These are uneasy times for Colombian cycling. The tentative hope engendered by Egan Bernal’s comeback from career-threatening injury is tempered by the sullied reputations of Nairo Quintana and Miguel Angel López, both currently banished from cycling’s top table.
The ongoing absence of the Tour Colombia from the calendar has only heightened the sense that the country’s gilded age of the past decade could be about to give way to a fallow period, just as the halcyon era of Herrera and Parra in the 1980s was followed by a generation of riders who travelled to Europe largely condemned to serve rather than to lead.
Although rumours of Quintana’s imminent retirement have proved premature for now, his options are limited after he was disqualified from last year’s Tour de France following two positive tests for the painkiller tramadol. His situation, as El País pointed out this week, is “a symptom of the malaise afflicting Colombian cycling.”
Yet while the very different travails of Bernal, Quintana and López have dominated thoughts and headlines during the off-season, there remain some bright spots amid the gloom, including national champion Sergio Higuita, who quietly enjoyed a career-best year in his debut campaign with Bora-Hansgrohe in 2022.
Higuita turned professional in 2019, emerging as part of a new wave of Colombian riders born in the late 1990s that included Bernal, Daniel Martínez and Ivan Sosa. Speaking to Cyclingnews at the Vuelta a San Juan this week, Higuita appealed for calm, pointing out that he and his contemporaries in the Bernal generation still hoped to race on for a decade or more.
“We need to stay calm. I think people are anxious at the moment because they want Colombian cycling to keep achieving like it has done in recent years,” Higuita said. “But we have to look at countries like France, for example, where they haven’t won the Tour de France for many years. Meanwhile, Slovenia is a country that didn’t have a big history, but it’s very successful now.
“It means that the general level of world cycling is very high now, so you need to have a bit of patience. The most important thing in Colombia is that we keep on developing young cyclists. That’s the key.”
The problem, of course, is that relatively few of the Colombian riders to reach the WorldTour since Higuita have made anything like the same impact. The 25-year-old, like Quintana, raced under the tutelage of Luis Fernando Saldarriaga in Colombia before moving gradually towards the…
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