The early season UCI calendar may have a serious hole in 2025 with the Tour Colombia at the moment battling to maintain the occasion going amid price range constraints.
Tour Colombia (February 4-9, 2025) is scheduled to overlap with the Volta a la Comunitat Valenciana (February 5-9), however the Spanish stage race which can additionally face cancellation in 2025 following the horrible floods of final month within the area, which killed lots of of individuals and devastated property and infrastructure, together with a lot of the fabric within the race’s logistic base.
If Valenciana and Colombia have been each cancelled, the one European males’s stage race that week at the moment on the UCI calendar can be the Etoile de Bessèges in France, with the Herald Solar Tour additionally going down in Australia.
Cyclingnews understands {that a} definitive verdict on whether or not the Tour Colombia will happen has but to be taken. A dramatic minimize in public funding, a at the moment inactive web site, and media reviews of pleas for its ongoing survival are hardly encouraging omens.
El Tiempo reported just lately that the Colombia Ministry of Sport, which supplies the important thing backing for the Tour Colombia, suffered a 66% world price range minimize for 2025. The Ministry’s price range will drop from 1,300 billion Colombian pesos (roughly $328 million US {dollars}) to 464 billion ($145 million US {dollars}). The price of the race to authorities coffers is estimated by El Tiempo to be round seven billion Colombian pesos.
Tour Colombia has been a massively fashionable occasion with riders, groups and followers alike. In previous editions of the two.1 race, figures of the stature of Mark Cavendish (Astana Qazaqstan) have chosen the Tour Colombia – the place Cavendish received a stage final 12 months – to make their season debut. Different high worldwide names participating in previous years embrace Chris Froome (Israel-Premier Tech), Julian Alaphilippe (Soudal-QuickStep), Egan Bernal (Ineos Grenadiers), Nairo Quintana (Movistar) and Rigoberto Urán (EF Training-EasyPost).
Nevertheless, based on El Tiempo, probably the most critically affected members of the peloton by the potential cancellation can be members of the native Colombian squads. The opposite main South American race, the Vuelta a San Juan, ended after the 2023 version. Colombia’s highest-ranked race kinds an nearly distinctive probability for the nation’s groups to battle towards a few of the high names within the sport.
“We have to give our U23 riders an opportunity to race, and the Tour Colombia is a superb alternative,” Raúl Mesa, whose Nu staff received the race final 12 months with Rodrigo Contreras, advised the paper.
“We race on house terrain towards main names, it provides our riders an incredible alternative to know what it is like to participate these sorts of occasions. If it would not occur, it actually hits us exhausting.
“Shedding the prospect to have a race of this stage on this nation is horrible information,” added Luis Cely, the sports activities director at one other Continental Colombian staff, GW Erco Shimano.
“Riders who cannot get to Europe solely have the prospect to race towards the most effective within the Tour Colombia, and the competitors is a lift for sponsors to take a position and profit from their funding.”
As probability would have it, the potential lack of the Tour Colombia might contribute to a quick however notable dearth of races within the early season calendar sparked by different outdoors circumstances.
Prime Colombian riders like Nairo Quintana (Movistar), well-known for his social activism, haven’t been gradual to react to the potential disaster to the nation’s sport created by the approaching huge price range minimize.
Throughout a ceremony final week when he obtained the ‘Order of Democracy Simón Bolivar’ medal, an honour awarded by the Colombian state to residents who’ve carried out distinctive companies to the nation, Quintana just lately made the a lot of the high-profile alternative to ship some pointed criticisms.
The winner of a stage of the Tour Colombia in 2019 and second total in 2018, Quintana didn’t consult with the stage race instantly throughout his speech to the nation’s parliament. As a substitute he took a broader perspective.
“This huge minimize for sportspeople and the Ministry of Sport – right here, no one has heard something, no one is aware of something and no one talks about it,” he stated in his speech. “As folks right here can see so many difficult conditions for our nation, I invite them to consider us. We sportspeople are dealing with a large minimize.”
The most recent revived model of the nation’s nationwide stage race that started in 2018 however resulted in 2020, the Tour Colombia subsequently solely returned, post-pandemic, for a brand new version in 2024. Nevertheless, this 12 months’s race was in far more unsure circumstances for the game normally than when COVID-19 initially introduced it to a halt.
As Cyclingnews reported earlier than the race begin this 12 months, the three-year hiatus from 2021 to 2023 was partly on account of shortfalls in funding, which prevented the Colombian Biking Federation from resurrecting it.
Its return in 2024 got here too late to influence many WorldTour groups to alter their early-season programmes and at a degree when Colombia’s beforehand excessive profile within the sport, partly because of a Tour de France win for Egan Bernal in 2019, was ebbing away.
Present ambitions that the 2024 Tour Colombia would supply a foothold for future editions nonetheless exist – on paper a minimum of. However because the weeks tick by in the direction of a definitive resolution on its viability, these hopes wish to be in painfully quick provide.
