Final Thoughts on The Tour of Colombia

The Tour of Colombia, for all of its fantastic crowds, passions and spectacular performances, was, in fact, a badly designed race. The blame for this falls not on the organizers, but rather on the WorldTour system and the exigencies that come with their participations outside of Europe’s borders. Interestingly enough, it was a Colombian UCI commissaire who explained the inside skinny to me. 

It was 2012 just after the finish of the first Bucks County Classic UCI road race, one I’d cobbled together after the somewhat sudden pullout of Univest from their (remarkable) 14-year sponsorship run of the Univest Grand Prix. I was with the commissaire, bubbling on the way I do when enthusiastic because the race circuit, with its twin covered bridges, twisting, hilly, gritty roads and screaming descents had created terrifically brutal racing. I was going on about how, maybe, just maybe, since the Quebec WorldTour races were held the previous weekend that somehow we could join forces and create….”That will never happen,” interrupted the commissaire, “ The WorldTour will never allow their teams on a circuit like this one. The UCI wants ‘The Show’ on wide roads so that all of the motorcycles and race caravan spread out creating a massive spectacle while keeping their WorldTour teams protected from as few racecourse complications as possible. There’s enough risk in Europe: they don’t want any more for their stars outside of it.” If one in fact examines the WorldTour style races throughout the non-European world, you will see that what he said holds true.

There’s a paucity of large roads in South America and the Tour of Colombia, in order to satisfy the UCI WorldTour demands, for the most part, simply went up and down Highway 55, with flourishes at the end to create various finish line scenarios. What’s more, in the general practice of weighting these races in favor of the WorldTour teams, the Colombian race, inexplicably for a short stage race, began with a Team Time Trial, an event that overly rewards the rich teams with the collective depth that the smaller ones cannot even begin to match. I’ve got to wonder about this TTT and why it came about, because the race originally announced an individual prologue, something that would have opened up the race considerably. Instead, with the team event, the race was basically decided on the first day and, with the large roads favoring the powerful steamrolling tactics of the WorldTour teams, we basically witnessed a week-long procession that ended in Bogáta with only a slight reshuffling of the first day's TTT results.

I worry that the Colombians are going to follow the same race design policies that have been so destructive to our USA racing circuit: that of creating races that completely cater to WorldTour demands and in doing so, marginalize their domestics teams and by extension, races.

The Tour of Colombia, only in its third year, is a different race than the two-week Vuelta a Colombia which is celebrating its 70th anniversary (It’s really confusing as Vuelta a España is Tour of Spain in English and Vuelta a Colombia always comes up on Google as the Tour of Colombia – took me a while to figure it all out). 

Their two-week Vuelta, which is a UCI 2.2 race (a .2 designation, which my races were, means pro-am) and can’t afford or doesn’t have the political juice to close the major highways, is one of the hardest races in the world, going deep into rural Colombia on tiny mountain roads through equally tiny pueblos, from crushing sea-level humidity way up to cold, foggy altitude sometimes all in a single day. It’s the true, uniquely Colombia racing that has formed the character of their athletes. If you really love adventure, that’s the one to follow, I guarantee you. Why not throw at least one stage like that into their “Tour’, forcing the WorldTour teams to adapt to Colombia instead of the other way around? Give the teams that I grew to admire as Super Giros and Team Medallìn the advantage or at least more of an equal field of play for one day? 

For all of that, the Colombians are doing so much that, to my mind, is right. So far they seem to be avoiding the trap of forcing their Tour into the ever-higher UCI levels that we did in the states. 
(Technical note: There are several UCI race designations, each determining the team makeup of the races. Their Tour is the third level, allowing WorldTour teams, but keeping their top domestic teams in the mix). 

Our mania for the highest UCI race rankings never made any sense to me, since it ended up pushing so many U.S. teams out of business because they couldn’t come up with the ever-increasing funding needs to compete at those stratospheric levels. Our decisions had more to do with ego and climbing up the UCI food chain rather than any rational acceptance of the true state of racing in the United States. What’s more, our major races only had a paltry 16 team spots unlike the Colombians, who’ve opened their race up to 27 teams, allowing so many more of their athletes the chance to rub shoulders, literally, with the Julian Alaphilippe’s of the world. What was the point of 16 teams, of all that massive, unsustainable money going to a tiny, 120-man peloton? Why did Frankie Andreu, who has given his life to cycling, have to lose his team because the Tour of California couldn’t figure out a way to give him a spot? 17 teams would have killed them? The Tour of Utah, which to my mind should be one of the great UCI 2.2 races of the world instead of the bridesmaid that it is, with its UCI ProRace (second category but who can keep track of these continuous UCI changes) classification, is obliged to have 11 UCI Word/ProTeam teams (out of 16..) this year, then 12 the next. That represents an enormous amount of money given that on top of all travel and hosting expenses, WorldTour teams demand somewhere between $50,000 and $100,000 start money. Now that the Europeans have realized that our cycling is basically dead and there’s no commercial interest for them here, the Tour of Utah faces an enormous team recruitment challenge. Why play that game? The Colombians are smart to stick to their UCI 2.1 level and keeping things under control.

As well, they actually follow UCI rules, something we didn’t do. It is expressly forbidden to charge entry fees for UCI races, and UCI stage race organizers are required to pay for food and lodging for teams and their support staff. While our major races took great care of the WorldTour teams, our domestic teams, with the full knowledge of USA Cycling, had to in fact pay fees to the organizers, ranging, according to my research, from $30,000 into the six-figures. That’s not how you develop cycling. I never charged fees for the various iterations of my UCI road race, and always provided a team dinner and host housing. Robin Morton, with the great Philadelphia race, never charged fees and did all sorts of amazing things to help out our teams – same with the Winston-Salem race.

Colombia is now the world’s cycling talent factory and, as we all know in the entertainment and sports business, talent commands. They should not be afraid to flex their considerable muscle and form races according to their own domestic needs and not solely those of the UCI WorldTour program. The United States has gifted them with the example of what not to do with cycling. I hope they heed the lesson.