A decade ago when the whippet-like Nairo Quintana burst onto the scene with stunning mountain escapes, Colombian cyclists looked poised to take over the world, but now the nation is in shock as three of its biggest stars flounder for very different reasons.
At 32, Quintana is still Colombia’s most popular “beetle” — as its cyclists are known collectively — but he cannot even find a team.
Egan Bernal, the only Colombian to win the Tour de France, is struggling to rediscover his former level after a near-fatal training crash, while Miguel Angel Lopez, nicknamed “Superman,” was kicked out of his team for his “probable connection” to a doping-tainted doctor.
Photo: Reuters
It has been a remarkable fall from grace for a nation that was sparkling on the UCI World Tour just a few years ago.
Quintana, a winner of both the Giro d’Italia and Vuelta a Espana and three-time podium finisher at the Tour, was widely expected to announce his retirement earlier this week when he called a news conference in Bogota.
Instead he expressed his determination to carry on, despite failing to find a team for this season after leaving Arkea-Samsic last year.
Quintana tested positive during last year’s Tour for a pain killer that while not on the World Anti-Doping Agency list of doping substances, has been banned by cycling authorities on medical grounds.
Tour organizers stripped him of his sixth-placed finish and Arkea-Samsic dropped him.
“An inexplicable wall has risen between me and my desire to race, and the possibility of doing so,” Quintana, approaching 33, said this week.
His name seems to be tarnished and his star appears to have waned.
“I’m an honest rider and I shall continue to look for a team,” he said defiantly.
Bernal looked set to be the greatest of the highly talented bunch of Colombian cyclists when in 2019 he became the youngest Tour de France winner in more than 100 years.
Two years later he also won the Giro at a canter, but his momentum was dramatically stopped a year ago when he crashed into the back of a bus at 62kph while out training.
He fractured 20 bones and suffered a punctured lung — doctors said that he had been lucky to survive, let alone escape paralysis.
After several operations he returned to racing seven months later, but was soon forced to take a break for another knee surgery.
“It’s been months and months of work,” Bernal said this week of his struggle back.
“We saw him at the end of last season and he was way off pace,” Colombian cycling specialist Sebastian Heredia said.
Bernal is due to ride the Tour for British team Ineos Grenadiers later this year, but the 26-year-old said it was too early to talk about that.
After his crash he said he had to “learn to brush my teeth, eat, these little steps that I had to take and that were very painful.”
Lopez was a leader with the Astana team until he was abruptly sacked last month due to alleged connections to a doctor being investigated in Spain over a doping network.
“They turned their backs on me, they kicked me out,” Lopez said of Astana this week.
He was briefly detained by Spanish police last year, but they subsequently denied he was being investigated.
Astana initially suspended him before later sacking the 28-year-old.
After winning the prestigious Tour de Suisse in 2016, Lopez went on to claim podium finishes at the Giro and Vuelta in 2018, also winning the young rider competition at both.
Just four months ago he finished fourth at the Vuelta, but now finds himself squeezed out of the World Tour and has signed for the second-tier Continental Tour Team Medellin in his homeland.
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