. He watches the life of Rigo, the Urrao phenomenon, on television, and at the end of the last stage he adores Nairo Quintana, who, according to his director, Pablo Lastras, has been prevented from being where he wanted by a flu and a slight fever. Even so, a fan in the Andina beer parking lot, in Sopó, where he started the stage, calls out to him and asks him: “Nairo, I love you! A little look!”

Jhonatan Restrepo (from Polti de Contador, with the Colombian team in the Tour) won the sprint against the escapees (second Carapaz) before the National Museum of Colombia, in Bogotá, in the last stage of a Tour Colombia that, for the first time In its four years of history it crowns a cyclist from a continental team (the third world division). Rodrigo Contreras (Nu), from Villapinzón, Cundinamarca, joins his name to the WorldTour runners who won the first three editions, Egan Bernal, Superman López and Sergio Andrés Higuita. Paradoxically, his victory, achieved by tenaciously resisting the attacks of Olympic champion Richard Carapaz, is more than a reason to rejoice, to congratulate himself on the strength of Colombian cycling, but rather a reason to worry about the lack of future of his quarry. Contreras, 29, came to Europe in Quick Step and Astana, and, upon returning to Colombia, dominates the debates.

The wise men of cycling speak of the technological and cultural leap that cycling has made in the last five years, and in Colombia they speak of the gap that is widening between their world and the other, of how they have remained in ancient times. “We are at least 10 years late,” analyzes Luis Fernando Saldarriaga, the father of the process that brought the great generation of Nairo and Chaves to Europe. “We still continue with the old systems, including illicit shortcuts to close the gap that has done so much damage to us.” The story of Diego Pescador, 19 years old, the great talent who arrives, and wants to reach Europe as soon as possible, is a real example of Saldarriaga's words. “Honestly, I think we still have a lot left to do here,” says the young man from Quimbaya, who, curiously, is trained by El Pácora. “He taught me a lot. He has already been on a WorldTour team, and with affection he tells me, 'boy, you have to take advantage of the opportunities 100%', and he gives me the example of him that suddenly he did not take advantage of that opportunity, and he is always talking to me, motivating me and paying attention to every training detail. He tells me that in Europe, since youth they are very professional. They already train guided by lactate and just last year I started training with a power meter, with watts. They take a lot from us. We should race more in Europe from the lower categories. Know what it is like to walk on narrow paths. European cycling is very technical cycling. They take you down some super steep descents, with very tight curves. Let's say that the issue of location there will always kill Colombians a little. Here we are going on highways… These are things about improving training, nutrition, biomechanics… and I hope it will be soon.”

Everything is as before, or worse, because even the great weapon of the Andean cyclists, being natives of the heights, of moors above 2,500 meters, is no longer worth anything. “The work we do at altitude, the concentrations that all the teams do, the new ways of training there due to the rapid application of new knowledge has changed everything,” says Carapaz, a native of Carchi, an Ecuadorian province at 2,900 meters. “Even though I live at altitude, I have noticed the difference a lot.”

The Ecuadorian who raced for Movistar and Ineos before settling at EF looks back and when he thinks about 2019, the year he won the Giro with Movistar, he thinks that a century has passed, so much has changed since then. . Like the great ancient civilizations that became extinct precisely at the moment in which they reached their peak, the Movistar of that Giro vanished into nothing. Four of its members –Amador, Carapaz, Landa, Sütterlin—, and also Nairo Quintana, left the team in the winter, which was left behind in the big leagues. One way of cycling became obsolete. In 2020, the pandemic marked the turn of the century in cycling as well. “After the pandemic, everything changed a lot. Hygiene protocols demonstrated that they were also valid for increasing watts and performance. The detergents for the clothes, not washing them with the shoes, the materials, the fabrics, the helmets, the glasses, the bike itself,” Carapaz explains. “And nutrition. In the Alto del Vino stage I have eaten 120 or 140 grams of carbohydrates per hour. Five years ago, I don't know, it was a bar, a sachet [gel] and that's it. “They are new methods that have been implemented and that give results.”

Carapaz triumphed in the old culture of instinct and class, and training by sensations, and resists among the best in the era of the sanctification of technology, although he adds the generational gap to the technological gap. In the Giro of '19, in the old times, he beat Roglic and Nibali, but in '20, Roglic, younger cyclically, a son of the new times, although not in age, beat him in the Vuelta. In '21, he was third in the Tour after the Pogacar cyclone, but very close to Vingegaard, but in '22 he was only second in the Giro after Hind Ley and before Landa, another of those from the old days. “When I won the Giro it was a dream come true. I could do it I did it,” he says. “But, obviously, I am a champion and I always dream of more, you always want more. After the Giro, my goal has always been the Tour. I have seen myself as a Tour man. I made third place in my second participation. The third was last year, and I fell the first day. I didn't have much luck. It's not like I've been there for 10 years and haven't even made it into the top 10. I have many options and that makes me dream much more.”

Carapaz's dream is a
ccompanied by knowledge, by the awareness that each year that passes the world will be different, its inhabitants, another species, and he, a dinosaur. “There has been a huge change globally. And the mentality of the cyclists who arrive is different. Young people grow up with this. You have to take care of your food, do your workouts at so many watts, your pulse, your heart rate… And when they join a team they always try to look for that, and no longer the traditional thing. You went and trained by sensation, and I feel good and I do six hours and that's it. Cycling, I don't know if the word fits, but yes, cycling has become robotic, in the sense that everything is automated,” he says. “I have noticed it, but, in the end, you have to adapt if you want to win, because if not, you are in the era…”

And, perhaps for this reason, because he knows the value of the old and because he also feels that the new cycling robs part of the poetry of his sport, he does not surrender to the god of technology, nor to the cyclist considered as an employee of a company. called a team, when, in its time, the only mission of the team was to guarantee bed, food, bicycles and massages to the runner. “Now, when you join a team that is super professional, they normally give you your roles. And, well, here, at the EF, that happens. Here you come with a role and your role, well, it's this, this, this and this and you have to fulfill it. It's like an office job. Each runner assumes a role and has to fulfill it and if not, then out,” he reflects. “Almost everything, as I say, has been robotized and before a climb in a race, for example, the director tells you, 'this climb takes so many minutes and I know you can do it at so many watts,' and you can see where you can spend and you can get there.”

But Carapaz knows something else, Carapaz knows that his wisdom as a runner, the intelligence that allowed him to win the Giro, leaving Roglic and Nibali stunned on the climb to Monte Bianco in Aosta, or on a slope on the outskirts of Rome, more strong according to the wise men of watts, it is a force that is not measured by the potentiometer, which only it can control. “Watts work, I have seen them work, but instinct is what breaks everything,” he says. “Knowing how to read the race when you press 200 times, well, having that instinct to say, well, it's time. I think that hasn't changed yet. In that sense, cycling has not changed much. The moments of choosing, of deciding, are in the corridor, not in their numbers.”

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