High country
Between the dropouts of a rusty steel bike hanging two metres up a tree, the pair of four-spoke carbon Spinergy wheels couldn’t appear stranger. Yet considering where we are, in a sense they’re appropriate.
The tree is outside Mauricio Ardila’s house, built atop what looks like a hillside mainly because everything, even the floor, is high in Colombia. We’re little more than an hour from Medellín, having wound our way up and out of the cleft in which the city nestles, but the contrast is stark. The horn-honking and ceaseless reggaeton playing out of bars and car windows is gone; in its place just the occasional howl of a dog. Where earlier we were surrounded by glowing high-rises, Mauricio’s house teeters alone on a 2,400m precipice in the pitch dark, the only light an occasional flash from a thunderstorm so far away it can’t be heard.
Like all riders in a country that loves cycling nearly as much as it loves football, this slight man, with a smile nearly as wide as he is tall, is a legend. At his peak Mauricio won the Tour of Britain, rode for Rabobank and nearly joined US Postal (he was rejected because his haematocrit levels were deemed too low), and during that time
