Colombia Es Pasión! How a New Generation of Cyclists Changed a Nation - Matt Rendell

Written by Matt Rendell
Read by Matt Rendell
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 128 Kbps
Unabridged

Length: 10 hrs and 55 mins
Release date: 03-19-20
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By winning the 2019 Tour de France, Egan Bernal became the race’s youngest champion in 110 years and the first from the South American nation of Colombia. His victory brought decades of national yearning to fruition and capped the achievements of a golden generation of Colombian cyclists.

For, in the years before Egan’s victory, Nairo Quintana won the Tours of Italy and Spain, even coming within 72 seconds of winning the Tour. Rigoberto Urán, Esteban Chaves, Miguel Ángel López and Fernando Gaviria took stage wins, donned leaders’ jerseys and made final podiums at cycling’s greatest events. They, and other world-class Colombian talents, made their nation a cycling superpower.

Colombia has long been the only developing nation not just competing but contending at cycling’s highest level. Yet its cycling sons are not the products of a rigorous sports system that spots them in childhood and nurtures them through the ranks to the pinnacle of globalised sport. They come from harder backgrounds that surprise, shock—even, at times, enchant.

And their attainments are not just sporting. The visibility they have secured their homeland has helped open it to international tourism and trade. After decades of violence, corruption and civil unrest, a new Colombia, revitalised by economic regeneration, a national peace process and the successes of its cyclists, has achieved normalisation in the eyes of the international community.

So rapid has this national transformation been that it has taken place within the lifetimes of these remarkable young sportsmen. Colombia Es Pasión! How a New Generation of Cyclists Changed a Nation explores the lives and dreams of each of Colombia’s leading cyclists. Theirs are inspiring stories of overcoming poverty and violence, sickness and corruption—of the emergence of the indigenous to global sporting glory. It portrays the unique sporting microcosm that lies behind Colombia’s world-beating riders and how their sporting achievements have spurred a nation to peace, reform and prosperity.