I would love to see Chumil get to the top two levels, Guatemala is such a passionate cycling scene, the Vuelta a Guatemala always draws huge crowds and the sport is really popular there, but the scene has always been insular and dominated by the richer Costa Rica and Colombia scenes and also they have had some absolutely terrible history of doping scandals that have hurt trust and so it's rare that riders get out. The federation have done a lot of work since the mid-2010s to try to fix this issue and get more young riders into the relevant parts of the GC and developing doing overseas races. The Spanish teams have started to take notice, Chumil and Álex Julajuj have gone over, and Mardóqueo Vásquez is going across to do some races too (you can see him 4th on the Lubián MTF in the sheet above in fact), although he's 27 so it's probably a bit late for him to make any kind of step up, nevertheless I think for the time being he deserves a lot of credit for the reinvention of the sport over there, he's become a popular figure, as a representative of the native peoples as well as being a younger and - to date - untainted by scandal rider that the populace have got behind. If a rider like Chumil can get onto a team like Kern Pharma or Caja Rural then that will be big news for Guatemalan cycling and I hope he earns it.
The one thing that does make me hesitate is that while PCS, CQ and his official records state his date of birth as October 8, 2000,
Cyclingarchives/Dewielersite has July 24, 1998 which would make him about to turn 25 rather than the 22-year-old that the rest of the scenes have. Now, CA/DWS is very shaky on these things, because it takes in really disparate sources and reports on all manner of small sized races where record-keeping is not great so it's possible that at an early race they picked him up his DOB was confused with that of another athlete, or was simply copied down wrong by them when recording that particular race, and the page has never been updated. For the record, I believe that it is likely that nothing is untoward and this is just an error on the part of Cyclingarchives because their database is so huge and as Firstcycling, which tends to share the same data, records his date of birth as October 8, 2000 like everywhere else.
Then again, nobody signed Edgar Cadena last year and that was very weird to me.
Speaking of Latin Americans in Spanish ProConti teams, Éric Fagúndez dropped the GC to Henok Mulubrhan on the last day in Qinghai Lake, losing a couple of seconds at the line plus a bonus second at an earlier sprint that gave the Eritrean a slight advantage. Timothy Dupont won the stage from a break that was allowed to go, with Corratec-Selle Italia driving it; they put Davide Baldaccini on the GC podium from this break, but with four riders in a group of 14 they somehow contrived to finish 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th like they're Cofidis in the 2010 Tour of Turkey or something.
30 riders duked out a sprint at the end of the hilly circuit race in Torres Vedras with José Manuel Díaz winning the stage ahead of Edu Prades. Rafa Reis didn't make the selection so Moreira inherits the GC lead.
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