A crash course in dodging rebels and fate

According to the farmers who scrape together a living on the stark slopes of the Andes, there’s one thing they know how to do better than anybody else: suffer.

That’s why they make good cyclists.

Yeferson Abacuc Vargas suffered this spring when he crashed during a five-day trial known as the Vuelta de Boyaca. A small-framed young man with marbled scars, he threw his crumpled bike into the brush in a fit of rage, then waited eight minutes for a friend to arrive with a replacement.

When he realized his cleats didn’t fit the new pedals he kicked them off and finished the stage barefoot. By the fifth day, he was exhausted and weakened by a cold. He fell to the back of the pack.

“But I finished,” he said. Of 160 riders who entered the Vuelta, less than a third could say the same.

Slight, fibrous and flat broke, Vargas belongs to a crop of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of young, rawboned Colombian men who dream of pedaling their way out of poverty, one mountain at a time. Wearing cracked helmets and threadbare jerseys, riding on spent brake pads and patched tires, they rise at dawn almost every day to slug it out on the jagged slopes of the Andes. Like Kenyan marathon runners, they know only one painful path forward. It’s a journey that America’s premier cyclist, Lance Armstrong, gamely refers to as “the suffer-fest.”

“I want to warrior my way through,” said Vargas, who was a farmer. He repeated his racing mantra: “I don’t feel any pain. I don’t feel any pain.”

If Colombia’s up-and-coming cyclists have anything in their favor, it’s that they have inherited one of the world’s most inhospitable mountain ranges as their personal training ground -- the imposing Andean cordilleras that bolt through Colombia like a backbone.

Vargas and his friends spend hours on these slopes almost every day, slobbering, sparring and sucking in the thin air. Used to training at 8,000 feet or higher, Vargas doesn’t trust the oxygen-rich air at sea level. It makes him feel like he’s choking.

On a typical morning last week, he shivered in front of a mechanic’s shop on the outskirts of Tunja -- a sprawl of hardscrabble barrios and grimy salsa clubs where the region’s young riders coast in small groups before hitting the slopes.

Wilmar Ruano arrived, a diminutive farmer’s son who seemed dwarfed by his bike, and Emerson Bernal, a lanky youth in wool mittens with super-sized thighs.

Their breath hung in chilly puffs as they shouted to passing riders. They exchanged barbs and routes, and then they started up the mountain.

Within half an hour, they were high above Tunja’s drizzly streets on a narrow pass of blind bends. They stood up on their pedals and kept climbing. Their destiny was a cluster of farms on the edge of the high-altitude paramo -- a bleak tundra of crusty lichens and spongy peat soils.

Off the bike, Vargas is an awkward teen with downcast eyes. He speaks in short sentences and uses lots of “sirs” and “misses.”

On the bike, he’s audacious and angry. At 19, he’s already raised eyebrows on the amateur circuit for daring assaults on older riders. But he’s impatient and sometimes goes out too soon. He also likes to tuck into the draft of trucks barreling along the mountain highways and ride their bumpers.

“I play with the bike,” he said, picking at an iodine-tinted scab that ran from his knee to his ankle.

Vargas’ mother has seen him race only once, but what she witnessed -- a horde of dauntless riders charging around slick roads, packed together so tightly that their handlebars knocked -- was enough to make her ill.

“She had a headache, and she couldn’t speak,” Vargas recalled. “It was a,” he paused and searched for the right phrase, “a nervous attack.”

Just about everyone else in Colombia is part of a captive audience. Ever since a small group of aficionados mapped the nation’s first cycling tour on dirt roads in 1951, the sport’s teeth-gritting brand of courage has held Colombia’s imagination -- a symbol of struggle and success in a country plagued by war, poverty and drug violence.

In one emblematic moment, Colombia’s working-class hero Luis “Lucho” Herrera won a mountain stage of the 1985 Tour de France after crashing and opening a deep gash on his forehead. He got back on the bike and kept charging, even as a medic tried to stem the bleeding from a car speeding alongside him. Ask any Colombian, and he or she will describe Herrera lurching defiantly across the finish line with streams of blood running into his eyes.

“That was the perfect image of Colombian cycling,” said Juan Pablo Machado, a sportswriter for the prominent El Tiempo newspaper. “We came, we suffered, we won.”

More recently, in 2002, Santiago Botero became the first Colombian to clinch gold at the World Championship Time Trial. An additional 40 Colombians are training on professional teams abroad, including Daniel Rincon and Victor Hugo Pena, who worked out with Armstrong’s elite United States Postal Service team as Armstrong prepared to chase after his sixth consecutive Tour de France victory.

Nonetheless, a brutal, 40-year civil conflict has taken its toll. With huge swaths of countryside under rebel and paramilitary control, international cyclists decided long ago to give the Colombian Tour a pass. Botero, a native of the war-torn Antioquia province, maps his training routes to avoid rebel roadblocks, and two retired cyclists have been targeted in extortive kidnappings.

Still climbing, Vargas and his friends chugged past vegetable stalls and brickyards. Farmers in heavy wool ponchos stared from the roadside, amused by their elegant bikes and their smooth, hairless skin. (Cyclists shave their legs to make it easier to clean out the gravel after a crash.)

Every bend in the road brought to view another ascent under a brooding sky and another spectacular vista of patchwork farms and purple-hued ridges. But the three didn’t look up. They looked down, settling into a quiet, trance-like rhythm, a familiar monotony of pain.

“Suffering” is the password into Colombia’s cycling lexicon. During one recent interview, Machado remembered asking Botero, the time trial champion, how his training was going.

“I’m not suffering,” Botero complained.

The three friends passed a wooden cross, where a road accident had claimed a victim on a sharp turn, and a statue of the Virgin Mary with big, round headlights at her feet. In a kind of roadside offering, Colombian truck drivers leave headlights for the Virgin as a security policy against car accidents on treacherous mountain passes.

The trio topped the mountain over Tunja and shot down the other side, hunched like beetles over their bikes. Within a few minutes they’d run out of paved road, so they turned onto a dirt track and began climbing again.

“It would be great to have a coach,” said Bernal, Vargas’ lanky friend who laid railroad stays for a year to save up for his first bike. “We train the way we imagine we’re supposed to.”

The cyclists are not just lacking a coach. They have no money, no technical support, no formal sponsorship, and at this moment, Vargas has no rear derailleur. He destroyed it when he crashed on the paramo, so he’s riding on a borrowed one. Like their friends, the three work odd jobs when they can find them, putting every spare cent toward bike chains and spokes.

The three friends climbed for 40 more minutes until the road broke into a paved stretch again and frailejon shrubs, with their leaves the texture of damp rabbit ears, announced the beginning of the paramo. A woman milked a cow in a nearby field.

Vargas comes at least once a month to this steep slope for altitude training. At roughly 12,000 feet, it offers thin air, smooth pavement, and the only traffic is the occasional donkey laden with rice and potatoes. The three coasted back to the bottom of the hill, turned to face the grade and broke into a mad sprint.

They battled to the top over and over again, the breath gushing out of them, past a boy pushing a rusty bike and a farmer on a startled horse. After five assaults, they dismounted with shaky legs and gasped for air.

“I feel fat,” Vargas said, slapping his flat stomach.

Realizing they were just 12 miles from Ruano’s farm, and a hot meal, they mounted again and turned up yet another dirt track, dust sticking in their nostrils. They climbed to a ridge over a sweeping valley, and then bumped down the other side to the tiny hamlet of San Pedro de Igueque: a few houses, a church, a bread shop. Schoolchildren ran alongside the bikes, trying to touch them.

The cyclists stopped for a molasses soda, and an old man in a stained felt hat and tattered wool poncho ambled toward them -- Ruano’s grandfather, Primitivo. They shook hands.

Asked what he thought of the young men’s alien appearance and their odd cycling habit, the old man shrugged. “Everyone follows their destiny,” he said.

Ruano began showing promise as a cyclist when he was 15 and won a prize at every county fair race he entered: a cooking pan, a canister for milking cows, three beers. Then one day, his father, Oscar, drove his vegetable truck to Tunja and rented a bare brick room for the boy. He registered his son in a local sports club.

With Ruano’s mother cooking over a wood-burning stove in the family’s dark kitchen, the three friends tucked into a bowl of potatoes and pork. Vargas still was fighting the cold he picked up in the Boyaca race on the paramo, and given his severe shortage of body fat, he was shivering again. The mayor of Tunja had just rejected his plea for a new derailleur and, like the others, he confessed that he also thought sometimes about packing it in.

The next morning, he would always find himself back on the bike.