While Chris Froome and his Sky team won yet another Tour de France on Sunday, for many cycling fans the more compelling story was that of Rigoberto Urán and his Cannondale-Drapac team. The Colombian finished second overall, just 54 seconds behind Froome after three weeks of intense racing, giving what Froome called his "closest and most hard-fought battle" in the world's biggest bike race.
Cannondale-Drapac has among the smallest budgets in the WorldTour, a third of Sky's, and is known as a scrappy squad that has resorted to a "Moneyball" strategy to compete against deep-pocketed juggernauts, with Urán its lone million-dollar rider. Jonathan Vaughters, the team's general manager, rolled the dice with Urán at the Tour, and it paid off big time, with the 30-year-old winning a key mountain stage and finishing on the second step in Paris, in a coup for the Argyle Armada.
While American fans who watch only the Tour may have seen Urán as a surprise, he's long been building a standout résumé, having raced in Europe for over a decade. Wildly popular at home and with die-hard cycling fans worldwide, he's a colorful character who loves to laugh and joke. But "Rigo" is also respected as a dedicated professional, and in Colombia he personifies a country that's trying to move forward from its war-torn past.
Following are some of the pivotal moments in Urán's life and career to date. Thanks to Klaus Bellon, a cycling journalist who reports on Colombian cycling at Alps & Andes, who shared his insights with Business Insider.
Urán was born on January 26, 1987, in Urrao, Colombia.
Urán told Bellon in an interview that he had a fairly common childhood, going to school and playing a lot of different sports. His mother was a homemaker and his dad sold lottery tickets. Eventually Urán's father got him into cycling, and the two would go on long rides in the countryside. They wore street clothes because they could not afford cycling shorts and jerseys.
Urrao is in northwest Colombia, in the department of Antioquia.
Urrao has a violent past, with fighting between the military and paramilitary and guerrilla groups. As Bellon has pointed out, Urán's hometown was essentially at the center of a decadelong civil war in Colombia, a period known as "La Violencia."
Urán's family experienced the violence firsthand.
"Rigoberto's dad was — as so many people in that sort of socioeconomic scale in Colombia were, especially in the countryside — very keen on cycling," Bellon told Business Insider. "One day his dad was out on a training ride, and it was also around that time he had gotten Rigoberto into cycling. Rigoberto had just done his first race a few months earlier, a time trial, and they simply told him, 'Get to the finish line as fast as you can.' Of course he won ...
"So his dad was out on a training ride, on a Saturday or a Sunday, and he was captured. In Colombia, the military would have these checkpoints where they'd stop you and check your car. And the guerrillas would set up fake checkpoints, as though they were the military. His dad, as I understand, was kidnapped along with other people. What the guerrillas wanted to do was apparently move some cattle and they used the people they captured to move it, and then they just assassinated them afterwards. Rigoberto was left without a father at 14 years old."
The club Urán had just joined took him under its wing.
Urrao has long had a strong cycling culture, Bellon said, "and there are local business owners who sponsor kids. There's a guy who runs the little supermarket. Every day at 6 in the morning his house is open for any cyclists — kids — who want to have breakfast for free. He will feed them because otherwise they will never be fed."
See the rest of the story at Business Insider