Great climb, looks like a longer and harder Mortirolo (on a side note, i really miss Mortirolo in the Giro)
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There's an access gate on Mount Washington, I believe it may be a toll road or similar? If you set the map to OpenRouteMap, it should have a symbol that looks like a ≠ sign.
If that's the case, you have to set it to manual routing, manually draw a straight line along the road as it shows on the satellite map until you're the other side of the ≠ sign, and then switch routing back to regular mode. There are a few other significant climbs where this method is required, the Alto de La Línea in Colombia is a noteworthy example.
After doing one defunct early-season Latin American race, I thought I’d go with a more active one. I’ve long been trying to come up with things in Venezuela, as it is, after Colombia, the most cycling-passionate nation in Latin America; it has insane variety and potential for race routes, and geographically and culturally it’s an interesting place. The big problem has always been finding a route that I’m happy with, because there’s so much choice; it’s why I’ve not done a national tour of either Colombia or Venezuela despite having editions sort-of complete for months, even years; every time I think I am sorted, I discover something new I want to include, and then it requires a lot more adjustment and eventually we’re back to the drawing board.
Doing this enables me to take a different tack, however; one area in Venezuela has more cycling history, passion and culture than any other, and it has its own race which is arguably more prestigious than the national race - and that region is the westerly, Andean province of Táchira, on the border with Colombia. While the Vuelta a Venezuela has run since 1963, the Vuelta al Táchira is barely any younger, starting in 1966, and hasn’t had any breaks where’s the national Tour has had a couple of cancellations in time or drops to amateur level. While the Vuelta al Táchira may not have stuck to its home location - indeed it has grown to be more of a regional tour than a simple tour of its own province, with stage hosts all over the neighbouring provinces - it has always retained a close link to its home, and the fact that it has maintained a very steady role in the national calendar, taking place in January, has made it a very important race on the Venezuelan schedule. This calendar location has also made it quite convenient as a pre-season tune-up race for teams from further afield, with the late 70s and early 80s seeing a number of Eastern Bloc teams travelling over here before the Vuelta a Cuba (indeed in 1982 and 1988, Ramazan Galyaletdinov and Vyacheslav Ekimov respectively even won the GC), and Italian and occasionally Spanish second- and third-tier teams have more recently elected to get their seasons started over here, most notably Savio’s mob when sponsored by Colombian or Venezuelan sponsors, and the post-Farnese Vini iterations of Scinto’s motley crew when the Venezuelan state helped sponsor them. Also, the Vuelta a Venezuela seems to like a lot of flat stages and circuit races, leading Táchira to be thought of as the “real” test of a Venezuelan GC man. And the crowds come out in their droves for it.
The first Vuelta al Táchira was a mere five-stage race contested by different regional teams representing regions of Colombia and Venezuela, but it was immediately conferred some prestige by Martín Emilio “Cochise” Rodríguez, the most important Colombian rider of the era, winning the inaugural edition and returning to win two more. At first, Colombians largely held sway; Vicencio Rivas became the first Venezuelan to win a stage when he took stage 2 of the second edition in 1967, but by and large Venezuelan wins were in flat stages, until 1969, the first year a home rider got on the GC podium as well, with Nicolás Reidtler achieving the feat. The race had reached 10 stages by 1970 and Reidtler would go one better the next year, but Santos Bermúdez would become the first home winner when he took the GC in 1973 and Reidtler would go on to be the race’s Poulidor, achieving five 2nd place finishes but never winning the GC. Early experiments included a first pass over the Santo Domingo pass - a shoulder of the Collado del Cóndor - in 1968, and stage hosts across the border in Colombia from 1971 when Pamplona (not that Pamplona) hosted a stage finish. The Cubans would arrive in 1974, the likes of Carlos Cardet and Aldo Arencibia animating the race, before in 1975, the USSR, Poland and others would turn it into a cosmopolitan endeavour.
Over the years, as well as Cochise, major names to have won the race include José Patrocinio Jiménez, Álvaro Pachón, Cuban star Eduardo Alonso, Vyacheslav Ekimov, Hernán Buenahora and major Venezuelan names like Mario Medina and Leonardo Sierra, while the podium has been graced by the likes of Enrique Campos, former Giro KOMs Freddy Excelino González and his namesake José Jaime “Chepe” González, Savio team stalwarts Jackson Rodríguez and José Serpa and former GT GC candidate turned long-time exile in South America Óscar Sevilla. In 2015 one of the longest-standing records was broken when local favourite José Rujano Guillén won his fourth Vuelta al Táchira, making him the most successful rider ever at the race, breaking the record of Pachón and Rodríguez; perhaps for this reason it was the race he chose to be his last, retiring after finishing 18th in the 2021 edition, years after his peak and having “retired” multiple times already.
Rujano can win this Giro, says Savio
But perhaps the race’s most notorious appearance in cycling lore in recent years came in 2014, when race winner Jimmy Briceño had to be stripped of his title after a positive test for EPO and recording a mind-blowing hematocrit measurement of 63%, beyond even the levels of Bjarne Riis in the 90s. The race had always been known to harbour a fair amount of suspicious activity, shall we say, but “Mr 63%” as he came to be known semi-jokingly really seemed to be taking things to the next level. The race being the focal point of the Venezuelan calendar for climbing type riders has led to a relatively negative reputation around doping, however, and Briceño is far from alone in getting disqualifications or asterisked performances at the Vuelta al Táchira; he may be the only winner to have got disqualified, but elsewhere there is something of a rogue’s gallery of riders in the GC or stage winners who have chequered history behind them - Briceño has also won the 2012 and 2019 editions, and the man who acquired the 2014 GC win, Carlos Galviz, also a couple of years later tested positive for EPO, placing him alongside 2011 winner Manuel Medina, Yonathán Monsalve, Miguel Ubeto, Óscar Sevilla, José Isidro Chacón and Juan Murillo as prominent riders at the Vuelta al Táchira to later see results expunged or come under a cloud following later positive tests.
“Señor Briceño, which performance enhancing substances did you use en route to your victory?” “Yes”
At its lengthiest, the Vuelta al Táchira reached 14 stages in duration, and would start all over Venezuela before heading towards Táchira for its final week or so of action. Starting in 1990, this role was usurped by the introduction of the Clásico Ciclístico Banfoandes, a sort of secondary Vuelta a Venezuela analogous to the Clásico RCN in Colombia or the Rutas de América in Uruguay, that was a tour of the country but unable to be called that as there was already a separate extant one. Sponsored by (of course) Banfoandes, the Andean banking conglomerate, the race would always finish in San Cristóbal, capital of the Táchira region, seeing as that was where the bank was headquartered. The Vuelta al Táchira at this stage would consolidate as less of a national race and more of a western race that took in Táchira and surrounding provinces such as Zulia, Mérida, Barinas and Trujillo. While it was still a two-week race as recently as 2011 (it was shortened from 12 stages to 10 in 2012), in recent years the race has reduced down to a consistent 8-stage duration, a bit shorter than its heyday, but still allowing for a strong race and with an extremely competitive (and often quite heavily enhanced) péloton (just look at some of the comments from Luca Scinto about some of the riders offered to him during the Venezuelan sponsorship - and bear in mind those are coming from somebody who signed Danilo di Luca in 2013). I have included some circuits and some oddities to try to keep it semi-authentic in style, with short stage lengths and geographic foibles, but also to enjoy a bit of tracing around an area that, although well-trodden, also offers more than you might think that is new.
Also it makes it easier to design a Vuelta a Venezuela route in future if I’ve already given the lowdown on the cycling-friendly sites in Táchira state, of course.
Stage 1: San Cristóbal de Táchira - San Cristóbal de Táchira, 117km
GPM:
Monumento Honor al Ciclista (cat.3) 1,0km @ 5,3%
It will probably come as no surprise to you to see this, after all, most of you will be well aware that I am something of a sap when it comes to honouring tradition in these races; especially when doing these races off the beaten track I like to honour a bit of the history in the area, like including the Morgul-Bismarck Loop and the Tour of the Moon in my Tour of Colorado, or the Parque Erick Barrondo circuit in my Vuelta a Guatemala. The Vuelta al Táchira has, for many years, started and finished in San Cristóbal, the largest city of the province and its capital, and I’m not about to deviate from that template. I will deviate from it slightly, however, and that’s in that I am looking at a historic and traditional circuit, however this is a circuit that typically in recent years has been the closer of the race, but here it will be the opening.
Home to 280.000 people, San Cristóbal is the economic hub of the Táchira region, and after its establishment in 1561 has quickly grown as an important economic hub, not only for its rich and fertile soil that made this region a very important agricultural centre for Venezuela but also since independence and in more recent times because of its proximity to Colombia, enabling vast quantities of cross-border trade that has helped it remain a population centre and a trade hub to this day. Coffee, sugar, and fruit and vegetables (especially pineapples and corn) are abundant in the region and extensively farmed for this purpose, but the city has also grown rich from local production of ceramics and also, especially after the damage created by the Cúcuta Earthquake of 1875, excavation of oil wells helped enrich San Cristóbal - although once the far vaster reserves of nearby Zúlia state were discovered, Táchira was rather left behind as a result. However, its position as a trading hub have enabled it to establish a strong position in the banking sector and service industry professions, with important national institutions like Sofitasa and, formerly, Banfoandes, being based out of the city.
San Cristóbal has had many famous sons and daughters, some of the most notorious being Rafael Inchauspe Méndez, known as Nogales, a mercenary soldier who fought in many conflicts in the early 20th Century, including the Spanish-American War (for Spain), World War I (for the Ottoman Empire), participated in a failed coup against dictator Cipriano Castro and you might note from the above that he was on the losing side of all of them - he did however write many eyewitness accounts as part of his memoirs and gives us some of the most well-reported first-hand reports of the Armenian Genocide. It is also home to Isaías Medina Angarita, the founder of the Venezuelan Democratic Party and the first Venezuelan sitting president to visit the United States, which he did in 1944. Generally regarded as a centrist and a moderate, Medina nevertheless also helped establish Venezuela’s relations with China and the Soviet Union in 1943 and 1945, and helped complete Eleazar López Contreras’ work to transition Venezuela from a series of coups and juntas to a democratic republic. For a while, at least. A fellow San Cristobalense was a key part of the more recent political developments in the country, Francisco Javier Arias; a member of the clandestine opposition movement MBR-200 (the “Boliviarian Revolutionary Movement” founded by Hugo Chávez in 1982) and a participant in a failed 1992 coup, Arias had successfully captured Maracaibo when Chávez turned himself in; disillusioned by this, Arias split from MBR-200 and instead stood for La Causa R, becoming governor of Zúlia in 1995, but still backed Chávez’ presidential bids later on. However, he once again became distrustful of his former comrade, and even stood against him in the 2000 presidential elections, supported by a breakaway group of MBR-200 that would become known as Partido Unión. Eventually he would reconcile with Chávez and join his government in 2006, and even serve a second stint as governor of Zúlia from 2012 to 2017.
The city is also well known for its annual Feria de San Sebastián, a huge event at the end of every January which links numerous major events through the city including parades, concerts, ExpoTáchira, a huge exposition/exhibition event, and the event’s centrepiece, bullfighting. The Vuelta al Táchira is usually timed in January in order to coincide and be included within the festivities; the fair involved with the Feria de San Sebastián is the largest one in all of Venezuela, with agricultural, commercial and industrial segments and huge amounts of trade undertaken within the event’s confines, so small business and industry is focused elsewhere allowing for greater disruption to be possible and allow for the logistical restrictions necessary to enable the Vuelta al Táchira to close even some significant major roads in the area.
With that, it’s really not surprising that many of the top Venezuelan cyclists over the years have called San Cristóbal home, too. These include Robinson Merchán (seen here on the left), who won the Pan-American Games Road Race in 1991; Moscow Olympians Mario Medina (a three-time GC winner at the Vuelta al Táchira who holds the record to this day for the most days in the leader’s jersey) and Jesús Torres; Franklin Chacón, a national TT champion and Pan-American medallist in both the Team Pursuit and the road Time Trial, the unrelated Miguel Chacón, who won stages of the Vuelta a Venezuela and of Cuba in the same era; Ronald González, who won the Vuelta al Táchira outright in 2009 and has twice finished on the podium since; and Juan Murillo, a winner of countless stages of Latin American races through the late 2000s and 2010s until an EPO positive in 2017 at the Tour de Guadeloupe brought his career to a screeching halt. The city is also the adoptive home of the Colombian-born (in Cúcuta) Rodolfo Antonio Camacho, a rider who settled in and represented Venezuela throughout his adult life and whose greatest triumph was to win self-same Tour de Guadeloupe in 2001, also winning multiple stages of the Vuelta al Táchira and the Vuelta a Venezuela. His story is tinged with tragedy, however; in August 2016 he and his 16-year-old son confronted intruders into his home in San Cristóbal, and for their troubles received fatal gunshot wounds by the fleeing invaders. He was 40 years old.
In addition to the Vuelta al Táchira, the Clásico Banfoandes and the Vuelta a Venezuela, San Cristóbal has also appeared on the route of the Vuelta a Colombia. It was not the first overseas host - Tulcán, in Ecuador, would host a stage finish in 1955 - but it was the first overseas départ, with stage 1 in the 1965 edition being a 120km stage from San Cristóbal de Táchira to Pamplona in Norte de Santander won by Gliserio Penagos, which served as the impetus necessary to start the local race, which held its first edition a year later in 1966. The same edition of the Vuelta a Colombia would also see Táchira start a long tradition of providing a team to compete in the race, consisting of the top local riders, sponsored mainly by Lotería del Táchira (whose teams have won 19 editions of the local race but none at the Vuelta a Colombia to date).
All this cycling heritage may go some way to explaining why San Cristóbal became the host of the first UCI World Championships to be held in South America, when it was chosen to organise the 1977 World Championships. Held on a 16,9km circuit which included a long but gradual ascent within the city called Las Pilas (3,9km @ 4,6%), the race would be won by Francesco Moser in a two-up sprint against Dietrich Thurau, in a race perhaps best known as the final World Championships of both Raymond Poulidor and Eddy Merckx, who would finish together at the back of the remaining péloton and be the last two classified finishers. Here is Lasterketa Burua’s approximation.
Moser wins the World Championships in San Cristóbal
However, surprisingly, while the Vuelta al Táchira has frequently, almost invariably, included at least one circuit race in San Cristóbal, it has been very rare to see the 1977 Worlds course, instead we usually see a shorter, flatter course known as the Circuito Santos Rafael Bermúdez, named of course for the first home winner of the race.
This circuit is a largely out-and-back affair which starts and finishes at the same spot as the World Championships did back then, but is a shorter route which takes place mostly on Avenida España and Avenida 19. Abril. This circuit has in recent years typically been the site on which the final day’s racing has taken place, with the final lap then seeing the riders head up to the velodrome for the stage finish; we’re not going to be looking at a velodrome finish on stage 1, so we will have to settle for mimicking the 1977 World Championships finish, just using the Circuito Santos Rafael Bermúdez en route. It’s not always been this way - indeed many stages here have been pure circuit races, as has been the case whenever the circuit race is not held on the final day - but it has been a feature of the race ever since 1978, with prominent previous winners on the circuit including Vyacheslav Ekimov twice, and Yonathan Monsalve no fewer than four times.
Péloton on the Circuito Santos Rafael Bermúdez
Standard circuit stage
What you may notice, however, is that despite the circuits being identical, the stage lengths tend to vary slightly, and that is because of that velodrome finish being sometimes appended. I have elected to retain the finish on the World Championships finish line, as mentioned, to keep the finale in the velodrome from being used on the first day of the race when a bunch sprint is much more likely. So what are the features of the circuit? Well, it’s 9,75km in length and so 12 laps of the circuit makes up for a 117km stage length, and it includes a small ascent in the middle of the route, although it is not especially significant - a kilometre dead straight up the Avenida España, averaging a not-especially-threatening 5,3%. At the summit of the road, there is a monument to the history and tradition of cycling in Táchira, which depicts two early heroes of Venezuelan cycling, Mario Medina (mentioned earlier on) and Nicolás Reidtler (or Reytler, spellings have varied over the years) - I mentioned him in the preamble, being the Raymond Poulidor of the Vuelta al Táchira, finishing 2nd 5 times and 3rd once without ever successfully winning his home race. He did, however, win the Vuelta a Venezuela twice, in 1967 and 1971.
Monumento Honor al Ciclista
After passing the monument, the circuit loops around the outside of the sporting complex at the east end of the city (hence the climb up to it as the city is on the shoulder of mountains) taking us around the Plaza de Toros Monumental and then back onto the out-and-back part of the route. The circuit includes a small chance for an outcome other than a sprint, and the Vuelta al Táchira is hardly a race renowned as being friendly to the sprinters (despite having at least a couple of flat stages most years), so we do have the potential of other outcomes, but the Circuito Santos Bermúdez being on stage 1 instead of the final stage in this particular route means we’re more likely to see a sprint here.
Doing this enables me to take a different tack, however; one area in Venezuela has more cycling history, passion and culture than any other, and it has its own race which is arguably more prestigious than the national race - and that region is the westerly, Andean province of Táchira, on the border with Colombia. While the Vuelta a Venezuela has run since 1963, the Vuelta al Táchira is barely any younger, starting in 1966, and hasn’t had any breaks where’s the national Tour has had a couple of cancellations in time or drops to amateur level. While the Vuelta al Táchira may not have stuck to its home location - indeed it has grown to be more of a regional tour than a simple tour of its own province, with stage hosts all over the neighbouring provinces - it has always retained a close link to its home, and the fact that it has maintained a very steady role in the national calendar, taking place in January, has made it a very important race on the Venezuelan schedule. This calendar location has also made it quite convenient as a pre-season tune-up race for teams from further afield, with the late 70s and early 80s seeing a number of Eastern Bloc teams travelling over here before the Vuelta a Cuba (indeed in 1982 and 1988, Ramazan Galyaletdinov and Vyacheslav Ekimov respectively even won the GC), and Italian and occasionally Spanish second- and third-tier teams have more recently elected to get their seasons started over here, most notably Savio’s mob when sponsored by Colombian or Venezuelan sponsors, and the post-Farnese Vini iterations of Scinto’s motley crew when the Venezuelan state helped sponsor them. Also, the Vuelta a Venezuela seems to like a lot of flat stages and circuit races, leading Táchira to be thought of as the “real” test of a Venezuelan GC man. And the crowds come out in their droves for it.
The first Vuelta al Táchira was a mere five-stage race contested by different regional teams representing regions of Colombia and Venezuela, but it was immediately conferred some prestige by Martín Emilio “Cochise” Rodríguez, the most important Colombian rider of the era, winning the inaugural edition and returning to win two more. At first, Colombians largely held sway; Vicencio Rivas became the first Venezuelan to win a stage when he took stage 2 of the second edition in 1967, but by and large Venezuelan wins were in flat stages, until 1969, the first year a home rider got on the GC podium as well, with Nicolás Reidtler achieving the feat. The race had reached 10 stages by 1970 and Reidtler would go one better the next year, but Santos Bermúdez would become the first home winner when he took the GC in 1973 and Reidtler would go on to be the race’s Poulidor, achieving five 2nd place finishes but never winning the GC. Early experiments included a first pass over the Santo Domingo pass - a shoulder of the Collado del Cóndor - in 1968, and stage hosts across the border in Colombia from 1971 when Pamplona (not that Pamplona) hosted a stage finish. The Cubans would arrive in 1974, the likes of Carlos Cardet and Aldo Arencibia animating the race, before in 1975, the USSR, Poland and others would turn it into a cosmopolitan endeavour.
Over the years, as well as Cochise, major names to have won the race include José Patrocinio Jiménez, Álvaro Pachón, Cuban star Eduardo Alonso, Vyacheslav Ekimov, Hernán Buenahora and major Venezuelan names like Mario Medina and Leonardo Sierra, while the podium has been graced by the likes of Enrique Campos, former Giro KOMs Freddy Excelino González and his namesake José Jaime “Chepe” González, Savio team stalwarts Jackson Rodríguez and José Serpa and former GT GC candidate turned long-time exile in South America Óscar Sevilla. In 2015 one of the longest-standing records was broken when local favourite José Rujano Guillén won his fourth Vuelta al Táchira, making him the most successful rider ever at the race, breaking the record of Pachón and Rodríguez; perhaps for this reason it was the race he chose to be his last, retiring after finishing 18th in the 2021 edition, years after his peak and having “retired” multiple times already.
Rujano can win this Giro, says Savio
But perhaps the race’s most notorious appearance in cycling lore in recent years came in 2014, when race winner Jimmy Briceño had to be stripped of his title after a positive test for EPO and recording a mind-blowing hematocrit measurement of 63%, beyond even the levels of Bjarne Riis in the 90s. The race had always been known to harbour a fair amount of suspicious activity, shall we say, but “Mr 63%” as he came to be known semi-jokingly really seemed to be taking things to the next level. The race being the focal point of the Venezuelan calendar for climbing type riders has led to a relatively negative reputation around doping, however, and Briceño is far from alone in getting disqualifications or asterisked performances at the Vuelta al Táchira; he may be the only winner to have got disqualified, but elsewhere there is something of a rogue’s gallery of riders in the GC or stage winners who have chequered history behind them - Briceño has also won the 2012 and 2019 editions, and the man who acquired the 2014 GC win, Carlos Galviz, also a couple of years later tested positive for EPO, placing him alongside 2011 winner Manuel Medina, Yonathán Monsalve, Miguel Ubeto, Óscar Sevilla, José Isidro Chacón and Juan Murillo as prominent riders at the Vuelta al Táchira to later see results expunged or come under a cloud following later positive tests.
“Señor Briceño, which performance enhancing substances did you use en route to your victory?” “Yes”
At its lengthiest, the Vuelta al Táchira reached 14 stages in duration, and would start all over Venezuela before heading towards Táchira for its final week or so of action. Starting in 1990, this role was usurped by the introduction of the Clásico Ciclístico Banfoandes, a sort of secondary Vuelta a Venezuela analogous to the Clásico RCN in Colombia or the Rutas de América in Uruguay, that was a tour of the country but unable to be called that as there was already a separate extant one. Sponsored by (of course) Banfoandes, the Andean banking conglomerate, the race would always finish in San Cristóbal, capital of the Táchira region, seeing as that was where the bank was headquartered. The Vuelta al Táchira at this stage would consolidate as less of a national race and more of a western race that took in Táchira and surrounding provinces such as Zulia, Mérida, Barinas and Trujillo. While it was still a two-week race as recently as 2011 (it was shortened from 12 stages to 10 in 2012), in recent years the race has reduced down to a consistent 8-stage duration, a bit shorter than its heyday, but still allowing for a strong race and with an extremely competitive (and often quite heavily enhanced) péloton (just look at some of the comments from Luca Scinto about some of the riders offered to him during the Venezuelan sponsorship - and bear in mind those are coming from somebody who signed Danilo di Luca in 2013). I have included some circuits and some oddities to try to keep it semi-authentic in style, with short stage lengths and geographic foibles, but also to enjoy a bit of tracing around an area that, although well-trodden, also offers more than you might think that is new.
Also it makes it easier to design a Vuelta a Venezuela route in future if I’ve already given the lowdown on the cycling-friendly sites in Táchira state, of course.
Stage 1: San Cristóbal de Táchira - San Cristóbal de Táchira, 117km
GPM:
Monumento Honor al Ciclista (cat.3) 1,0km @ 5,3%
It will probably come as no surprise to you to see this, after all, most of you will be well aware that I am something of a sap when it comes to honouring tradition in these races; especially when doing these races off the beaten track I like to honour a bit of the history in the area, like including the Morgul-Bismarck Loop and the Tour of the Moon in my Tour of Colorado, or the Parque Erick Barrondo circuit in my Vuelta a Guatemala. The Vuelta al Táchira has, for many years, started and finished in San Cristóbal, the largest city of the province and its capital, and I’m not about to deviate from that template. I will deviate from it slightly, however, and that’s in that I am looking at a historic and traditional circuit, however this is a circuit that typically in recent years has been the closer of the race, but here it will be the opening.
Home to 280.000 people, San Cristóbal is the economic hub of the Táchira region, and after its establishment in 1561 has quickly grown as an important economic hub, not only for its rich and fertile soil that made this region a very important agricultural centre for Venezuela but also since independence and in more recent times because of its proximity to Colombia, enabling vast quantities of cross-border trade that has helped it remain a population centre and a trade hub to this day. Coffee, sugar, and fruit and vegetables (especially pineapples and corn) are abundant in the region and extensively farmed for this purpose, but the city has also grown rich from local production of ceramics and also, especially after the damage created by the Cúcuta Earthquake of 1875, excavation of oil wells helped enrich San Cristóbal - although once the far vaster reserves of nearby Zúlia state were discovered, Táchira was rather left behind as a result. However, its position as a trading hub have enabled it to establish a strong position in the banking sector and service industry professions, with important national institutions like Sofitasa and, formerly, Banfoandes, being based out of the city.
San Cristóbal has had many famous sons and daughters, some of the most notorious being Rafael Inchauspe Méndez, known as Nogales, a mercenary soldier who fought in many conflicts in the early 20th Century, including the Spanish-American War (for Spain), World War I (for the Ottoman Empire), participated in a failed coup against dictator Cipriano Castro and you might note from the above that he was on the losing side of all of them - he did however write many eyewitness accounts as part of his memoirs and gives us some of the most well-reported first-hand reports of the Armenian Genocide. It is also home to Isaías Medina Angarita, the founder of the Venezuelan Democratic Party and the first Venezuelan sitting president to visit the United States, which he did in 1944. Generally regarded as a centrist and a moderate, Medina nevertheless also helped establish Venezuela’s relations with China and the Soviet Union in 1943 and 1945, and helped complete Eleazar López Contreras’ work to transition Venezuela from a series of coups and juntas to a democratic republic. For a while, at least. A fellow San Cristobalense was a key part of the more recent political developments in the country, Francisco Javier Arias; a member of the clandestine opposition movement MBR-200 (the “Boliviarian Revolutionary Movement” founded by Hugo Chávez in 1982) and a participant in a failed 1992 coup, Arias had successfully captured Maracaibo when Chávez turned himself in; disillusioned by this, Arias split from MBR-200 and instead stood for La Causa R, becoming governor of Zúlia in 1995, but still backed Chávez’ presidential bids later on. However, he once again became distrustful of his former comrade, and even stood against him in the 2000 presidential elections, supported by a breakaway group of MBR-200 that would become known as Partido Unión. Eventually he would reconcile with Chávez and join his government in 2006, and even serve a second stint as governor of Zúlia from 2012 to 2017.
The city is also well known for its annual Feria de San Sebastián, a huge event at the end of every January which links numerous major events through the city including parades, concerts, ExpoTáchira, a huge exposition/exhibition event, and the event’s centrepiece, bullfighting. The Vuelta al Táchira is usually timed in January in order to coincide and be included within the festivities; the fair involved with the Feria de San Sebastián is the largest one in all of Venezuela, with agricultural, commercial and industrial segments and huge amounts of trade undertaken within the event’s confines, so small business and industry is focused elsewhere allowing for greater disruption to be possible and allow for the logistical restrictions necessary to enable the Vuelta al Táchira to close even some significant major roads in the area.
With that, it’s really not surprising that many of the top Venezuelan cyclists over the years have called San Cristóbal home, too. These include Robinson Merchán (seen here on the left), who won the Pan-American Games Road Race in 1991; Moscow Olympians Mario Medina (a three-time GC winner at the Vuelta al Táchira who holds the record to this day for the most days in the leader’s jersey) and Jesús Torres; Franklin Chacón, a national TT champion and Pan-American medallist in both the Team Pursuit and the road Time Trial, the unrelated Miguel Chacón, who won stages of the Vuelta a Venezuela and of Cuba in the same era; Ronald González, who won the Vuelta al Táchira outright in 2009 and has twice finished on the podium since; and Juan Murillo, a winner of countless stages of Latin American races through the late 2000s and 2010s until an EPO positive in 2017 at the Tour de Guadeloupe brought his career to a screeching halt. The city is also the adoptive home of the Colombian-born (in Cúcuta) Rodolfo Antonio Camacho, a rider who settled in and represented Venezuela throughout his adult life and whose greatest triumph was to win self-same Tour de Guadeloupe in 2001, also winning multiple stages of the Vuelta al Táchira and the Vuelta a Venezuela. His story is tinged with tragedy, however; in August 2016 he and his 16-year-old son confronted intruders into his home in San Cristóbal, and for their troubles received fatal gunshot wounds by the fleeing invaders. He was 40 years old.
In addition to the Vuelta al Táchira, the Clásico Banfoandes and the Vuelta a Venezuela, San Cristóbal has also appeared on the route of the Vuelta a Colombia. It was not the first overseas host - Tulcán, in Ecuador, would host a stage finish in 1955 - but it was the first overseas départ, with stage 1 in the 1965 edition being a 120km stage from San Cristóbal de Táchira to Pamplona in Norte de Santander won by Gliserio Penagos, which served as the impetus necessary to start the local race, which held its first edition a year later in 1966. The same edition of the Vuelta a Colombia would also see Táchira start a long tradition of providing a team to compete in the race, consisting of the top local riders, sponsored mainly by Lotería del Táchira (whose teams have won 19 editions of the local race but none at the Vuelta a Colombia to date).
All this cycling heritage may go some way to explaining why San Cristóbal became the host of the first UCI World Championships to be held in South America, when it was chosen to organise the 1977 World Championships. Held on a 16,9km circuit which included a long but gradual ascent within the city called Las Pilas (3,9km @ 4,6%), the race would be won by Francesco Moser in a two-up sprint against Dietrich Thurau, in a race perhaps best known as the final World Championships of both Raymond Poulidor and Eddy Merckx, who would finish together at the back of the remaining péloton and be the last two classified finishers. Here is Lasterketa Burua’s approximation.
Moser wins the World Championships in San Cristóbal
However, surprisingly, while the Vuelta al Táchira has frequently, almost invariably, included at least one circuit race in San Cristóbal, it has been very rare to see the 1977 Worlds course, instead we usually see a shorter, flatter course known as the Circuito Santos Rafael Bermúdez, named of course for the first home winner of the race.
This circuit is a largely out-and-back affair which starts and finishes at the same spot as the World Championships did back then, but is a shorter route which takes place mostly on Avenida España and Avenida 19. Abril. This circuit has in recent years typically been the site on which the final day’s racing has taken place, with the final lap then seeing the riders head up to the velodrome for the stage finish; we’re not going to be looking at a velodrome finish on stage 1, so we will have to settle for mimicking the 1977 World Championships finish, just using the Circuito Santos Rafael Bermúdez en route. It’s not always been this way - indeed many stages here have been pure circuit races, as has been the case whenever the circuit race is not held on the final day - but it has been a feature of the race ever since 1978, with prominent previous winners on the circuit including Vyacheslav Ekimov twice, and Yonathan Monsalve no fewer than four times.
Péloton on the Circuito Santos Rafael Bermúdez
Standard circuit stage
What you may notice, however, is that despite the circuits being identical, the stage lengths tend to vary slightly, and that is because of that velodrome finish being sometimes appended. I have elected to retain the finish on the World Championships finish line, as mentioned, to keep the finale in the velodrome from being used on the first day of the race when a bunch sprint is much more likely. So what are the features of the circuit? Well, it’s 9,75km in length and so 12 laps of the circuit makes up for a 117km stage length, and it includes a small ascent in the middle of the route, although it is not especially significant - a kilometre dead straight up the Avenida España, averaging a not-especially-threatening 5,3%. At the summit of the road, there is a monument to the history and tradition of cycling in Táchira, which depicts two early heroes of Venezuelan cycling, Mario Medina (mentioned earlier on) and Nicolás Reidtler (or Reytler, spellings have varied over the years) - I mentioned him in the preamble, being the Raymond Poulidor of the Vuelta al Táchira, finishing 2nd 5 times and 3rd once without ever successfully winning his home race. He did, however, win the Vuelta a Venezuela twice, in 1967 and 1971.
Monumento Honor al Ciclista
After passing the monument, the circuit loops around the outside of the sporting complex at the east end of the city (hence the climb up to it as the city is on the shoulder of mountains) taking us around the Plaza de Toros Monumental and then back onto the out-and-back part of the route. The circuit includes a small chance for an outcome other than a sprint, and the Vuelta al Táchira is hardly a race renowned as being friendly to the sprinters (despite having at least a couple of flat stages most years), so we do have the potential of other outcomes, but the Circuito Santos Bermúdez being on stage 1 instead of the final stage in this particular route means we’re more likely to see a sprint here.
Now I have that old jingle that they used for the race in my head, la loteria, loteria del Tachira...
Stage 2: La Fría - Santa Bárbara del Zulia, 124km
GPM:
None
If stage 1 was a flat stage with a bit of a chance of there being another type of conclusion given the small climb on the circuit, stage 2 is a flat stage where, unless the weather plays ball, there is simply not going to be any chance of anything other than a sprint being the outcome, as this stage is an absolutely pancake flat route through the north of Táchira state and then on into the southern parts of neighbouring Zúlia, the wealthy oil-rich neighbour to the north. After all, the Vuelta al Táchira has frequently included excursions - sometimes several stages long - into Mérida, Trujillo, Barinas and of course Zúlia. The race had been heading out into Barinas state as early as 1968 (the third edition of the race), and Mérida (via the Santo Domingo super-climb) was introduced in 1969. Portuguesa, Trujillo and Sucre would follow in 1971, with periodic excursions as far as Biscucuy and Valera, and even as far afield as Lara in 1978. Hell, in 1986 and 1987 the race even managed to start in Caracas, foreshadowing what would become the Clásico Banfoandes. Zúlia state, despite its proximity to Táchira, would not be introduced until 1989, when the race started with two stages around Maracaibo (a road stage and a prologue) and then a third departing from Cabimas, with the fact that the state is predominantly flat (or at least the parts with paved roads are) being the main obstacle to its introduction prior to this point, with Mérida and Tovar paying up meaning that the portion of the route that would typically have had the opportunity to enter Zúlia would instead track along the valley at the spine of the Andes in the area instead. The region would return, being passed through in 1991’s edition, a brief excursion in the 1992 race, and periodically since. However, Zúlia has been very closely linked to cycling in Venezuela due to its local teams being historically very strong thanks to the economic strength of the region; when riders like José Rujano returned to Venezuela in 2009, he signed with the Zulia team, and major Venezuelan riders like Manuel Medina, Carlos Galviz and Franklin Chacón were among those who would back him up; other riders of some repute like José Contreras, Eduin Becerra and Noel Vásquez are among those who have passed through the squad.
At the northern tip of the mountain range separating the most densely inhabited parts of Táchira from the northern flatlands around Lake Maracaibo and the Catatumbo and Chama river floodplains, La Fría is however a pretty regular host of the Vuelta al Táchira. Founded in the mid-19th Century and lying around 40km north of San Cristóbal as the crow flies, La Fría was for a time one of the main gateways into Táchira, due to a much more manageable airport to approach, being outside of the Andean mountains and therefore not requiring as much technical expertise in the event of variable or inclement weather. Before the coming of the airport (and the railroad), it was a small outlying village, but it has since become a bustling town of around 60.000, with the logistics involved in transferring much of the air freight around the Táchira region and southern Zúlia accounting for the largest amount of trade and employment in the city. It is a relatively late inclusion in the Vuelta al Táchira; historically La Grita, in the mountains, would typically host the preceding stage after coming from the mountains to the east, usually from Tovar or via Zea (to come via the Monte de Barro pass, which is pretty monolithic but not quite as brutal as Portachuelo, the more direct route from Tovar, and allowing for an uphill finish in La Grita rather than going straight to the line. Nowadays, La Grita hosts an MTF but it’s more of a tempo grinder), and then head through La Fría to finish at San Juan de Colón. La Fría was only introduced as a stage host in 1984, but has since become extremely regular as a stop-off on the route, with 22 appearances on the route of the Vuelta al Táchira since, as well as a couple of additional stages in the Clásico Banfoandes.
However, almost invariably, La Fría has hosted stage starts - just as I have it doing today. Probably because of that location. Anyway, it has only hosted a couple of finishes, those being in 1995, when Raúl Saavedra won a stage starting and finishing in the city; in 1996, when Joselin Saavedra (yes) won an ITT that finished here, and in 2016 when Marco Zamparella, of Italian Continental team Amore e Vita, took it on a slight uphill ramp. Otherwise it has always been the salida, not the llegada, and even pulled double duty in 2012, with both stages 6 and 8 starting in the city. Go figure.
Victory for Zamparella in La Fría, 2016 Vuelta al Táchira
This is not a long stage and it is not a complicated stage. The only thing for the breakaway to do with this one is collect some metas volantes, and in all honesty we don’t even pass through a large number of major towns or cities on the way. We cross over from Táchira state into Zúlia around a quarter of the way through the stage, arriving at the Puente de Venezuela crossing the Zúlia river where we leave the Ruta Troncal 6 and then move on to the city of El Guayabo, where we bear northeast and on towards our stage finish.
This leads us through a long and unthreatening flat stretch - much of it dead straight - for a good 50km before arriving in Santa Cruz del Zúlia, and then turn right onto Avenida Bolivar before a technical, twisty approach through near the Santa Bárbara airport, and then a mostly very un-technical final 3km, the idea being to give the opportunity to escape late on given the nature of this péloton, and then a final stretch that should be safe, into the finishing host of Santa Bárbara del Zúlia.
The capital of Colón municipality, this city is rapidly growing, with 80.000 people at the turn of the millennium and a cool 126.000 as of the 2023 census. It forms a twin city with San Carlos del Zúlia and dates its origins to the start of the 18th Century as an important staging post in the transit routes - especially when the majority needed to be by river traffic - between the economic and agricultural hubs of the Andes and the port city of Maracaibo. It is probably best known as the hometown of the present Governor of Zúlia state and one of Venezuela’s best known opposition figures, Manuel Rosales.
A former youth leader of Acción Democrática, Rosales is a self-described social democrat who had been part of the political landscape in Zúlia since the mid 80s including a stint as mayor of Maracaibo, before he went on to found the centre-left Nuevo Tiempo party in 2000 and win the electoral race to become state governor, a position he held from 2000 to 2008. He was implicated in the coup of 2002 due to some strange administrative circumstances, and stood as the main opposition to Hugo Chávez in the 2006 election, as one of only two governors opposed to the incumbent President at the time. However, while Rosales was successful in uniting the opposition parties’ politicians behind him, he was less successful at rallying the populace, being criticised for a campaign marked by relatively drab efficiency over charisma and leadership. After aggressively pushing Chávez on a number of topics, he stepped back from governorship in 2008 and returned to mayoral duties in Maracaibo, although charges relating to misuse of public funds led to his removal in 2009 (he maintains that these were fabricated to allow Chávez to replace him with a more pliable alternative - however given this is Venezuelan politics, both theories are equally plausible), creating a minor political storm when Venezuela withdrew diplomatic relations with Peru after he sought refuge there and seeing the Human Rights Watchdog citing his case an an example of politically-motivated persecution. He was arrested and incarcerated for 13 years upon his return to Maracaibo in 2015, but this was later commuted to house arrest and reduced to just over a year with his being released in December 2016. He has now become a face of more moderate opposition, having accepted Maduro’s presidency in 2018 and been rehabilitated into Venezuelan politics despite his ongoing oppositional stance; he returned as governor of Zúlia in 2021, and even ran as an opposition candidate for the 2024 election, though withdrew his candidacy in support of Edmundo González Urrutia’s bid later. This was a controversial position at the time as he had been expected to support María Machado’s campaign, so his initial independent candidacy had raised a stir and created some friction in the opposition.
Santa Bárbara has appeared on the route of the Vuelta al Táchira three times in its history. The first was in 1991, when Italian sprinter Marino Marcozzi won the first of two stages of that edition - he was part of Domenico Cavallo’s Selle Italia team that brought Leonardo Sierra and Richard Parra to Europe from Venezuela; this team would later go on to be acquired by Gianni Savio and become the long-running team that we knew and loved, becoming ZG Mobili, Roslotto, Selle Italia-W52 (!!!), Colombia-Selle Italia, Serramenti PVC Diquigiovanni and eventually Androni Giocattoli, so have a long and well-established history at the race. The following year the Colombian José Fabio Moreno would win in the city - he would go on to race the Vuelta in 1993 when the Colombian Gaseosas Glacial team would be invited, but this win would be his biggest. Finally, the city would host the start of the Mérida stage in 2003, which was won by another Colombia-Selle Italia rider, this time Rubén Marín. That stage saw him come in solo around 30” ahead of a reduced pack, but that’s because Mérida is in the Andes. The two stages that finished in Santa Bárbara were both sprints, and that’s what we should expect here, too.
GPM:
None
If stage 1 was a flat stage with a bit of a chance of there being another type of conclusion given the small climb on the circuit, stage 2 is a flat stage where, unless the weather plays ball, there is simply not going to be any chance of anything other than a sprint being the outcome, as this stage is an absolutely pancake flat route through the north of Táchira state and then on into the southern parts of neighbouring Zúlia, the wealthy oil-rich neighbour to the north. After all, the Vuelta al Táchira has frequently included excursions - sometimes several stages long - into Mérida, Trujillo, Barinas and of course Zúlia. The race had been heading out into Barinas state as early as 1968 (the third edition of the race), and Mérida (via the Santo Domingo super-climb) was introduced in 1969. Portuguesa, Trujillo and Sucre would follow in 1971, with periodic excursions as far as Biscucuy and Valera, and even as far afield as Lara in 1978. Hell, in 1986 and 1987 the race even managed to start in Caracas, foreshadowing what would become the Clásico Banfoandes. Zúlia state, despite its proximity to Táchira, would not be introduced until 1989, when the race started with two stages around Maracaibo (a road stage and a prologue) and then a third departing from Cabimas, with the fact that the state is predominantly flat (or at least the parts with paved roads are) being the main obstacle to its introduction prior to this point, with Mérida and Tovar paying up meaning that the portion of the route that would typically have had the opportunity to enter Zúlia would instead track along the valley at the spine of the Andes in the area instead. The region would return, being passed through in 1991’s edition, a brief excursion in the 1992 race, and periodically since. However, Zúlia has been very closely linked to cycling in Venezuela due to its local teams being historically very strong thanks to the economic strength of the region; when riders like José Rujano returned to Venezuela in 2009, he signed with the Zulia team, and major Venezuelan riders like Manuel Medina, Carlos Galviz and Franklin Chacón were among those who would back him up; other riders of some repute like José Contreras, Eduin Becerra and Noel Vásquez are among those who have passed through the squad.
At the northern tip of the mountain range separating the most densely inhabited parts of Táchira from the northern flatlands around Lake Maracaibo and the Catatumbo and Chama river floodplains, La Fría is however a pretty regular host of the Vuelta al Táchira. Founded in the mid-19th Century and lying around 40km north of San Cristóbal as the crow flies, La Fría was for a time one of the main gateways into Táchira, due to a much more manageable airport to approach, being outside of the Andean mountains and therefore not requiring as much technical expertise in the event of variable or inclement weather. Before the coming of the airport (and the railroad), it was a small outlying village, but it has since become a bustling town of around 60.000, with the logistics involved in transferring much of the air freight around the Táchira region and southern Zúlia accounting for the largest amount of trade and employment in the city. It is a relatively late inclusion in the Vuelta al Táchira; historically La Grita, in the mountains, would typically host the preceding stage after coming from the mountains to the east, usually from Tovar or via Zea (to come via the Monte de Barro pass, which is pretty monolithic but not quite as brutal as Portachuelo, the more direct route from Tovar, and allowing for an uphill finish in La Grita rather than going straight to the line. Nowadays, La Grita hosts an MTF but it’s more of a tempo grinder), and then head through La Fría to finish at San Juan de Colón. La Fría was only introduced as a stage host in 1984, but has since become extremely regular as a stop-off on the route, with 22 appearances on the route of the Vuelta al Táchira since, as well as a couple of additional stages in the Clásico Banfoandes.
However, almost invariably, La Fría has hosted stage starts - just as I have it doing today. Probably because of that location. Anyway, it has only hosted a couple of finishes, those being in 1995, when Raúl Saavedra won a stage starting and finishing in the city; in 1996, when Joselin Saavedra (yes) won an ITT that finished here, and in 2016 when Marco Zamparella, of Italian Continental team Amore e Vita, took it on a slight uphill ramp. Otherwise it has always been the salida, not the llegada, and even pulled double duty in 2012, with both stages 6 and 8 starting in the city. Go figure.
Victory for Zamparella in La Fría, 2016 Vuelta al Táchira
This is not a long stage and it is not a complicated stage. The only thing for the breakaway to do with this one is collect some metas volantes, and in all honesty we don’t even pass through a large number of major towns or cities on the way. We cross over from Táchira state into Zúlia around a quarter of the way through the stage, arriving at the Puente de Venezuela crossing the Zúlia river where we leave the Ruta Troncal 6 and then move on to the city of El Guayabo, where we bear northeast and on towards our stage finish.
This leads us through a long and unthreatening flat stretch - much of it dead straight - for a good 50km before arriving in Santa Cruz del Zúlia, and then turn right onto Avenida Bolivar before a technical, twisty approach through near the Santa Bárbara airport, and then a mostly very un-technical final 3km, the idea being to give the opportunity to escape late on given the nature of this péloton, and then a final stretch that should be safe, into the finishing host of Santa Bárbara del Zúlia.
The capital of Colón municipality, this city is rapidly growing, with 80.000 people at the turn of the millennium and a cool 126.000 as of the 2023 census. It forms a twin city with San Carlos del Zúlia and dates its origins to the start of the 18th Century as an important staging post in the transit routes - especially when the majority needed to be by river traffic - between the economic and agricultural hubs of the Andes and the port city of Maracaibo. It is probably best known as the hometown of the present Governor of Zúlia state and one of Venezuela’s best known opposition figures, Manuel Rosales.
A former youth leader of Acción Democrática, Rosales is a self-described social democrat who had been part of the political landscape in Zúlia since the mid 80s including a stint as mayor of Maracaibo, before he went on to found the centre-left Nuevo Tiempo party in 2000 and win the electoral race to become state governor, a position he held from 2000 to 2008. He was implicated in the coup of 2002 due to some strange administrative circumstances, and stood as the main opposition to Hugo Chávez in the 2006 election, as one of only two governors opposed to the incumbent President at the time. However, while Rosales was successful in uniting the opposition parties’ politicians behind him, he was less successful at rallying the populace, being criticised for a campaign marked by relatively drab efficiency over charisma and leadership. After aggressively pushing Chávez on a number of topics, he stepped back from governorship in 2008 and returned to mayoral duties in Maracaibo, although charges relating to misuse of public funds led to his removal in 2009 (he maintains that these were fabricated to allow Chávez to replace him with a more pliable alternative - however given this is Venezuelan politics, both theories are equally plausible), creating a minor political storm when Venezuela withdrew diplomatic relations with Peru after he sought refuge there and seeing the Human Rights Watchdog citing his case an an example of politically-motivated persecution. He was arrested and incarcerated for 13 years upon his return to Maracaibo in 2015, but this was later commuted to house arrest and reduced to just over a year with his being released in December 2016. He has now become a face of more moderate opposition, having accepted Maduro’s presidency in 2018 and been rehabilitated into Venezuelan politics despite his ongoing oppositional stance; he returned as governor of Zúlia in 2021, and even ran as an opposition candidate for the 2024 election, though withdrew his candidacy in support of Edmundo González Urrutia’s bid later. This was a controversial position at the time as he had been expected to support María Machado’s campaign, so his initial independent candidacy had raised a stir and created some friction in the opposition.
Santa Bárbara has appeared on the route of the Vuelta al Táchira three times in its history. The first was in 1991, when Italian sprinter Marino Marcozzi won the first of two stages of that edition - he was part of Domenico Cavallo’s Selle Italia team that brought Leonardo Sierra and Richard Parra to Europe from Venezuela; this team would later go on to be acquired by Gianni Savio and become the long-running team that we knew and loved, becoming ZG Mobili, Roslotto, Selle Italia-W52 (!!!), Colombia-Selle Italia, Serramenti PVC Diquigiovanni and eventually Androni Giocattoli, so have a long and well-established history at the race. The following year the Colombian José Fabio Moreno would win in the city - he would go on to race the Vuelta in 1993 when the Colombian Gaseosas Glacial team would be invited, but this win would be his biggest. Finally, the city would host the start of the Mérida stage in 2003, which was won by another Colombia-Selle Italia rider, this time Rubén Marín. That stage saw him come in solo around 30” ahead of a reduced pack, but that’s because Mérida is in the Andes. The two stages that finished in Santa Bárbara were both sprints, and that’s what we should expect here, too.
I love doing this & the BANTRAB on procycling manager. One of the few races where I can turn up with the train & destroy everyone 
Todays stage, the final stage before the rest day, going south from Conway provides another test after the previous day’s stage to Mount Washington
Our second straight depart from Conway(and not the last time it’ll be featured in this race), the race goes for the two category climbs before the finish, both of which are low gradient tempo climbs.
For the next 140 kilometers from the top of the cat 1 to the bottom of Mount Kearsage, this is little difficulty for the riders, but if someone wants to drill it the roads are very lumpy compared to what you see on the profile.
For the last 7 or so kilometers, the race faces Mount Kearsage, with inconsistent and steep gradient, a climbers playground before the rest day
The GP de Montreal is often pretty boring unfortunately, with all the action coming on the last lap - mostly on the Mont Royal itself. So I looked at how it might be improved.
I've shifted the route to the south of Mont Royal rather than north. There I've added three short climbs of about 300 metres and 8% after a short bit of technical narrow descent. The section contains 13 90 degree corners within 13 km. I've kept the finish line with the 180, which I like a lot. Hopefully the techinal nature of the circuit could stretch the race out and make early attacks viable - like a Glasgow circuit, you know...
I've shifted the route to the south of Mont Royal rather than north. There I've added three short climbs of about 300 metres and 8% after a short bit of technical narrow descent. The section contains 13 90 degree corners within 13 km. I've kept the finish line with the 180, which I like a lot. Hopefully the techinal nature of the circuit could stretch the race out and make early attacks viable - like a Glasgow circuit, you know...
Stage 3: El Vigía - Cúcuta, 184km
GPM:
Loma Bolivar (cat.3) 0,6km @ 9,0% x2
The third stage of the Vuelta al Táchira is the longest, at a full on 180km+ distance, the kind that goes in the medium-long category at a higher level and well above what many 2.2 races offer. For the most part the Vuelta al Táchira tends to keep its stage lengths in the 110km-150km kind of range, and it isn’t since 2018 that we’ve seen a stage of 180km+, however that was a flat stage followed immediately by a 174km mountain stage, and given this stage is more or less flat (just with a tricky finale), I think we’ll be fine with this. It’s also the only stage to both start and finish outside Táchira state, although we do pass through the race’s home region through the middle part of the stage. As mentioned in previous stage write-ups, the race would frequently hold finishes in towns and cities well outside the confines of Táchira, often even at the opposite end of the country in fact, and while the race has become more linked to its home in recent years, this is nevertheless not really a rarity as we still typically have at least one, usually two, stages which are entirely outside of the province, typically the common Mérida finish, or a flat stage to Santa Bárbara de Barinas. We are going to be starting in one of the relatively common - at least in recent years - external hosts of the race, the city of El Vigía.
El Vigía is the shire town of the Alberto Adriani Municipality, one of the most populous in Merida state, and is home to around 160.000 people as of the 2013 census. It is the northwesternmost part of Merida state, with borders with Zúlia to the north and Táchira to the west. It does not have an official founding date, but there was a small village on the path along the northern base of the Andes on this site prior to the arrival of the railway, which came in 1892, when a railroad from Santa Bárbara del Zúlia was constructed in order to expedite transfer of produce from the Andean provinces, and El Vigía was chosen as the terminus, due to its position at the edge of the Río Chama, which carves a low valley down from the altiplano and Mérida city, and was a popular route for goods traffic accordingly. When the Chama was bridged in 1954 during the construction of Troncal 1, which links to the Pan-American Highway, the city became placed at an important crossroads for trade and grew rapidly as a result. It is the birthplace of the Olympic boxer Yoel Finol, who took a bronze medal in the Rio Olympics which was later upgraded to silver after the original silver medallist failed a doping test, and the politician Tareck El-Aissami, a former vice president of Venezuela who has held a number of high ranking positions in Nicolás Maduro’s government, most recently the Minister of Petroleum, but who resigned in 2023 amid a number of allegations of corruption among other more significant crimes, including drug trafficking (he was one of the political figures connected to the narcosobrinos incident which saw two of Maduro’s nephews incarcerated) and, with his own familial connections to Iraq, allegations have connected him to terrorist groups and to money laundering rings in the Middle East as well.
El Vigía is also home to a somewhat less contentious politician, Richard Parra - his political career has been relatively inconspicuous, but he is of more interest to us here as he went into the field after the end of his career as a pro cyclist - he won the Vuelta a Venezuela in 1988 before turning pro, riding in Italy with Selle Italia and in Spain with CIEMAT in the early 90s, including a tilt at the 1991 Giro d’Italia where he would ride in support of compatriot Leonardo Sierra. It is also home to veteran star of the Venezuelan domestic scene, José Alarcón. A talented climber, Alarcón won his first Vuelta al Táchira stage in 2009 in a sprint of the elites, and this got him a few years of international racing, spending 2010 with Lotería de Boyacá in Colombia, two years with Movistar Team América, the Colombian-based lower league Telefónica lineup that served as a satellite but not a feeder for the World Tour team, and then two more years with Canel’s Turbo in Mexico before giving up on breaking through to a higher level and returning to his home region. He has won eight stages overall at the Vuelta al Táchira, although it took him until 2023 to actually win the GC - despite seven previous top 10s and his previous best of 2nd being achieved all the way back in 2010 - along with five top 5s and one win (2015) at the Vuelta a Venezuela, a GC podium and queen stage victory at the Vuelta a Cuba, a top 5 at the Vuelta a Guatemala and top 10s at the Clásico Banfoandes and the Tour de Guadeloupe.
José Alarcón wins in the polka dots in La Grita in the 2023 Vuelta al Táchira
With Mérida and Tovar being regular hosts in the race’s relative youth, El Vigía took a little time to become established within the Vuelta al Táchira, but it has hosted a number of stages over the years, starting in 1973 when the race headed over to Trujillo for the first time, with Domingo Guerrero winning a flat stage from Valera to El Vigía. An identical stage the following year would be won by Cuban star Carlos Cardet, then Guillermo León would win a short stage from Mérida through the Chama valley a year later. Yuri Mikhaylov would win a road stage here in 1976 while Fernando Fontes of Colombia would win a CRI in the city the following day, but then it would be off the menu until 1984 when another Soviet rider, Aleksandr Krasnov, won the stage. Although the race passed through El Vigía a few times in the intervening period, though, it was not until 2002 that it would stop here again, but it would swiftly become a semi-regular host of early-race flat stages to maintain balance; Carlos Ibáñez won for Colombia-Selle Italia that year, Diosenis Valdes for the Cuban national team the following year; Alberto Loddo would win here for Diquigiovanni in 2006, Paul Alberto Torres in a circuit race in 2008 which would be repeated with Artur García winning the following year, and then, most recently, another win for Savio’s team in its most recent iteration, with Matteo Malucelli winning in El Vigía in 2021. It has also hosted stage starts in 2004 and 2005 to Mérida, in 2006 to Bailadores (!!!), La Grita in 2007 and Cerro Cristo Rey in 2009, while also appearing in the Clásico Banfoandes in 2008 with another Cuban, Gil Cordovés, triumphing - this was before he switched his allegiance although he had been racing in Venezuela for nearly a decade already by this point.
We cross back into Táchira almost immediately - around 15km into the stage and with no noteworthy obstacles, just some uphill false flat, and then heading downhill slightly into La Tendida, which has hosted finishes in the last couple of editions of the Vuelta al Táchira, won by Jonathan Guatibonza in 2023 in a sprint, and by Fernando Briceño upon his return from a doping ban in 2024. We continue along a flat charge for the next 35km until we get to Coloncito, which hosts the first intermediate sprint, and has also hosted a few flat stages in recent Vueltas itself. It usually hosts the start of a mountain stage - typically to La Grita or Mérida - but has seen a sprint finish in 2010, won by Miguel Ubeto, and an ITT in 2014, won by Andrea Del Col. Instead of heading westward back to yesterday’s stage host of La Fría, we head north from Coloncito toward El Pulpito, then crossing state lines into Zúlia and turning west again to Orope, then continuing, crossing the stage 2 route, to reach Boca de Grita and Puerto Internacional de la Unión, a bridge crossing the Rio Grita just before it flows into the Rio Zúlia, and sees us cross the international boundary into Colombia at the frontier town of Puerto Santander.
Constructed in 1989, the bridge has been the southernmost transit point between Colombia and Zúlia state, and has greatly benefited trade in the Freeport-style zone; many inhabitants of Boca de Grita will cross into Puerto Santander for their Holy Week festivities and vice versa; the border has been closed a couple of times in recent times due to political tensions resulting in a large exodus of Venezuelans or cross-border illicit activity, but the relatively isolated locale of this bridge means it is often one of the earliest transit points between the two nations to reopen.
The proximity of Táchira province to Colombia, the relative isolation within Colombia of Cúcuta and its surrounding area due to the difficulty of accessing it via the Andean mountain passes, and the many border crossings has meant that the Norte de Santander province has some level of affinity with Táchira, and the Vuelta al Táchira has seen a number of excursions into their neighbours’ territory, both to stage hosts and simply - as has been the case often in recent years - simply as mid-stage detours before returning to Venezuelan territory for the stage finish. We are going to go with a finish on Colombian territory. The difficulty in accessing this part of Colombia had meant that it was not a frequent stop-off for the Vuelta a Colombia, and typically only Cúcuta and Pamplona would be used if the race did head into the region. It took until the fourth edition of the race, in 1954, to appear, with Ramón Hoyos winning a stage into Cúcuta before a rest day saw the riders transferred to Pamplona, before a stage to Bucaramanga and a second rest day immediately afterward. 1960 would see the race start in Villa del Rosario, neighbouring Cúcuta and on the border with Venezuela, with a stage to Pamplona of just 91km won by Pablo Hurtado. This would be replicated in 1963, with Rubén Dário Gómez triumphing, and again in 1965, but with the Grand Départ being in San Cristóbal del Táchira, which was the impetus behind the introduction of the Vuelta al Táchira in 1966. It would take until 1976 for the Vuelta a Colombia to return to Norte de Santander when it would once more see a Grand Départ in Cúcuta (the Czech team winning a TTT), by which time Pamplona had seen the region’s first inclusion in the Vuelta al Táchira, Álvaro Pachón winning a stage there in 1970 and Luís Villaroel triumphing over the same course a year later. The eastward expansion of the Vuelta al Táchira would mean excursions to the east for stage starts and finishes would become rare, although stages to Rubio, Urena and San António del Táchira would often detour across the border. 1981 would see the Vuelta a Colombia return, again with a TTT in Cúcuta followed by a semitappe to Pamplona, Israel Corredor winning the latter.
When racing returned to Norte de Santander in 1990, it was an odd year for the two main races that would appear there. The Vuelta al Táchira included a stage to Cúcuta, then a clone of the short Cúcuta-Pamplona stage from the earlier Vueltas a Colombia, local boy José Díaz winning both; then there would be another stage finish in Cúcuta, won by Venezuelan “home” rider Robinson Merchán. Meanwhile in the Vuelta a Colombia, the race starting in the isolated Amazonian east of Arauca before crossing the border to Guasdualito and back during two semitappes on day 2. Then they would travel through to Táchira province and into Cúcuta, with Soviet (Lithuanian) rider Remigijus Lupeikis winning the stage. In 1993 the race would be back, for the first time visiting both Ecuador and Venezuela in the same edition, with Juan Carlos Rosero of Ecuador winning in Pamplona, Jorge León Otalvaro in a stage from Pamplona to San Cristóbal, Libardo Niño winning a time trial in Cúcuta and then Raúl Acosta winning the final stage, a circuit race including the Venezuelan cities of Ureña and San António as well as a start/finish in Cúcuta. This same circuit would be seen in the 1997 Vuelta al Táchira, the next time the region would appear, but it would then be off-the-menu for a long time after an opening prologue in the Vuelta a Colombia in 2002, won by later Caisse d’Épargne domestique Marlon Pérez. The 2023 Vuelta al Táchira has a stage which is listed as being from Ureña to Cúcuta but don’t be fooled - it has laps of the 1993 and 1997 circuit before a climb up to Cerro Cristo Rey in Venezuela. Cúcuta hasn’t hosted a start or finish in a UCI-accredited race since 2002. So let’s bring it back.
After around 60km of flat and slightly uphill false flat through Norte de Santander, we arrive in the city of Cúcuta, officially San José de Cúcuta, the sixth largest city in Colombia with a population of over 750.000. The capital and economic hub of Norte de Santander, the region was first discovered by German explorer-conquistadores in the 16th Century, but the modern settlement was originally founded as San José de Guasimales, to differentiate it from a native settlement nearby, but when growing to consume the latter it adopted the name San José de Cúcuta from the native word Kukuta, the name of the original settlement and, curiously, translating as “house of the goblin”. Originally it was a backwater, with more interest being in the hills and the city of Pamplona, around which gold mines had been found, but the difficulty of transporting such goods through the mountains led to the river navigation to the Caribbean becoming a favoured route and creating a need for transit points in what is now known as the Cúcuta valley. Founded in the early 18th Century, by the end of that period it had grown to a flourishing trading city and one of the most important in the Colombian East. It was also the site of one of the most crucial battles fought by the Libertadores, when Simon Bolívar’s troops defeated those of Spanish loyalist Ramón Correa in 1813, as Bolívar fought to secure the banks of the Táchira river, and although the battle itself was comparatively small - just 22 fatalities - it enabled the belligerents to secure their Colombian possessions and pave the way for the Admirable Campaign as the great liberator fought his way back through Venezuela toward his hometown of Caracas and was able to secure independence for both Colombia and Venezuela across these campaigns. One of the important lieutenants under Bolívar was Francisco de Paula Santander, who became vice president of New Colombia and then the first President of Nueva Granada and became associated for life with the fight for independence in the Cúcuta valley; the city’s university, one of the most prestigious in Latin America, was named for him. He is also one of the signatories of the 1821 Constitución de Cúcuta, which declared him vice president to Simon Bolívar and created the Republic of Colombia. Cúcuta remained one of the most important cities of the country until it was greatly ravaged by earthquake damage in 1875. During the reconstruction, a new centre on a grid basis was created and soon afterward the railroad arrived in the city, and greatly expedited its recovery, although the railroad itself did not survive and fell into disuse in the 1950s.
In more recent times Cúcuta has given Colombia its second President, this time of actual Colombia rather than the united provinces of Nueva Granada, this being Virgilio Barco, the grandson of an army general turned oil baron, and who led the country from 1986 to 1990, during some of the most challenging times for the nation. A former ambassador to Great Britain and the United States as well as a director of the World Bank and a mayor of Bogotá, he supported anti-poverty programs and his moves to combat drug trafficking won him significant popularity in the wider world, but his economic policies being based around the old adage of “short term pain for long term gain” and a rise in violence as the drugs cartels fought back against crackdowns hurt his popularity and he was unable to win re-election. He was aided in his fight against the cartels by another local, Luis Alberto Villamizar, an ally of Luis Carlos Galán who led the Nuevo Liberalismo group and successfully passed legislation such as the National Narcotics Statute of 1986, one of the most crucial items of law in the fight against drugs in the country, for which notorious drug lord Pablo Escobar attempted to have him assassinated, which caused Barco to deploy Villamizar on overseas embassy duty for two years. After his return to Colombia, Escobar had Villamizar’s wife and sister kidnapped along with eight other associates. Barco allowed Villamizar to conduct his own release negotiations, which he did so successfully that two years later he was commissioned by Escobar himself to negotiate his own surrender to authorities. Go figure. His crisis aversion skills in these major news events would be immortalised by Colombia’s greatest literary figure, Gabriel García Márquez, in News of a Kidnapping.
Alberto Villamizar and his wife Maruja Pachón interviewed about the kidnappings a year before Alberto’s death by Argentine TV icon Mirtha Legrand
More recently, Cúcuta has had more prominence in the field of sport, with Fabiola Zuluaga, Colombia’s most successful ever tennis competitor, coming from the city; she won five WTA Tour events, four of which being the Copa Colsanitas in Bogotá, and reached a highest rank of 16th on the world rankings in the mid 2000s, with a best in Grand Slam competition of the semi-finals in the 2004 Australian Open. Her legacy has been continued more recently by youngster Camila Osorio, who has won two WTA Tour events - again both the Copa Colsanitas, and like her predecessor all her best results are on clay. More prominent, most likely, to many would be star footballer James Rodríguez, who had been developing in Argentine and then Portuguese football before moving to Monaco before the 2014 World Cup; there he stunned the world and won the Golden Boot earning himself a big money transfer to Real Madrid; however from then his career has stuttered a bit as he has struggled to meet lofty expectations. A two-year loan to Bayern München saw him collect more trophies and contribute, but not as much as had been hoped, and eventually he would find his way to less world-renowned destinations like Everton and Olympiakos, though successful performances back in South America and a Golden Ball award at the 2024 Copa América have seen him enjoy a resurgence. Finally, there is Yeison Delgado, a Venezuelan cyclist who was born in Cúcuta and won a Vuelta a Colombia stage and finished on the podium of the Vuelta al Táchira before a doping ban following a positive test for EPO and synthetic testosterone at the 2004 Vuelta a Guatemala; upon his return he took several years to fight back to his best, but eventually won the GC of the Vuelta al Táchira, his de facto home race, in 2013.
I could have gone for a flat finish in Cúcuta; after all, most races that finish here do. However, I had designs on something to shake things up a little, and have instead elected to finish with two laps of a 9,9km circuit. This includes a short (600m) sharp dig of a climb at 9% that snakes around the monument commemorating Bolívar’s triumphs of 1813, the hill being known as Loma Bolívar in honour of the great liberator.
Cresting at 16 and 6km from the line, this is steep enough to allow puncheurs to think that they can do something here, but also short enough that sprinters can power their way over as long as they can stay in contact. The question is going to be, though, what sort of rider does it favour in this kind of péloton? The Colombian-Venezuelan scene is not exactly renowned for its puncheurs, at least not for these super short ramps (although there are a few riders who have graduated from this scene who have proven to be more than adept at the World Tour level on this kind of terrain, just think of Jhonatán Narváez, Carlos Betancur or Sérgio Henao) while sprinters coming from this kind of scene tend to need to be a bit more durable than most (think the likes of Orluís Aular, Fernando Gaviria or Jonathan Guatibonza) - but 186km is a pretty long course for riders in the Vuelta al Táchira, which doesn’t tend to put stages of this kind of length out there too often, so there ought to be some tired legs and struggling domestiques. Besides, the sprinters won’t have many chances after this, so they’re going to need to make it count.
GPM:
Loma Bolivar (cat.3) 0,6km @ 9,0% x2
The third stage of the Vuelta al Táchira is the longest, at a full on 180km+ distance, the kind that goes in the medium-long category at a higher level and well above what many 2.2 races offer. For the most part the Vuelta al Táchira tends to keep its stage lengths in the 110km-150km kind of range, and it isn’t since 2018 that we’ve seen a stage of 180km+, however that was a flat stage followed immediately by a 174km mountain stage, and given this stage is more or less flat (just with a tricky finale), I think we’ll be fine with this. It’s also the only stage to both start and finish outside Táchira state, although we do pass through the race’s home region through the middle part of the stage. As mentioned in previous stage write-ups, the race would frequently hold finishes in towns and cities well outside the confines of Táchira, often even at the opposite end of the country in fact, and while the race has become more linked to its home in recent years, this is nevertheless not really a rarity as we still typically have at least one, usually two, stages which are entirely outside of the province, typically the common Mérida finish, or a flat stage to Santa Bárbara de Barinas. We are going to be starting in one of the relatively common - at least in recent years - external hosts of the race, the city of El Vigía.
El Vigía is the shire town of the Alberto Adriani Municipality, one of the most populous in Merida state, and is home to around 160.000 people as of the 2013 census. It is the northwesternmost part of Merida state, with borders with Zúlia to the north and Táchira to the west. It does not have an official founding date, but there was a small village on the path along the northern base of the Andes on this site prior to the arrival of the railway, which came in 1892, when a railroad from Santa Bárbara del Zúlia was constructed in order to expedite transfer of produce from the Andean provinces, and El Vigía was chosen as the terminus, due to its position at the edge of the Río Chama, which carves a low valley down from the altiplano and Mérida city, and was a popular route for goods traffic accordingly. When the Chama was bridged in 1954 during the construction of Troncal 1, which links to the Pan-American Highway, the city became placed at an important crossroads for trade and grew rapidly as a result. It is the birthplace of the Olympic boxer Yoel Finol, who took a bronze medal in the Rio Olympics which was later upgraded to silver after the original silver medallist failed a doping test, and the politician Tareck El-Aissami, a former vice president of Venezuela who has held a number of high ranking positions in Nicolás Maduro’s government, most recently the Minister of Petroleum, but who resigned in 2023 amid a number of allegations of corruption among other more significant crimes, including drug trafficking (he was one of the political figures connected to the narcosobrinos incident which saw two of Maduro’s nephews incarcerated) and, with his own familial connections to Iraq, allegations have connected him to terrorist groups and to money laundering rings in the Middle East as well.
El Vigía is also home to a somewhat less contentious politician, Richard Parra - his political career has been relatively inconspicuous, but he is of more interest to us here as he went into the field after the end of his career as a pro cyclist - he won the Vuelta a Venezuela in 1988 before turning pro, riding in Italy with Selle Italia and in Spain with CIEMAT in the early 90s, including a tilt at the 1991 Giro d’Italia where he would ride in support of compatriot Leonardo Sierra. It is also home to veteran star of the Venezuelan domestic scene, José Alarcón. A talented climber, Alarcón won his first Vuelta al Táchira stage in 2009 in a sprint of the elites, and this got him a few years of international racing, spending 2010 with Lotería de Boyacá in Colombia, two years with Movistar Team América, the Colombian-based lower league Telefónica lineup that served as a satellite but not a feeder for the World Tour team, and then two more years with Canel’s Turbo in Mexico before giving up on breaking through to a higher level and returning to his home region. He has won eight stages overall at the Vuelta al Táchira, although it took him until 2023 to actually win the GC - despite seven previous top 10s and his previous best of 2nd being achieved all the way back in 2010 - along with five top 5s and one win (2015) at the Vuelta a Venezuela, a GC podium and queen stage victory at the Vuelta a Cuba, a top 5 at the Vuelta a Guatemala and top 10s at the Clásico Banfoandes and the Tour de Guadeloupe.
José Alarcón wins in the polka dots in La Grita in the 2023 Vuelta al Táchira
With Mérida and Tovar being regular hosts in the race’s relative youth, El Vigía took a little time to become established within the Vuelta al Táchira, but it has hosted a number of stages over the years, starting in 1973 when the race headed over to Trujillo for the first time, with Domingo Guerrero winning a flat stage from Valera to El Vigía. An identical stage the following year would be won by Cuban star Carlos Cardet, then Guillermo León would win a short stage from Mérida through the Chama valley a year later. Yuri Mikhaylov would win a road stage here in 1976 while Fernando Fontes of Colombia would win a CRI in the city the following day, but then it would be off the menu until 1984 when another Soviet rider, Aleksandr Krasnov, won the stage. Although the race passed through El Vigía a few times in the intervening period, though, it was not until 2002 that it would stop here again, but it would swiftly become a semi-regular host of early-race flat stages to maintain balance; Carlos Ibáñez won for Colombia-Selle Italia that year, Diosenis Valdes for the Cuban national team the following year; Alberto Loddo would win here for Diquigiovanni in 2006, Paul Alberto Torres in a circuit race in 2008 which would be repeated with Artur García winning the following year, and then, most recently, another win for Savio’s team in its most recent iteration, with Matteo Malucelli winning in El Vigía in 2021. It has also hosted stage starts in 2004 and 2005 to Mérida, in 2006 to Bailadores (!!!), La Grita in 2007 and Cerro Cristo Rey in 2009, while also appearing in the Clásico Banfoandes in 2008 with another Cuban, Gil Cordovés, triumphing - this was before he switched his allegiance although he had been racing in Venezuela for nearly a decade already by this point.
We cross back into Táchira almost immediately - around 15km into the stage and with no noteworthy obstacles, just some uphill false flat, and then heading downhill slightly into La Tendida, which has hosted finishes in the last couple of editions of the Vuelta al Táchira, won by Jonathan Guatibonza in 2023 in a sprint, and by Fernando Briceño upon his return from a doping ban in 2024. We continue along a flat charge for the next 35km until we get to Coloncito, which hosts the first intermediate sprint, and has also hosted a few flat stages in recent Vueltas itself. It usually hosts the start of a mountain stage - typically to La Grita or Mérida - but has seen a sprint finish in 2010, won by Miguel Ubeto, and an ITT in 2014, won by Andrea Del Col. Instead of heading westward back to yesterday’s stage host of La Fría, we head north from Coloncito toward El Pulpito, then crossing state lines into Zúlia and turning west again to Orope, then continuing, crossing the stage 2 route, to reach Boca de Grita and Puerto Internacional de la Unión, a bridge crossing the Rio Grita just before it flows into the Rio Zúlia, and sees us cross the international boundary into Colombia at the frontier town of Puerto Santander.
Constructed in 1989, the bridge has been the southernmost transit point between Colombia and Zúlia state, and has greatly benefited trade in the Freeport-style zone; many inhabitants of Boca de Grita will cross into Puerto Santander for their Holy Week festivities and vice versa; the border has been closed a couple of times in recent times due to political tensions resulting in a large exodus of Venezuelans or cross-border illicit activity, but the relatively isolated locale of this bridge means it is often one of the earliest transit points between the two nations to reopen.
The proximity of Táchira province to Colombia, the relative isolation within Colombia of Cúcuta and its surrounding area due to the difficulty of accessing it via the Andean mountain passes, and the many border crossings has meant that the Norte de Santander province has some level of affinity with Táchira, and the Vuelta al Táchira has seen a number of excursions into their neighbours’ territory, both to stage hosts and simply - as has been the case often in recent years - simply as mid-stage detours before returning to Venezuelan territory for the stage finish. We are going to go with a finish on Colombian territory. The difficulty in accessing this part of Colombia had meant that it was not a frequent stop-off for the Vuelta a Colombia, and typically only Cúcuta and Pamplona would be used if the race did head into the region. It took until the fourth edition of the race, in 1954, to appear, with Ramón Hoyos winning a stage into Cúcuta before a rest day saw the riders transferred to Pamplona, before a stage to Bucaramanga and a second rest day immediately afterward. 1960 would see the race start in Villa del Rosario, neighbouring Cúcuta and on the border with Venezuela, with a stage to Pamplona of just 91km won by Pablo Hurtado. This would be replicated in 1963, with Rubén Dário Gómez triumphing, and again in 1965, but with the Grand Départ being in San Cristóbal del Táchira, which was the impetus behind the introduction of the Vuelta al Táchira in 1966. It would take until 1976 for the Vuelta a Colombia to return to Norte de Santander when it would once more see a Grand Départ in Cúcuta (the Czech team winning a TTT), by which time Pamplona had seen the region’s first inclusion in the Vuelta al Táchira, Álvaro Pachón winning a stage there in 1970 and Luís Villaroel triumphing over the same course a year later. The eastward expansion of the Vuelta al Táchira would mean excursions to the east for stage starts and finishes would become rare, although stages to Rubio, Urena and San António del Táchira would often detour across the border. 1981 would see the Vuelta a Colombia return, again with a TTT in Cúcuta followed by a semitappe to Pamplona, Israel Corredor winning the latter.
When racing returned to Norte de Santander in 1990, it was an odd year for the two main races that would appear there. The Vuelta al Táchira included a stage to Cúcuta, then a clone of the short Cúcuta-Pamplona stage from the earlier Vueltas a Colombia, local boy José Díaz winning both; then there would be another stage finish in Cúcuta, won by Venezuelan “home” rider Robinson Merchán. Meanwhile in the Vuelta a Colombia, the race starting in the isolated Amazonian east of Arauca before crossing the border to Guasdualito and back during two semitappes on day 2. Then they would travel through to Táchira province and into Cúcuta, with Soviet (Lithuanian) rider Remigijus Lupeikis winning the stage. In 1993 the race would be back, for the first time visiting both Ecuador and Venezuela in the same edition, with Juan Carlos Rosero of Ecuador winning in Pamplona, Jorge León Otalvaro in a stage from Pamplona to San Cristóbal, Libardo Niño winning a time trial in Cúcuta and then Raúl Acosta winning the final stage, a circuit race including the Venezuelan cities of Ureña and San António as well as a start/finish in Cúcuta. This same circuit would be seen in the 1997 Vuelta al Táchira, the next time the region would appear, but it would then be off-the-menu for a long time after an opening prologue in the Vuelta a Colombia in 2002, won by later Caisse d’Épargne domestique Marlon Pérez. The 2023 Vuelta al Táchira has a stage which is listed as being from Ureña to Cúcuta but don’t be fooled - it has laps of the 1993 and 1997 circuit before a climb up to Cerro Cristo Rey in Venezuela. Cúcuta hasn’t hosted a start or finish in a UCI-accredited race since 2002. So let’s bring it back.
After around 60km of flat and slightly uphill false flat through Norte de Santander, we arrive in the city of Cúcuta, officially San José de Cúcuta, the sixth largest city in Colombia with a population of over 750.000. The capital and economic hub of Norte de Santander, the region was first discovered by German explorer-conquistadores in the 16th Century, but the modern settlement was originally founded as San José de Guasimales, to differentiate it from a native settlement nearby, but when growing to consume the latter it adopted the name San José de Cúcuta from the native word Kukuta, the name of the original settlement and, curiously, translating as “house of the goblin”. Originally it was a backwater, with more interest being in the hills and the city of Pamplona, around which gold mines had been found, but the difficulty of transporting such goods through the mountains led to the river navigation to the Caribbean becoming a favoured route and creating a need for transit points in what is now known as the Cúcuta valley. Founded in the early 18th Century, by the end of that period it had grown to a flourishing trading city and one of the most important in the Colombian East. It was also the site of one of the most crucial battles fought by the Libertadores, when Simon Bolívar’s troops defeated those of Spanish loyalist Ramón Correa in 1813, as Bolívar fought to secure the banks of the Táchira river, and although the battle itself was comparatively small - just 22 fatalities - it enabled the belligerents to secure their Colombian possessions and pave the way for the Admirable Campaign as the great liberator fought his way back through Venezuela toward his hometown of Caracas and was able to secure independence for both Colombia and Venezuela across these campaigns. One of the important lieutenants under Bolívar was Francisco de Paula Santander, who became vice president of New Colombia and then the first President of Nueva Granada and became associated for life with the fight for independence in the Cúcuta valley; the city’s university, one of the most prestigious in Latin America, was named for him. He is also one of the signatories of the 1821 Constitución de Cúcuta, which declared him vice president to Simon Bolívar and created the Republic of Colombia. Cúcuta remained one of the most important cities of the country until it was greatly ravaged by earthquake damage in 1875. During the reconstruction, a new centre on a grid basis was created and soon afterward the railroad arrived in the city, and greatly expedited its recovery, although the railroad itself did not survive and fell into disuse in the 1950s.
In more recent times Cúcuta has given Colombia its second President, this time of actual Colombia rather than the united provinces of Nueva Granada, this being Virgilio Barco, the grandson of an army general turned oil baron, and who led the country from 1986 to 1990, during some of the most challenging times for the nation. A former ambassador to Great Britain and the United States as well as a director of the World Bank and a mayor of Bogotá, he supported anti-poverty programs and his moves to combat drug trafficking won him significant popularity in the wider world, but his economic policies being based around the old adage of “short term pain for long term gain” and a rise in violence as the drugs cartels fought back against crackdowns hurt his popularity and he was unable to win re-election. He was aided in his fight against the cartels by another local, Luis Alberto Villamizar, an ally of Luis Carlos Galán who led the Nuevo Liberalismo group and successfully passed legislation such as the National Narcotics Statute of 1986, one of the most crucial items of law in the fight against drugs in the country, for which notorious drug lord Pablo Escobar attempted to have him assassinated, which caused Barco to deploy Villamizar on overseas embassy duty for two years. After his return to Colombia, Escobar had Villamizar’s wife and sister kidnapped along with eight other associates. Barco allowed Villamizar to conduct his own release negotiations, which he did so successfully that two years later he was commissioned by Escobar himself to negotiate his own surrender to authorities. Go figure. His crisis aversion skills in these major news events would be immortalised by Colombia’s greatest literary figure, Gabriel García Márquez, in News of a Kidnapping.
More recently, Cúcuta has had more prominence in the field of sport, with Fabiola Zuluaga, Colombia’s most successful ever tennis competitor, coming from the city; she won five WTA Tour events, four of which being the Copa Colsanitas in Bogotá, and reached a highest rank of 16th on the world rankings in the mid 2000s, with a best in Grand Slam competition of the semi-finals in the 2004 Australian Open. Her legacy has been continued more recently by youngster Camila Osorio, who has won two WTA Tour events - again both the Copa Colsanitas, and like her predecessor all her best results are on clay. More prominent, most likely, to many would be star footballer James Rodríguez, who had been developing in Argentine and then Portuguese football before moving to Monaco before the 2014 World Cup; there he stunned the world and won the Golden Boot earning himself a big money transfer to Real Madrid; however from then his career has stuttered a bit as he has struggled to meet lofty expectations. A two-year loan to Bayern München saw him collect more trophies and contribute, but not as much as had been hoped, and eventually he would find his way to less world-renowned destinations like Everton and Olympiakos, though successful performances back in South America and a Golden Ball award at the 2024 Copa América have seen him enjoy a resurgence. Finally, there is Yeison Delgado, a Venezuelan cyclist who was born in Cúcuta and won a Vuelta a Colombia stage and finished on the podium of the Vuelta al Táchira before a doping ban following a positive test for EPO and synthetic testosterone at the 2004 Vuelta a Guatemala; upon his return he took several years to fight back to his best, but eventually won the GC of the Vuelta al Táchira, his de facto home race, in 2013.
I could have gone for a flat finish in Cúcuta; after all, most races that finish here do. However, I had designs on something to shake things up a little, and have instead elected to finish with two laps of a 9,9km circuit. This includes a short (600m) sharp dig of a climb at 9% that snakes around the monument commemorating Bolívar’s triumphs of 1813, the hill being known as Loma Bolívar in honour of the great liberator.
Cresting at 16 and 6km from the line, this is steep enough to allow puncheurs to think that they can do something here, but also short enough that sprinters can power their way over as long as they can stay in contact. The question is going to be, though, what sort of rider does it favour in this kind of péloton? The Colombian-Venezuelan scene is not exactly renowned for its puncheurs, at least not for these super short ramps (although there are a few riders who have graduated from this scene who have proven to be more than adept at the World Tour level on this kind of terrain, just think of Jhonatán Narváez, Carlos Betancur or Sérgio Henao) while sprinters coming from this kind of scene tend to need to be a bit more durable than most (think the likes of Orluís Aular, Fernando Gaviria or Jonathan Guatibonza) - but 186km is a pretty long course for riders in the Vuelta al Táchira, which doesn’t tend to put stages of this kind of length out there too often, so there ought to be some tired legs and struggling domestiques. Besides, the sprinters won’t have many chances after this, so they’re going to need to make it count.
Stage 4: Ureña - Cerro Cristo Rey, 138km
GPM:
Alto de Las Dantas (cat.2) 10,3km @ 4,7%
Altos de Berlin (cat.3) 4,0km @ 5,2%
Páramo de la Laja (cat.2) 4,0km @ 9,6%
Alto de Palo Gordo (cat.2) 5,6km @ 8,2%
Back in Venezuela from start to finish after a quick hop across the border at the end of yesterday’s stage, this is our first medium mountain stage and my first true piece of innovation, as I take something which is fundamental to the core of the Vuelta al Táchira, but throw a curveball out there for the riders, as we take on the race’s historic icon, the Cerro Cristo Rey.
Before we get there, however, we must start off in the border town of Ureña. Home to just under 40.000 people, this city was named after its founder, Pedro María Ureña, it is currently the only municipality in Venezuela with a local economy rated as “excellent” on international standards, due to its thriving textile and furniture industry and its cross-border trade. The original site was known colloquially as Ureña but officially known as San Juan del Llano Táchira, however after the town was destroyed in the Cúcuta earthquake of 1875, it was rebuilt and officially christened Ureña. Its border status may have helped its economy grow, but it also makes it a flashpoint when diplomatic flare-ups between Colombia and Venezuela occur, such as in 2015 when Maduro closed the border and declared a state of emergency in the area, causing widespread protests and stranding visitors to the other side of the border. In recent times, however, relations have thawed, and in 2023 it was even agreed in Táchira state polities to allow passport-free entry for Colombians in the approved crossing points around Ureña and San António in order to spur tourism and open up the country somewhat; the seven years of closed borders have dramatically changed the area. Where once cross-border travel was big business, buses from Cúcuta full of border-hopping Colombians seeking bargains, now these towns, out of the way for regular Tachirense business, have taken a heavy hit, and while the border may have reopened, the cross-border traffic has been but a fraction of what it was.
Perhaps that is why Ureña has become a frequent host of the Vuelta al Táchira, spurring a bit of activity in the city, and bringing people into the town as well as broadcasting it around the televisions of the region (the Cúcuta valley and the Táchira area form a sort of local broadcasting bund, so to speak, with each broadcasting into the others’ airspace, meaning the race gets strong TV coverage in Norte de Santander). In earlier times, the city was off the menu for the Vuelta al Táchira, just being too out of the way, or occasionally being a mid-stage point or incorporating a circuit across the border akin to that from the 1973 Vuelta a Colombia. However, in more recent times it has been, if not an everpresent, then at least a regular stop-off for the local race par excellence, first appearing in 2003, and then nine times in the last fourteen editions since the shrinking of the race in 2011.
It has yet to host any stage finishes, but it has hosted stage start after stage start, and most of these stages follow a similar format; they begin with a flat/rolling circuit around Ureña and San António del Táchira, and then head inland via either the Alto de Las Dantas or the Alto de los Cacaos and then a finish. Most of these have been Cerro Cristo Rey MTF/HTF stages; 2003 and 2016 saw stages over Las Dantas and Berlin to San Cristóbal (César Salazar won solo in the former, Jackson Rodríguez won a two-up sprint against Juan José Ruíz in the latter), 2011 saw a reduced sprint in Rubio won by Miguel Ubeto, but otherwise, it’s been a finish at Cerro Cristo Rey each time, and usually via Los Cacaos and then a short climb that is a little more than a punchy finish. Manuel Medina in 2013, Jimmi Briceño in 2017, José Serpa in 2018, Luís Guillermo Mora in 2019 and 2024, Kevin Rivera in 2020, and José Alarcón in 2022 and 2023 have all won Ureña to Cerro Cristo Rey stages, most of which have followed a similar format.
PCS approximation of a typical Ureña - Cerro Cristo Rey stage in recent years
My stage is harder in terms of cumulative climbing, but has no single climb as tough as Los Cacaos; the race typically only categorises the section from the junction where it splits off from Las Dantas, so only categorises it as an 8km @ 7,4% climb, but it’s actually more like 13km at 7% so a more than worthy cat.1. However, we’re not taking that route, and instead are going for the multiple easier climbs option (and beefing up the finale), going via Las Dantas and Berlin in the fashion of the 2003, 2011 and 2016 stages. However, we do start in the same fashion, with an out-and-back circuit between Ureña and the neighbouring border city of San António del Táchira, linked to Colombia by the Simon Bolívar International Bridge and home of the now somewhat dormant airpot Juan Vicente Gómez, named for an early President of Venezuela. We have an intermediate sprint at the end of each circuit upon the return to Ureña, before leaving the circuit on our third time to San António.
There are two climbs out of San António, Los Cacaos in the direction of El Capacho, and Las Dantas in the direction of Rubio. We are going to take the latter, which is the easier of the two, which is the opposite of what the current race usually does, but then it often uses Cristo Rey as a final impact segment of the race, whereas here I am using it to set up the later mountain stages. The climb to Las Dantas is fairly steady, 10,3km @ 4,7% with the last 9km at 5,1%. This leads us into the city of Rubio, a coffee-producing city of 70.000 that is one of the largest and most important in Táchira State. However, it is just a quick pass through here with a final intermediate sprint, we will revisit the city in more detail later. Instead now we head on toward San Cristóbal via the well known Altos de Berlin, a gradual and unthreatening ascent which has its biggest gradients in the final 4km or so which average 5,2% as seen here; the rest is nothing but false flat gradients, but given that it connects the capital of the province with one of its largest and most populous secondary cities, it is almost ever-present in the Vuelta al Táchira. My stage, therefore, is much more akin to the 2021 version of this stage in the second half.
PCS approximation of 2021 stage
“Sorry, Libertine, but this is a stage starting on a common circuit, travelling over common passes and finishing at a well-established finish for the race, where’s this innovation you promised?” I hear you ask. Well, glad you asked, as we’re about to get to it, as the final section of the stage sees us go full Javier Guillén. After descending the Altos de Berlin, we stop before the final ridge over to San Cristóbal, instead we head to Zorca. However, we’re not climbing to Rancherías (a well known climb in the area) via Troncal 5, instead we continue along the valley road to San Isidro, and this enables us to climb up to - and beyond - the Troncal road via a few rampas inhumanas…
The first kilometre of this, from San Isidro up to the Troncal 5 via Urbanización El Paraíso de La Laguna, is on hormigón at an average of almost 15%, and ramrod straight. After this we have a 90º left and then right on to the main road, before a brief stretch of low gradient battling in the Pie de Cuesta part of Capacho Nuevo, before a final uphill 1,2km at 11,3% that peaks at the Páramo de la Laja. This last stretch once more is on hormigón, but it is wide enough and well maintained enough to be part of a race, and crests just 18km from the line.
Concrete ramps en route to Páramo de la Laja
From here there’s a short dip then a short ascent again to the high point of the road, then we descend through Rancherías to the main urban area of Capacho Nuevo, base of the race’s most traditional uphill finish in recent years, Cerro El Cristo / Cristo Rey. This is basically a puncheur finish, but it’s an icon of the race and appears almost every year. The climb was first introduced to the race in 1992, but has been almost ever-present since. That first stage was won by Luís Barroso, a Venezuelan who had made progress in his early 20s and got some chances to race in Europe with Seur in Spain, and ZG Mobili in Italy. The following year’s stage from Táriba to Cerro El Cristo was won by Karl Belgarev, a Ukrainian rider for whom this appears to be the sole result logged in his career. Subsequent stages here have seen a few noteworthy victors that may be familiar to a more international cycling audience not fully versed in the Venezuelan domestic péloton, such as Carlos Maya, who would win the race in 1995, and accumulate a further five podiums with the last being in 2005, who would win at the summit here on two occasions; Hernán Dário Muñoz, a Colombian who would come to Europe with Savio and win the Tour de Langkawi as well as ride two Giri as well as winning the Vuelta al Táchira GC during his spell with Colombia-Selle Italia as the team often used this as an early season tune-up; Fredy Excelino González, who would also come to Europe with Savio but to more success, winning the King of the Mountains jersey at the Giro twice, in 1991 and 1993, these being the only GTs he completed out of 7 across the Giro and Vuelta with spells at Ceramica Panaria-Navigare and Relax-Fuenlabrada before returning to South America, who would also win here twice; and long-time veteran of the Italian scene José Serpa, another Colombian who came to Europe with Savio and spent a decade with either Androni or Lampre, winning the Tour de Langkawi twice (as well as two more wins at MTFs at the race) and entering 11 Grand Tours, with a personal best of 12th at the 2009 Giro d’Italia, which has subsequently been upgraded to 9th with the removals of Danilo di Luca, Franco Pellizotti and Tadej Valjavec; and Kevin Rivera, another LatAm rider brought to Europe by Gianni Savio, but this time from Costa Rica. A specialist in short Unipuerto stages, Rivera is a prodigious climber but lacking in durability meaning his best successes have come on the Asia Tour. As well as these, the summit has also been crested with arms aloft by well-established local heroes such as José Chacón, Jonathán Camargo (twice), Rónald González, Manuel Medina, Juan Murillo, Luís Guillermo Mora (twice), while the record for victories here is shared on three apiece by “Mr 63%” Jimmi Briceño, who would win here in 2010, 2012 and 2017, and José Alarcón who won the stage three times consecutively in 2021, 2022 and 2023. The only year the climb has not seen a stage finish since its introduction in 1992 was 1997, so it has now been in 27 consecutive editions of the race (it being one of the few races that was able to run unhindered through the pandemic). Cerro El Cristo being an icon of the race as well as an accessible tourist site in the region, it therefore always tends to pack in the fans.
Vuelta al Táchira at El Cristo Rey in the early 2000s
Drone footage of the Monumento Cristo Rey overlooking Capacho Nuevo
The interesting thing about Cerro El Cristo, however, is that it’s not the actual summit of its road but actually on the shoulder of it. The steep nature of the climb and the lack of infrastructure at the actual summit means that it isn’t really viable for a finish and the climb to the monument and Parque El Cristo Rey is challenging enough - while different routes into Capacho Nuevo afford different starting points, once they all converge the final 1,5km is at 13%; there is, however a whole other side to the climb which has never been seen in racing, and which I have chosen to use here. With this side going over the summit and then gradual downhill to the monument I guess you could say that Cristo Rey is kind of like a reverse Arrate, like the traditional side being shorter and steeper but stopping before the summit would be climbing the Krabelín side but finishing at the sanctuary, while the ‘new’ side I am exploring is more like the Ixua side, going up and over the high point of the road before finishing at the sanctuary.
Cerro El Cristo via the Palo Gordo road is a borderline cat.1/cat.2 climb; it requires a short descent from Capacho Nuevo to Peribeca to its start (this is sometimes, at least in the stages coming from the east which have been rare in recent years, part of the lead-in to the regular Cristo Rey climb when ridden in the opposite direction), and then averages just over 8km in 5,6km, but with 2,5km at 11% in the middle and a very steep repecho of 400m at 13% just after leaving the main road. The steepest part, around a kilometre from the top and the final ramp of the steep middle section, is 400m at 15%, before easing down to a final 800m at 7%. The summit is just 1km from the line, which is a gradual downhill so I guess you could say this is a bit more comparable to something like Xorret del Catí, but it’s not quite so steep or as sharp as that. The climb’s actual statistics suggest something more like Planche des Belles Filles as a comparable, maybe Alto del Cordal from the Vuelta. It is steep enough to definitely do some damage, but not long enough to completely define the race before the stages to come - however given tomorrow is a time trial, this may discourage some action, so having the final two climbs including some horrendous gradients that will minimise the effect of drafting, the hope is that it should negate any conservatism in the bunch, not that the often highly charged Venezuelan domestic péloton is likely to be concerned about that. However, I have some serious challenges to come, so we shall see.
Climb on the Ruta Capacho from Palo Gordo
Approaching the summit
This one should see some proper GC gaps opened up, to set us up for some climbing of a very different kind in the days to come.
GPM:
Alto de Las Dantas (cat.2) 10,3km @ 4,7%
Altos de Berlin (cat.3) 4,0km @ 5,2%
Páramo de la Laja (cat.2) 4,0km @ 9,6%
Alto de Palo Gordo (cat.2) 5,6km @ 8,2%
Back in Venezuela from start to finish after a quick hop across the border at the end of yesterday’s stage, this is our first medium mountain stage and my first true piece of innovation, as I take something which is fundamental to the core of the Vuelta al Táchira, but throw a curveball out there for the riders, as we take on the race’s historic icon, the Cerro Cristo Rey.
Before we get there, however, we must start off in the border town of Ureña. Home to just under 40.000 people, this city was named after its founder, Pedro María Ureña, it is currently the only municipality in Venezuela with a local economy rated as “excellent” on international standards, due to its thriving textile and furniture industry and its cross-border trade. The original site was known colloquially as Ureña but officially known as San Juan del Llano Táchira, however after the town was destroyed in the Cúcuta earthquake of 1875, it was rebuilt and officially christened Ureña. Its border status may have helped its economy grow, but it also makes it a flashpoint when diplomatic flare-ups between Colombia and Venezuela occur, such as in 2015 when Maduro closed the border and declared a state of emergency in the area, causing widespread protests and stranding visitors to the other side of the border. In recent times, however, relations have thawed, and in 2023 it was even agreed in Táchira state polities to allow passport-free entry for Colombians in the approved crossing points around Ureña and San António in order to spur tourism and open up the country somewhat; the seven years of closed borders have dramatically changed the area. Where once cross-border travel was big business, buses from Cúcuta full of border-hopping Colombians seeking bargains, now these towns, out of the way for regular Tachirense business, have taken a heavy hit, and while the border may have reopened, the cross-border traffic has been but a fraction of what it was.
Perhaps that is why Ureña has become a frequent host of the Vuelta al Táchira, spurring a bit of activity in the city, and bringing people into the town as well as broadcasting it around the televisions of the region (the Cúcuta valley and the Táchira area form a sort of local broadcasting bund, so to speak, with each broadcasting into the others’ airspace, meaning the race gets strong TV coverage in Norte de Santander). In earlier times, the city was off the menu for the Vuelta al Táchira, just being too out of the way, or occasionally being a mid-stage point or incorporating a circuit across the border akin to that from the 1973 Vuelta a Colombia. However, in more recent times it has been, if not an everpresent, then at least a regular stop-off for the local race par excellence, first appearing in 2003, and then nine times in the last fourteen editions since the shrinking of the race in 2011.
It has yet to host any stage finishes, but it has hosted stage start after stage start, and most of these stages follow a similar format; they begin with a flat/rolling circuit around Ureña and San António del Táchira, and then head inland via either the Alto de Las Dantas or the Alto de los Cacaos and then a finish. Most of these have been Cerro Cristo Rey MTF/HTF stages; 2003 and 2016 saw stages over Las Dantas and Berlin to San Cristóbal (César Salazar won solo in the former, Jackson Rodríguez won a two-up sprint against Juan José Ruíz in the latter), 2011 saw a reduced sprint in Rubio won by Miguel Ubeto, but otherwise, it’s been a finish at Cerro Cristo Rey each time, and usually via Los Cacaos and then a short climb that is a little more than a punchy finish. Manuel Medina in 2013, Jimmi Briceño in 2017, José Serpa in 2018, Luís Guillermo Mora in 2019 and 2024, Kevin Rivera in 2020, and José Alarcón in 2022 and 2023 have all won Ureña to Cerro Cristo Rey stages, most of which have followed a similar format.
PCS approximation of a typical Ureña - Cerro Cristo Rey stage in recent years
My stage is harder in terms of cumulative climbing, but has no single climb as tough as Los Cacaos; the race typically only categorises the section from the junction where it splits off from Las Dantas, so only categorises it as an 8km @ 7,4% climb, but it’s actually more like 13km at 7% so a more than worthy cat.1. However, we’re not taking that route, and instead are going for the multiple easier climbs option (and beefing up the finale), going via Las Dantas and Berlin in the fashion of the 2003, 2011 and 2016 stages. However, we do start in the same fashion, with an out-and-back circuit between Ureña and the neighbouring border city of San António del Táchira, linked to Colombia by the Simon Bolívar International Bridge and home of the now somewhat dormant airpot Juan Vicente Gómez, named for an early President of Venezuela. We have an intermediate sprint at the end of each circuit upon the return to Ureña, before leaving the circuit on our third time to San António.
There are two climbs out of San António, Los Cacaos in the direction of El Capacho, and Las Dantas in the direction of Rubio. We are going to take the latter, which is the easier of the two, which is the opposite of what the current race usually does, but then it often uses Cristo Rey as a final impact segment of the race, whereas here I am using it to set up the later mountain stages. The climb to Las Dantas is fairly steady, 10,3km @ 4,7% with the last 9km at 5,1%. This leads us into the city of Rubio, a coffee-producing city of 70.000 that is one of the largest and most important in Táchira State. However, it is just a quick pass through here with a final intermediate sprint, we will revisit the city in more detail later. Instead now we head on toward San Cristóbal via the well known Altos de Berlin, a gradual and unthreatening ascent which has its biggest gradients in the final 4km or so which average 5,2% as seen here; the rest is nothing but false flat gradients, but given that it connects the capital of the province with one of its largest and most populous secondary cities, it is almost ever-present in the Vuelta al Táchira. My stage, therefore, is much more akin to the 2021 version of this stage in the second half.
PCS approximation of 2021 stage
“Sorry, Libertine, but this is a stage starting on a common circuit, travelling over common passes and finishing at a well-established finish for the race, where’s this innovation you promised?” I hear you ask. Well, glad you asked, as we’re about to get to it, as the final section of the stage sees us go full Javier Guillén. After descending the Altos de Berlin, we stop before the final ridge over to San Cristóbal, instead we head to Zorca. However, we’re not climbing to Rancherías (a well known climb in the area) via Troncal 5, instead we continue along the valley road to San Isidro, and this enables us to climb up to - and beyond - the Troncal road via a few rampas inhumanas…
The first kilometre of this, from San Isidro up to the Troncal 5 via Urbanización El Paraíso de La Laguna, is on hormigón at an average of almost 15%, and ramrod straight. After this we have a 90º left and then right on to the main road, before a brief stretch of low gradient battling in the Pie de Cuesta part of Capacho Nuevo, before a final uphill 1,2km at 11,3% that peaks at the Páramo de la Laja. This last stretch once more is on hormigón, but it is wide enough and well maintained enough to be part of a race, and crests just 18km from the line.
Concrete ramps en route to Páramo de la Laja
From here there’s a short dip then a short ascent again to the high point of the road, then we descend through Rancherías to the main urban area of Capacho Nuevo, base of the race’s most traditional uphill finish in recent years, Cerro El Cristo / Cristo Rey. This is basically a puncheur finish, but it’s an icon of the race and appears almost every year. The climb was first introduced to the race in 1992, but has been almost ever-present since. That first stage was won by Luís Barroso, a Venezuelan who had made progress in his early 20s and got some chances to race in Europe with Seur in Spain, and ZG Mobili in Italy. The following year’s stage from Táriba to Cerro El Cristo was won by Karl Belgarev, a Ukrainian rider for whom this appears to be the sole result logged in his career. Subsequent stages here have seen a few noteworthy victors that may be familiar to a more international cycling audience not fully versed in the Venezuelan domestic péloton, such as Carlos Maya, who would win the race in 1995, and accumulate a further five podiums with the last being in 2005, who would win at the summit here on two occasions; Hernán Dário Muñoz, a Colombian who would come to Europe with Savio and win the Tour de Langkawi as well as ride two Giri as well as winning the Vuelta al Táchira GC during his spell with Colombia-Selle Italia as the team often used this as an early season tune-up; Fredy Excelino González, who would also come to Europe with Savio but to more success, winning the King of the Mountains jersey at the Giro twice, in 1991 and 1993, these being the only GTs he completed out of 7 across the Giro and Vuelta with spells at Ceramica Panaria-Navigare and Relax-Fuenlabrada before returning to South America, who would also win here twice; and long-time veteran of the Italian scene José Serpa, another Colombian who came to Europe with Savio and spent a decade with either Androni or Lampre, winning the Tour de Langkawi twice (as well as two more wins at MTFs at the race) and entering 11 Grand Tours, with a personal best of 12th at the 2009 Giro d’Italia, which has subsequently been upgraded to 9th with the removals of Danilo di Luca, Franco Pellizotti and Tadej Valjavec; and Kevin Rivera, another LatAm rider brought to Europe by Gianni Savio, but this time from Costa Rica. A specialist in short Unipuerto stages, Rivera is a prodigious climber but lacking in durability meaning his best successes have come on the Asia Tour. As well as these, the summit has also been crested with arms aloft by well-established local heroes such as José Chacón, Jonathán Camargo (twice), Rónald González, Manuel Medina, Juan Murillo, Luís Guillermo Mora (twice), while the record for victories here is shared on three apiece by “Mr 63%” Jimmi Briceño, who would win here in 2010, 2012 and 2017, and José Alarcón who won the stage three times consecutively in 2021, 2022 and 2023. The only year the climb has not seen a stage finish since its introduction in 1992 was 1997, so it has now been in 27 consecutive editions of the race (it being one of the few races that was able to run unhindered through the pandemic). Cerro El Cristo being an icon of the race as well as an accessible tourist site in the region, it therefore always tends to pack in the fans.
Vuelta al Táchira at El Cristo Rey in the early 2000s
The interesting thing about Cerro El Cristo, however, is that it’s not the actual summit of its road but actually on the shoulder of it. The steep nature of the climb and the lack of infrastructure at the actual summit means that it isn’t really viable for a finish and the climb to the monument and Parque El Cristo Rey is challenging enough - while different routes into Capacho Nuevo afford different starting points, once they all converge the final 1,5km is at 13%; there is, however a whole other side to the climb which has never been seen in racing, and which I have chosen to use here. With this side going over the summit and then gradual downhill to the monument I guess you could say that Cristo Rey is kind of like a reverse Arrate, like the traditional side being shorter and steeper but stopping before the summit would be climbing the Krabelín side but finishing at the sanctuary, while the ‘new’ side I am exploring is more like the Ixua side, going up and over the high point of the road before finishing at the sanctuary.
Cerro El Cristo via the Palo Gordo road is a borderline cat.1/cat.2 climb; it requires a short descent from Capacho Nuevo to Peribeca to its start (this is sometimes, at least in the stages coming from the east which have been rare in recent years, part of the lead-in to the regular Cristo Rey climb when ridden in the opposite direction), and then averages just over 8km in 5,6km, but with 2,5km at 11% in the middle and a very steep repecho of 400m at 13% just after leaving the main road. The steepest part, around a kilometre from the top and the final ramp of the steep middle section, is 400m at 15%, before easing down to a final 800m at 7%. The summit is just 1km from the line, which is a gradual downhill so I guess you could say this is a bit more comparable to something like Xorret del Catí, but it’s not quite so steep or as sharp as that. The climb’s actual statistics suggest something more like Planche des Belles Filles as a comparable, maybe Alto del Cordal from the Vuelta. It is steep enough to definitely do some damage, but not long enough to completely define the race before the stages to come - however given tomorrow is a time trial, this may discourage some action, so having the final two climbs including some horrendous gradients that will minimise the effect of drafting, the hope is that it should negate any conservatism in the bunch, not that the often highly charged Venezuelan domestic péloton is likely to be concerned about that. However, I have some serious challenges to come, so we shall see.
Climb on the Ruta Capacho from Palo Gordo
Approaching the summit
This one should see some proper GC gaps opened up, to set us up for some climbing of a very different kind in the days to come.
Stage 5: Rubio - Rubio, 15,0km (CRI)
Day five, and it’s our ITT, as we feature a route around the city of Rubio which should be familiar - albeit not in time trial format admittedly - for many of the riders in the bunch. This city of 90.000 is a central hub of coffee production in Táchira State, and one of the largest cities other than San Cristóbal in the province. Founded in 1794 by Gervasio Rubio, from whose name the city’s own derives, it was for a period the capital of the region, before losing that role to its larger neighbour when it was outgrown. It is often known affectionately as Ciudad Pontalida, meaning City of Bridges, owing to the many rivers and waterfalls around its outskirts that mean it features many, well, bridges of course.
Rubio, Táchira is also the birthplace of Leonardo Ruiz Pineda, an important figure in Venezuelan politics who served as the Governor of Táchira under the premiership of Romulo Betancourt (the same Betancourt who had led the campaign to overthrow one dictator and who would later see an assassination attempt on his life by Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo) and as the Minister of Communications in the government of Rómulo Gallegos in his brief 1948 stint in power following the country’s first elections believed by posterity to have been fully free in 1947 before the coup d’état that installed Marcos Pérez Jiménez as dictator; as a major figure in the government Ruiz Pineda was imprisoned, but with many of the higher-ups in that former government exiled or imprisoned for longer stints, he acquired leadership of Acción Democrática and led clandestine resistance against the dictatorship and to set the framework of a return to democracy that would eventually see fruition in 1958 with the return of Betancourt to power; however Ruiz Pineda would not see the fruits of his labour, as he was assassinated by police at the behest of the government in October 1952 at the age of 36.
A fellow founder of Acción Democrática, Carlos Andrés Pérez Rodríguez, was also born in Rubio, although he had moved to Caracas at the age of 16 upon the death of his father. He was exiled following the 1948 coup d’état, but clandestinely returned secretively in 1952 to complete special missions especially after the death of Rui Pineda. After the fall of the dictatorship, he would serve as Minister of the Interior and Justice in Betancourt’s administration following his restoration as leader in 1959, and neutralised disquiet on both wings in order to encourage a more centrist, stable politics for Venezuela. He would eventually serve as President in his own right from 1974 to 1979, and in pushing for economic improvement would accelerate oil production leading to implications remaining to this day, such as the nationalisation of the fossil fuel industry in Venezuela with the creation of PDVSA; ironically therefore he also became the first Latin American leader to win the Earth Care award, and also while his policies enabled a level of corruption to become ingrained in central industries, he also aggressively opposed dictatorships such as those of Somoza in Nicaragua and Pinochet in Chile. After losing his bid for re-election, Pérez would return to the presidency a decade later in 1989, and in contradiction to his earlier policies, he would liberalise the economy and implement austerity measures that created widespread protests, which resulted in an aggressive crackdown and a calling of a state of emergency that worsened the social situation in the country, leading to human rights violations, arbitrary detention and allegations of use of torture, all among the things that he had decried other Latin American countries for using in his previous tenure as President. Go figure. This also resulted in two failed coups in 1992, one of which was by Hugo Chávez, who was then paraded on TV to call for a cessation to hostility - a move which backfired eventually with the MBR-200 leader taking the opportunity to push his agenda to the broadcast while being forced to admit failure… “for now”. In the end, however, Pérez would be impeached for misuse and embezzlement of public funds the following year, being sentenced eventually to 28 months in prison. He would eventually scarper to the United States after failing to secure a Senate seat in 1999 and remained embittered in self-imposed exile until his death in 2010.
Closer to home for the forum, the city is home to Yonathán Salinas, a rider who has won the Vuelta a Venezuela in 2014 and the Vuelta al Táchira in 2017, and also to one of the stalwarts of representing Venezuela at the highest levels of pro cycling, Jackson Rodríguez.
After some promising performances including hitting the podium of the 2007 Vuelta al Táchira, Rodríguez would be signed to Gianni Savio’s Diquigiovanni team for 2008, and would ride in the Italian newspaper’s classified ads section jersey for eight seasons, during which he would ride the Giro on six occasions, with a best finish of 26th in 2009. Although he would ride frequently in support of the likes of Gilberto Simoni, Michele Scarponi and Franco Pellizotti, his main results in his own right came in Latin America where he was given a bit more freedom to pursue his own goals, with an overall win at the Vuelta a México in 2009 and strong results at races like the Vuelta a la Independencia Nacional, the Tour de San Luís and the Vuelta a Venezuela, as well as three top 10s (with a best of 3rd, again in 2009) at the Tour de Langkawi - although his most notable appearance in this time is, rather unfortunately, being Androni Giocattoli’s fifth best TTT rider in 2010, costing Michele Scarponi more time relative to Ivan Basso than he would lose in the rest of the race combined. Rodríguez returned home to Venezuela in 2016 and rode on until 2020 before retiring during the pandemic, his final result of note being a top 10 in a circuit race at the Vuelta al Táchira around his home town.
As one of the largest cities of Táchira State, as you can imagine, Rubio has been a frequent host of the Vuelta al Táchira. Colombian Jairo Cruz was the first to win here, in the second edition of the race back in 1967. Subsequent notable winners include Martín Emilio “Cochise” Rodríguez, one of the great icons of Colombian cycling, in 1968 and 1971, two-time Vuelta al Táchira winner Fernando Fontes in 1976, Santos Bermúdez in 1972, multi-time GC winner Mario Medina in 1983, Leonardo Sierra, two-time Giro GC top 10 and stage winner in 1989, Tour stage winner and Giro top 10 GC rider Nelson “Cacaíto” Rodríguez in 1993, José Serpa in 2005, Miguel Ubeto in 2011, and Jhonatán Restrepo on the most recent visit to the city in 2020.
Jhonatán Restrepo wins in Rubio in 2020
The city was almost ever-present in the 1960s and 1970s, but became a much more infrequent host in the 1980s and in the first part of the 1990s. However, in 1995, for the first time, they went from point-to-point races finishing in Rubio to a circuit race in the city, and this circuit became the main way that the race would visit the city from that point onward.
Typical Vuelta al Táchira Rubio stage, approximated by PCS
This stage design loops the city’s western edge, but I have extended it out to the eastern side as well to get the distance up to 15km and make it a long enough time trial - since we’re used to closing off large parts of the San António-Rubio highway for the regular circuit, it shouldn’t be a problem. I have also done the stage in the opposite direction from the regular race versions and put the finish on the Bramón road to enable the riders to go in both directions at the finish, so that riders departing from the main sports stadium of the city (which can host all the trappings) can set off on the northbound carriageway, and riders finishing can arrive on the southbound route.
15-20km is a fairly typical length for an ITT in the Vuelta al Táchira, even in the days when the race was 2 weeks long. These frequently include a reasonably-sized climb as well, such as a couple we are going to see in road stages later on so I won’t go into in great detail, but other examples would be the Coloncito TT in 2014, all gradual low-gradient climbing from La Fría; 2020’s San Cristóbal to Palmira TT of around 16km, won by noted TT engine (ahem) Kevin Rivera, and Óscar Sevilla winning an ITT from Táriba to San Cristóbal with a climb of the ascent used in the 1977 World Championships Road Race. I have eschewed climbing in the time trial because I have some important climbing to be done in the stages to come, so the flat engines need to make their chance to build up a lead count. No, this TT should not be enough to counter the climbing to come, but this is a race which should be - and historically always has been - focused on the mountain climbers, so that’s not a bad thing. I hope.
Day five, and it’s our ITT, as we feature a route around the city of Rubio which should be familiar - albeit not in time trial format admittedly - for many of the riders in the bunch. This city of 90.000 is a central hub of coffee production in Táchira State, and one of the largest cities other than San Cristóbal in the province. Founded in 1794 by Gervasio Rubio, from whose name the city’s own derives, it was for a period the capital of the region, before losing that role to its larger neighbour when it was outgrown. It is often known affectionately as Ciudad Pontalida, meaning City of Bridges, owing to the many rivers and waterfalls around its outskirts that mean it features many, well, bridges of course.
Rubio, Táchira is also the birthplace of Leonardo Ruiz Pineda, an important figure in Venezuelan politics who served as the Governor of Táchira under the premiership of Romulo Betancourt (the same Betancourt who had led the campaign to overthrow one dictator and who would later see an assassination attempt on his life by Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo) and as the Minister of Communications in the government of Rómulo Gallegos in his brief 1948 stint in power following the country’s first elections believed by posterity to have been fully free in 1947 before the coup d’état that installed Marcos Pérez Jiménez as dictator; as a major figure in the government Ruiz Pineda was imprisoned, but with many of the higher-ups in that former government exiled or imprisoned for longer stints, he acquired leadership of Acción Democrática and led clandestine resistance against the dictatorship and to set the framework of a return to democracy that would eventually see fruition in 1958 with the return of Betancourt to power; however Ruiz Pineda would not see the fruits of his labour, as he was assassinated by police at the behest of the government in October 1952 at the age of 36.
A fellow founder of Acción Democrática, Carlos Andrés Pérez Rodríguez, was also born in Rubio, although he had moved to Caracas at the age of 16 upon the death of his father. He was exiled following the 1948 coup d’état, but clandestinely returned secretively in 1952 to complete special missions especially after the death of Rui Pineda. After the fall of the dictatorship, he would serve as Minister of the Interior and Justice in Betancourt’s administration following his restoration as leader in 1959, and neutralised disquiet on both wings in order to encourage a more centrist, stable politics for Venezuela. He would eventually serve as President in his own right from 1974 to 1979, and in pushing for economic improvement would accelerate oil production leading to implications remaining to this day, such as the nationalisation of the fossil fuel industry in Venezuela with the creation of PDVSA; ironically therefore he also became the first Latin American leader to win the Earth Care award, and also while his policies enabled a level of corruption to become ingrained in central industries, he also aggressively opposed dictatorships such as those of Somoza in Nicaragua and Pinochet in Chile. After losing his bid for re-election, Pérez would return to the presidency a decade later in 1989, and in contradiction to his earlier policies, he would liberalise the economy and implement austerity measures that created widespread protests, which resulted in an aggressive crackdown and a calling of a state of emergency that worsened the social situation in the country, leading to human rights violations, arbitrary detention and allegations of use of torture, all among the things that he had decried other Latin American countries for using in his previous tenure as President. Go figure. This also resulted in two failed coups in 1992, one of which was by Hugo Chávez, who was then paraded on TV to call for a cessation to hostility - a move which backfired eventually with the MBR-200 leader taking the opportunity to push his agenda to the broadcast while being forced to admit failure… “for now”. In the end, however, Pérez would be impeached for misuse and embezzlement of public funds the following year, being sentenced eventually to 28 months in prison. He would eventually scarper to the United States after failing to secure a Senate seat in 1999 and remained embittered in self-imposed exile until his death in 2010.
Closer to home for the forum, the city is home to Yonathán Salinas, a rider who has won the Vuelta a Venezuela in 2014 and the Vuelta al Táchira in 2017, and also to one of the stalwarts of representing Venezuela at the highest levels of pro cycling, Jackson Rodríguez.
After some promising performances including hitting the podium of the 2007 Vuelta al Táchira, Rodríguez would be signed to Gianni Savio’s Diquigiovanni team for 2008, and would ride in the Italian newspaper’s classified ads section jersey for eight seasons, during which he would ride the Giro on six occasions, with a best finish of 26th in 2009. Although he would ride frequently in support of the likes of Gilberto Simoni, Michele Scarponi and Franco Pellizotti, his main results in his own right came in Latin America where he was given a bit more freedom to pursue his own goals, with an overall win at the Vuelta a México in 2009 and strong results at races like the Vuelta a la Independencia Nacional, the Tour de San Luís and the Vuelta a Venezuela, as well as three top 10s (with a best of 3rd, again in 2009) at the Tour de Langkawi - although his most notable appearance in this time is, rather unfortunately, being Androni Giocattoli’s fifth best TTT rider in 2010, costing Michele Scarponi more time relative to Ivan Basso than he would lose in the rest of the race combined. Rodríguez returned home to Venezuela in 2016 and rode on until 2020 before retiring during the pandemic, his final result of note being a top 10 in a circuit race at the Vuelta al Táchira around his home town.
As one of the largest cities of Táchira State, as you can imagine, Rubio has been a frequent host of the Vuelta al Táchira. Colombian Jairo Cruz was the first to win here, in the second edition of the race back in 1967. Subsequent notable winners include Martín Emilio “Cochise” Rodríguez, one of the great icons of Colombian cycling, in 1968 and 1971, two-time Vuelta al Táchira winner Fernando Fontes in 1976, Santos Bermúdez in 1972, multi-time GC winner Mario Medina in 1983, Leonardo Sierra, two-time Giro GC top 10 and stage winner in 1989, Tour stage winner and Giro top 10 GC rider Nelson “Cacaíto” Rodríguez in 1993, José Serpa in 2005, Miguel Ubeto in 2011, and Jhonatán Restrepo on the most recent visit to the city in 2020.
Jhonatán Restrepo wins in Rubio in 2020
The city was almost ever-present in the 1960s and 1970s, but became a much more infrequent host in the 1980s and in the first part of the 1990s. However, in 1995, for the first time, they went from point-to-point races finishing in Rubio to a circuit race in the city, and this circuit became the main way that the race would visit the city from that point onward.
Typical Vuelta al Táchira Rubio stage, approximated by PCS
This stage design loops the city’s western edge, but I have extended it out to the eastern side as well to get the distance up to 15km and make it a long enough time trial - since we’re used to closing off large parts of the San António-Rubio highway for the regular circuit, it shouldn’t be a problem. I have also done the stage in the opposite direction from the regular race versions and put the finish on the Bramón road to enable the riders to go in both directions at the finish, so that riders departing from the main sports stadium of the city (which can host all the trappings) can set off on the northbound carriageway, and riders finishing can arrive on the southbound route.
15-20km is a fairly typical length for an ITT in the Vuelta al Táchira, even in the days when the race was 2 weeks long. These frequently include a reasonably-sized climb as well, such as a couple we are going to see in road stages later on so I won’t go into in great detail, but other examples would be the Coloncito TT in 2014, all gradual low-gradient climbing from La Fría; 2020’s San Cristóbal to Palmira TT of around 16km, won by noted TT engine (ahem) Kevin Rivera, and Óscar Sevilla winning an ITT from Táriba to San Cristóbal with a climb of the ascent used in the 1977 World Championships Road Race. I have eschewed climbing in the time trial because I have some important climbing to be done in the stages to come, so the flat engines need to make their chance to build up a lead count. No, this TT should not be enough to counter the climbing to come, but this is a race which should be - and historically always has been - focused on the mountain climbers, so that’s not a bad thing. I hope.
Stage 6: San Juan de Colón - Queniquea, 110km
GPM:
Alto de Susperia (cat.2) 14,3km @ 4,2%
Alto de La Cortada (cat.ESP) 25,2km @ 8,0%
Queniquea (cat.3) 2,3km @ 8,4%
Yep: it’s a 110km queen stage without a mountaintop finish. But you don’t really need more than one key-note climb if it’s one like this. This is a Táchirense equivalent of those Manizales stages in the Vuelta a Colombia, where basically the entire stage is the ascent and descent of the Alto de Letras. This is perhaps stretching the boundaries of acceptability at the level, but the race has done stuff like this before, and… well, I’ll get to that.
The stage host for the salida is San Juan de Colón, often known simply as Colón, a city of 57.000 people lying just north of the mountain ridge that crosses north of San Cristóbal and which includes the climb to Cerro El Cristo that hosted the stage 4 finish. As the shire town of Ayacucho municipality, it is perhaps best known as the birthplace of Ramón José Velásquez, a former lawyer and journalist who authored several books on Latin American political history and became Venezuela’s most renowned historian, even being imprisoned at one point for publishing a “Black Book of Dictatorship” in which he highlighted the abuses of power of the Marcos Pérez Jiménez administration. He would periodically contribute first-hand to politics as well, serving as Secretary General during Betancourt’s administration and as Minister of Communications during Rafael Caldera’s first premiership. He would also chair multiple commissions aimed at reforming the state and rebuilding national relationships, a role that would lend him such credibility that he was chosen to serve as interim president to complete the term of the recently-impeached Carlos Andrés Pérez in 1993 until the newly-elected Caldera - returning to office 20 years after leaving the first time - could be sworn in. It is also the hometown of Artur García, a sprinter who has won a number of stages of the Vueltas al Táchira and a Venezuela, as well as in Cuba, Bolivia, Uruguay and Colombia across a twenty-year career. He would not enjoy this stage.
Likely due to its proximity to frequent stage host La Grita, San Juan de Colón would have to wait until 1981 for its debut as a stage town in the Vuelta al Táchira, when in the height of the Ostbloc invasion days, Sergei Lesmyt would win a stage here on the penultimate day of the race, with Soviet teammate Aleksandr Gusyatnikov defending the yellow jersey. It would return as an early-race finish the following year, won by Enrique Campos, and the international flavour would continue in 1983 when Mexican Ignacio Mosquera would win a semitappe in the town. Aleksandr Krasnov would take another stage for the USSR in 1984, before Campos would restore home pride. After a brief layoff the city would become a stage start in 1987, a mountain stage to Tovar won by Jorge Salazar for Cuba, before José Ruíz would win the last stage finish here of the era a year later. In the 1990s it would become an almost-everpresent once more, with prominent winners including Leonardo Sierra in 1993 and future and former GC winners like Alexis Méndez in 1998, Aldrin Salamanca in 1999, Noel Vásquez in 2000, César Salazar in 2001 and Freddy Vargas in 2003 and 2012. More recent winners include Yonathán Monsalve in 2010, Carlos Galviz in 2015. Since then, however, it has only been a stage start, and that’s the role it has for me today.
The first part of the stage is a set of multi-stepped downhill saunterings via a couple of uncategorised uphill repechos. Before we get to La Fría, however, we turn right, and then head up a classic of the race, the two steps of gradual uphill grind up to La Grita. Except, with a difference. This all starts with the cat.2 Alto de Susperia, which is a 4,2% tempo grinder that leads to the small town of Seboruco. And then the real agony begins as we take on the Alto de la Cortada, one of the great monoliths. But before that, on the way, we go through one of the race’s most traditional hosts, La Grita.
The city of La Grita
With a population of 80.000 and beautiful colonial architecture, La Grita is one of the jewels of Táchira State, named for the mini-province that it - founded under the name of Ciudad de Atenas - was the centre of, and was one of the central towns that played a crucial role in Simon Bolívar’s Campaña Admirable, as he liberated his homeland from Spanish colonial rule through the summer of 1813.
Casa de Bolívar, where the great liberator stayed and lived during the Admirable Campaign
However, it is very difficult to not have a difficult stage to La Grita. It’s only accessible via this double-climb (14km at 4,2%, then 12km at just over 5%), which has been the primary route into the city in recent years, or over significant monolithic passes, such as Paramó El Zumbador from San Cristóbal and Táriba, or Paramó La Negra and Alto del Portachuelo from the northeast, from the cities in Mérida province. And one more to the south which has never been used in the race to date, but which we’ll go into in a second.
In recent years, the race has gone for Casa del Padre as its biggest summit finish, so La Grita has tended to host tempo grinding uphill finishes, but it wasn’t always thus; in fact often it hosted stages from Tovar which would usually go over Portachuelo or La Negra and then finish on a descent into La Grita. The city is legitimately one of the most traditional spots for the race, however, having been introduced at the finish of the second stage of the very first edition when Álvaro Pachón was victorious, and it would then appear every year consecutively all the way until 1995 when it recorded its first absence; it has been a bit more sporadic since, but still somewhat regular. In 1967 it was accessed over Zumbador, and in 1968 the route with the gradual uphill from Seboruco was added. From 1969 a traditional route from Tovar would be added; this route would be retained until 1974, when the route direction was shaken up and José Duaxt won from San Cristóbal over Palo Grande and then climbing the traditional uphill version of the ascent. 1976 was an anomalous year, with a near 240km stage from Tovar, going all the way around to the north and then up the gradual ascent into La Grita, due to road problems with the mountain passes in the area, but usually when coming from Tovar, the traditional route was taken. Even when not coming from Tovar, in later years the same regular route would be used, but often from Zea or Santa Cruz de Mora (hometown of José Rujano of course) instead. In recent years, however, the uphill finish has been the main means by which La Grita has appeared on the route in recent times.
Most of the great and good of the race have won here, including José Patricio Jiménez, Enrique Campos, Israel Ochoa, Carlos Maya, Noel Vásquez, Manuel Medina (twice but also once in the Clásico Banfoandes), Hernán Dário Muñoz, José Alarcón, José Serpa, José Rujano Guillén (twice in the Vuelta al Táchira and once in the Clásico Banfoandes), Roniel Campos (twice), Nicolás Reidtler (twice), Fernando Fontes (three times) and Jonathán Camargo (three times), but the king of La Grita is Leonardo Sierra, who won four times in La Grita.
But… we’re not stopping in La Grita. This is nothing but the beginning. The 12km at 5,2% or so of this ascent is barely a beginning for the climb up to the south, as we’re going well up and beyond La Grita, up to - and beyond - the Paramó El Rosal, and on to the Alto de La Cortada, an absolute MONSTER of an ascent. Just the part after La Grita is 25km averaging almost 8%; this is a colossus, a beast, and a climb that just rips the péloton to absolute pieces, even if they’re doping up to Mr. 63% level as sometimes is the case at the Vuelta al Táchira. This is brutal.
Although it is not precise since it’s mapped from cronoescalada data (sadly there is to my knowledge no Venezuelan equivalent of Asier Bilbao and Gustavo Duncán’s excellent Altimetrias de Colombia site) so I can’t truly verify it, it is worth noting that these gradients put this instantly among the toughest climbs in the history of world cycling. Think Col de la Madeleine south, but 25% longer again. Think Alpe d’Huez, but 80% longer. Think Stelvio from Prato or Ventoux from Bédoin, but at a steeper average. It’s beyond brutal, and of course we’re here for it.
According to my Cronoescalada profile, this one scores 543 on the Coeficiente APM, and that despite not reaching too many murder death kill gradients. That puts it above Angliru (514), Gamoniteiro (492), Finestre (487), Mortirolo from Mazzo (486) and Cerro de la Muerte (486), and up there with Zoncolan (556). In fact, of all the climbs in world cycling that have been used in a pro race, only four can be named - Alto El Sifón, introduced in the 2024 Vuelta a Colombia; Babadağ, introduced in the 2023 Tour of Turkey; Páramo de Letras from Mariquita in Colombia, and Monte Zoncolan from Ovaro. And even the latter could potentially be debatable, given that the Coeficiente APM places a heavy emphasis on steepness that has a disproportionately large effect the steeper the gradient becomes, and that it does not have a means by which to account for altitude, given the peak of this climb is over 3000m above sea level. The toughest stretch here is from La Grita itself to Paramó El Rosal, which averages almost 9% for 16km (8,8% to be precise), before a flattening out and then a final 2km at nearly 10% up to La Cortada. That’s right, not too dissimilar from having Finestre (albeit on tarmac, but 1000m higher altitude), after you’ve already been grinding uphill for several kilometres.
“Libertine, this is a January race, surely this is overkill?” I hear you say. And you’re kind of right. But simultaneously, this is the centrepiece of the Venezuelan calendar, and it also has included some monsters of its own over the years. Its current beau is Casa del Padre, which is often classified in different sections that disguise its overall difficulty, but its toughest face used is 24km at 6% so very much HC-level; it has been used every year from 2012 to 2017 and then from 2021 to 2023. The race has also used the Paramó El Zumbador (37km at just under 5%), and even the Alto de Santo Domingo - 60km at approaching 5%, with a final 29km at 6,6% - as part of its traditional routes. That’s some serious climbing there, so this isn’t too out there as a possibility. But it is about as brutal a climb as you’re going to see in a race, with only a small number of climbs world-wide that could match up to it.
The summit of the climb is 32km from the line, and in the same fashion as many of these types of stages in Latin American cycling - just compare the traditional Letras to Manizales stage from the Vuelta a Colombia and Clásico RCN, or the Cerro de la Muerte stages at the Vuelta a Costa Rica, while the old Barinas to Mérida stages of the Vuelta al Táchira would be similar, using the Alto de Santo Domingo - it’s essentially - especially if you count the Susperia ascent as part of the whole climbing process, which generates around 60km at nearly 5% - one up, one down, with a lengthy descent of La Cortada making up the majority of it - being almost as hard, but slightly shorter than, its ascent, amounting to 21,6km at 7,9%. It’s going to be fast and challenging, with 24 hairpins, 15 of which are in the first 8km, and eventually ending at the town of San José de Bolívar.
After the 22km of descent from La Cortada, only 10km or so remain of the stage, and this is not flat, but by contrast to what came before it seems pretty benign. The first 4,2km of it are uphill, but with the most serious part of it being just over 2km at an average of a far less relevant 5% to a shoulder summit known as El Altico, it’s not the most challenging. A similar level descent follows, before a fairly noteworthy puncheur finish of 2,3km at 8,4% into our finishing town of Queniquea. With the short length of the stage and the comparison of the climb to a monolith like La Cortada, the climb could be easy to overlook; it looks like nothing on the profile, right?
Road in the closing phases of the stage
Queniquea
Hidden away in the distant parts of southeastern Táchira, Queniquea is a town of 20.000 that is the centre of the Sucre municipality and the home of former President José Eleazar López Contreras, a former army general who led the nation from 1935 to 1941, signing the 1936 constitution and founding the Ministry of Health and Social Assistance. Although his tenure saw great progress in human rights and equality in Venezuela, he also oversaw overuse of executive powers that forced opposition leaders into exile. Queniquea has only appeared in the Vuelta al Táchira three times, due to its relative isolation as a location; it was introduced as part of a medium mountain stage on the penultimate day in 2006, when Manuel Medina, José Serpa, Hernán Buenahora and Francisco Colorado - already fighting out the upper GC - fought out the stage and opened up a considerable advantage, eliminating all others from contention. In 2007 and 2009, the other two occasions the town has appeared, the stages were both identical ITTs from San José de Bolívar to Queniquea along the final stages of my stage here. See, I told you the ITTs in this race tended to be hilly! Hernán Buenahora won the first of these, ahead of a parade of local favourites like José Chacón, Manuel Medina, Jackson Rodríguez and Carlos Maya, but in 2009 it was all Venezuelans all the time, with José Rujano winning the stage from José Alarcón and Tomás Gil, and the best-placed overseas rider being César Salazar in 9th. This is my queen stage, and although it only really has the one key-note climb, that should be more than enough to create some carnage.
GPM:
Alto de Susperia (cat.2) 14,3km @ 4,2%
Alto de La Cortada (cat.ESP) 25,2km @ 8,0%
Queniquea (cat.3) 2,3km @ 8,4%
Yep: it’s a 110km queen stage without a mountaintop finish. But you don’t really need more than one key-note climb if it’s one like this. This is a Táchirense equivalent of those Manizales stages in the Vuelta a Colombia, where basically the entire stage is the ascent and descent of the Alto de Letras. This is perhaps stretching the boundaries of acceptability at the level, but the race has done stuff like this before, and… well, I’ll get to that.
The stage host for the salida is San Juan de Colón, often known simply as Colón, a city of 57.000 people lying just north of the mountain ridge that crosses north of San Cristóbal and which includes the climb to Cerro El Cristo that hosted the stage 4 finish. As the shire town of Ayacucho municipality, it is perhaps best known as the birthplace of Ramón José Velásquez, a former lawyer and journalist who authored several books on Latin American political history and became Venezuela’s most renowned historian, even being imprisoned at one point for publishing a “Black Book of Dictatorship” in which he highlighted the abuses of power of the Marcos Pérez Jiménez administration. He would periodically contribute first-hand to politics as well, serving as Secretary General during Betancourt’s administration and as Minister of Communications during Rafael Caldera’s first premiership. He would also chair multiple commissions aimed at reforming the state and rebuilding national relationships, a role that would lend him such credibility that he was chosen to serve as interim president to complete the term of the recently-impeached Carlos Andrés Pérez in 1993 until the newly-elected Caldera - returning to office 20 years after leaving the first time - could be sworn in. It is also the hometown of Artur García, a sprinter who has won a number of stages of the Vueltas al Táchira and a Venezuela, as well as in Cuba, Bolivia, Uruguay and Colombia across a twenty-year career. He would not enjoy this stage.
Likely due to its proximity to frequent stage host La Grita, San Juan de Colón would have to wait until 1981 for its debut as a stage town in the Vuelta al Táchira, when in the height of the Ostbloc invasion days, Sergei Lesmyt would win a stage here on the penultimate day of the race, with Soviet teammate Aleksandr Gusyatnikov defending the yellow jersey. It would return as an early-race finish the following year, won by Enrique Campos, and the international flavour would continue in 1983 when Mexican Ignacio Mosquera would win a semitappe in the town. Aleksandr Krasnov would take another stage for the USSR in 1984, before Campos would restore home pride. After a brief layoff the city would become a stage start in 1987, a mountain stage to Tovar won by Jorge Salazar for Cuba, before José Ruíz would win the last stage finish here of the era a year later. In the 1990s it would become an almost-everpresent once more, with prominent winners including Leonardo Sierra in 1993 and future and former GC winners like Alexis Méndez in 1998, Aldrin Salamanca in 1999, Noel Vásquez in 2000, César Salazar in 2001 and Freddy Vargas in 2003 and 2012. More recent winners include Yonathán Monsalve in 2010, Carlos Galviz in 2015. Since then, however, it has only been a stage start, and that’s the role it has for me today.
The first part of the stage is a set of multi-stepped downhill saunterings via a couple of uncategorised uphill repechos. Before we get to La Fría, however, we turn right, and then head up a classic of the race, the two steps of gradual uphill grind up to La Grita. Except, with a difference. This all starts with the cat.2 Alto de Susperia, which is a 4,2% tempo grinder that leads to the small town of Seboruco. And then the real agony begins as we take on the Alto de la Cortada, one of the great monoliths. But before that, on the way, we go through one of the race’s most traditional hosts, La Grita.
The city of La Grita
With a population of 80.000 and beautiful colonial architecture, La Grita is one of the jewels of Táchira State, named for the mini-province that it - founded under the name of Ciudad de Atenas - was the centre of, and was one of the central towns that played a crucial role in Simon Bolívar’s Campaña Admirable, as he liberated his homeland from Spanish colonial rule through the summer of 1813.
Casa de Bolívar, where the great liberator stayed and lived during the Admirable Campaign
However, it is very difficult to not have a difficult stage to La Grita. It’s only accessible via this double-climb (14km at 4,2%, then 12km at just over 5%), which has been the primary route into the city in recent years, or over significant monolithic passes, such as Paramó El Zumbador from San Cristóbal and Táriba, or Paramó La Negra and Alto del Portachuelo from the northeast, from the cities in Mérida province. And one more to the south which has never been used in the race to date, but which we’ll go into in a second.
In recent years, the race has gone for Casa del Padre as its biggest summit finish, so La Grita has tended to host tempo grinding uphill finishes, but it wasn’t always thus; in fact often it hosted stages from Tovar which would usually go over Portachuelo or La Negra and then finish on a descent into La Grita. The city is legitimately one of the most traditional spots for the race, however, having been introduced at the finish of the second stage of the very first edition when Álvaro Pachón was victorious, and it would then appear every year consecutively all the way until 1995 when it recorded its first absence; it has been a bit more sporadic since, but still somewhat regular. In 1967 it was accessed over Zumbador, and in 1968 the route with the gradual uphill from Seboruco was added. From 1969 a traditional route from Tovar would be added; this route would be retained until 1974, when the route direction was shaken up and José Duaxt won from San Cristóbal over Palo Grande and then climbing the traditional uphill version of the ascent. 1976 was an anomalous year, with a near 240km stage from Tovar, going all the way around to the north and then up the gradual ascent into La Grita, due to road problems with the mountain passes in the area, but usually when coming from Tovar, the traditional route was taken. Even when not coming from Tovar, in later years the same regular route would be used, but often from Zea or Santa Cruz de Mora (hometown of José Rujano of course) instead. In recent years, however, the uphill finish has been the main means by which La Grita has appeared on the route in recent times.
Most of the great and good of the race have won here, including José Patricio Jiménez, Enrique Campos, Israel Ochoa, Carlos Maya, Noel Vásquez, Manuel Medina (twice but also once in the Clásico Banfoandes), Hernán Dário Muñoz, José Alarcón, José Serpa, José Rujano Guillén (twice in the Vuelta al Táchira and once in the Clásico Banfoandes), Roniel Campos (twice), Nicolás Reidtler (twice), Fernando Fontes (three times) and Jonathán Camargo (three times), but the king of La Grita is Leonardo Sierra, who won four times in La Grita.
But… we’re not stopping in La Grita. This is nothing but the beginning. The 12km at 5,2% or so of this ascent is barely a beginning for the climb up to the south, as we’re going well up and beyond La Grita, up to - and beyond - the Paramó El Rosal, and on to the Alto de La Cortada, an absolute MONSTER of an ascent. Just the part after La Grita is 25km averaging almost 8%; this is a colossus, a beast, and a climb that just rips the péloton to absolute pieces, even if they’re doping up to Mr. 63% level as sometimes is the case at the Vuelta al Táchira. This is brutal.
Although it is not precise since it’s mapped from cronoescalada data (sadly there is to my knowledge no Venezuelan equivalent of Asier Bilbao and Gustavo Duncán’s excellent Altimetrias de Colombia site) so I can’t truly verify it, it is worth noting that these gradients put this instantly among the toughest climbs in the history of world cycling. Think Col de la Madeleine south, but 25% longer again. Think Alpe d’Huez, but 80% longer. Think Stelvio from Prato or Ventoux from Bédoin, but at a steeper average. It’s beyond brutal, and of course we’re here for it.
According to my Cronoescalada profile, this one scores 543 on the Coeficiente APM, and that despite not reaching too many murder death kill gradients. That puts it above Angliru (514), Gamoniteiro (492), Finestre (487), Mortirolo from Mazzo (486) and Cerro de la Muerte (486), and up there with Zoncolan (556). In fact, of all the climbs in world cycling that have been used in a pro race, only four can be named - Alto El Sifón, introduced in the 2024 Vuelta a Colombia; Babadağ, introduced in the 2023 Tour of Turkey; Páramo de Letras from Mariquita in Colombia, and Monte Zoncolan from Ovaro. And even the latter could potentially be debatable, given that the Coeficiente APM places a heavy emphasis on steepness that has a disproportionately large effect the steeper the gradient becomes, and that it does not have a means by which to account for altitude, given the peak of this climb is over 3000m above sea level. The toughest stretch here is from La Grita itself to Paramó El Rosal, which averages almost 9% for 16km (8,8% to be precise), before a flattening out and then a final 2km at nearly 10% up to La Cortada. That’s right, not too dissimilar from having Finestre (albeit on tarmac, but 1000m higher altitude), after you’ve already been grinding uphill for several kilometres.
“Libertine, this is a January race, surely this is overkill?” I hear you say. And you’re kind of right. But simultaneously, this is the centrepiece of the Venezuelan calendar, and it also has included some monsters of its own over the years. Its current beau is Casa del Padre, which is often classified in different sections that disguise its overall difficulty, but its toughest face used is 24km at 6% so very much HC-level; it has been used every year from 2012 to 2017 and then from 2021 to 2023. The race has also used the Paramó El Zumbador (37km at just under 5%), and even the Alto de Santo Domingo - 60km at approaching 5%, with a final 29km at 6,6% - as part of its traditional routes. That’s some serious climbing there, so this isn’t too out there as a possibility. But it is about as brutal a climb as you’re going to see in a race, with only a small number of climbs world-wide that could match up to it.
The summit of the climb is 32km from the line, and in the same fashion as many of these types of stages in Latin American cycling - just compare the traditional Letras to Manizales stage from the Vuelta a Colombia and Clásico RCN, or the Cerro de la Muerte stages at the Vuelta a Costa Rica, while the old Barinas to Mérida stages of the Vuelta al Táchira would be similar, using the Alto de Santo Domingo - it’s essentially - especially if you count the Susperia ascent as part of the whole climbing process, which generates around 60km at nearly 5% - one up, one down, with a lengthy descent of La Cortada making up the majority of it - being almost as hard, but slightly shorter than, its ascent, amounting to 21,6km at 7,9%. It’s going to be fast and challenging, with 24 hairpins, 15 of which are in the first 8km, and eventually ending at the town of San José de Bolívar.
After the 22km of descent from La Cortada, only 10km or so remain of the stage, and this is not flat, but by contrast to what came before it seems pretty benign. The first 4,2km of it are uphill, but with the most serious part of it being just over 2km at an average of a far less relevant 5% to a shoulder summit known as El Altico, it’s not the most challenging. A similar level descent follows, before a fairly noteworthy puncheur finish of 2,3km at 8,4% into our finishing town of Queniquea. With the short length of the stage and the comparison of the climb to a monolith like La Cortada, the climb could be easy to overlook; it looks like nothing on the profile, right?
Road in the closing phases of the stage
Queniquea
Hidden away in the distant parts of southeastern Táchira, Queniquea is a town of 20.000 that is the centre of the Sucre municipality and the home of former President José Eleazar López Contreras, a former army general who led the nation from 1935 to 1941, signing the 1936 constitution and founding the Ministry of Health and Social Assistance. Although his tenure saw great progress in human rights and equality in Venezuela, he also oversaw overuse of executive powers that forced opposition leaders into exile. Queniquea has only appeared in the Vuelta al Táchira three times, due to its relative isolation as a location; it was introduced as part of a medium mountain stage on the penultimate day in 2006, when Manuel Medina, José Serpa, Hernán Buenahora and Francisco Colorado - already fighting out the upper GC - fought out the stage and opened up a considerable advantage, eliminating all others from contention. In 2007 and 2009, the other two occasions the town has appeared, the stages were both identical ITTs from San José de Bolívar to Queniquea along the final stages of my stage here. See, I told you the ITTs in this race tended to be hilly! Hernán Buenahora won the first of these, ahead of a parade of local favourites like José Chacón, Manuel Medina, Jackson Rodríguez and Carlos Maya, but in 2009 it was all Venezuelans all the time, with José Rujano winning the stage from José Alarcón and Tomás Gil, and the best-placed overseas rider being César Salazar in 9th. This is my queen stage, and although it only really has the one key-note climb, that should be more than enough to create some carnage.
Great stage @Libertine Seguros this needs a short highlights video from an actual Tachira queenstage, with that old Loteria del Tachira jingle:
Stage 7: San Rafael del Piñal - Chorro del Índio, 155km
GPM:
Alto de Libertad (cat.3) 5,6km @ 4,4%
Pata de Gallina (cat.3) 4,0km @ 4,5%
Alto de Los Cacaos (cat.1) 12,1km @ 7,2%
Alto de Canta Rana (cat.1) 9,3km @ 6,3%
After yesterday saw a stage of one colossus of a climb, today is more about multiple smaller, more consistent and back to back climbs as we head back from the hinterland toward the urban centre of Táchira province. And we do so by heading back toward Troncal 5, as it heads along the southern foothills of the Andes and connects Táchira to Barinas state (a very common route for the Vuelta al Táchira to take especially in the era where it expanded out into central Venezuela, often travelling along this flat terrain to Barinas, and then over the Alto de Santo Domingo monster climb to descend down in to Mérida), and having our stage begin in the city of San Rafael del Piñal, sometimes abbreviated to just “El Piñal”, a new town established in the 1950s and officially founded in 1962 in order to provide a health centre and an agricultural hub (specialising in yucca and also, as the name would suggest, pineapples) at the mouth of the Chururú river, a tributary of the Apure. As costs have risen in San Cristóbal and its urban sprawl, El Piñal has grown rapidly, and now houses some 48.000 people.
Being such a young settlement, barely older than the race itself, it took some time for San Rafael del Piñal to appear on the Vuelta al Táchira route; stages over to this neck of the woods would frequently bypass it or simply pass through en route to Santa Bárbara de Barinas. It would be a central part of a stage for the first time in 1982 as a turning point in San Cristóbal - El Piñal - Rubio stages of that era, but the city would not formally host a stage until 1988, when a Team Time Trial was held in El Piñal, won by the Cuban national team, and it would take until 1993 for a road stage to appear, which was on the first day of the race and was won by ZG’s Italian rider Stefano Colagè, a stalwart of the Italian scene who had once finished on the podium of the Coors Classic and 13th in the Giro d’Italia, and would later score his biggest triumph by winning the GC of Tirreno-Adriatico in 1995. The following year the same stage was back, with Cuban Daniel Fuentes raising his arms at the line. Luís Barroso would win here in 1995, Julio Blanco in 1997, César Salazar in 2000 and 2004, Juan Murillo in 2006 and Michele Merlo in 2013. Since then, however, it has only been a stage start; typically mountain stages, such as the Casa del Padre stages in 2014, 2015 and 2016, and Borota stages in 2017 and 2024.
But the city also has another cycling connection, and that is in its being the hometown of one well-known rider, who is an interesting figure all of their own. A figure who, despite their somewhat chequered past, has developed into a bit of a cult figure, hidden away in a quiet corner of the cycling world. I speak, of course, of the queen of the Latin American péloton, the dominant time trialist and mythical climber that is Lilibeth Chacón.
Originally a successful track rider back home in Venezuela winning gold and silver medals in endurance track events at the Pan American Championships in 2011 and 2012, Chacón would catch the eye of European scouts and came to Spain with Bizkaia-Durango in 2013, but struggled to impact races outside of Latin America. In 2014 she would win Pan American Games and Central American/Caribbean Games medals, but the joy would be short-lived, as she would test positive for EPO and cop a two year ban as a result. During the ban, no longer any use to the Venezuelan sports authorities, she would move to Colombia at the behest of her coach, Jhoann Robayo, with whom she would live until 2018 when she spent a brief period back in Europe with the then-moribund SC Michela Fanini team. Returning to Colombia after the Giro Donne, things would deteriorate rapidly with Robayo, who is alleged to have beaten Chacón on a number of occasions and thrown her out knowing that she had no family in Colombia to turn to and would have to return. Robayo for his part did not contest that he struck her, but insists that she had been drunk and threatened him with a knife. In 2019, some more dots would be there to join regarding Lilibeth’s previous ban, as Robayo would be suspended for four years by the Colombian NADO for supplying doping products to cyclists, but this would not keep him from the sport; his sportswear company Liro Sport have sponsored a women’s team since 2020 (convenient timing, no?) and in 2024, after his suspension ran out, he returned to the Vuelta a Colombia as a DS.
Of course, by then, Chacón had long since put Robayo behind her, and the man who apparently once assaulted her would get a first-hand view of what Chacón now does best, which is destroying the entire Latin American péloton whenever races hit the mountains; with many of the other top names in racing in these events such as Colombians Carolina Vargas, Jennifer Ducuara and Andrea Alzate, Aranza Villalón of Chile and Anet Barrera of Mexico being signed up by European and North American teams, Chacón is left as comfortably the strongest climber left in the Central and South American scene, and realistically if she didn’t have that previous doping suspension in her background dissuading teams at the higher level from taking a flyer on her, she would long since have outgrown the scene; she therefore serves as a useful barometer of performance for the other riders in the Latin American péloton. Whenever the races hit the mountains, she steps up as well as having an Emma Pooley-esque “pocket rocket” time trial ability despite her compact frame and short stature. In 2021 she won the Vuelta a Colombia by taking all but one stage including dominant victories in both MTFs, and though she didn’t enter the race in 2022 after breaking her collarbone after a dog ran onto the course at the Bolivarian Games Road Race and collided with her, she made up for lost time in 2023 and 2024, winning both races well, although in 2024 she lost a lot of time in the final TT after racing the event off a cold open to match the record for most wins in the event. She has also won the only UCI-accredited women’s edition of the Vuelta a Venezuela, the Clásica RPC Radio Panama, the Vuelta a Guatemala, the Vuelta a Costa Rica, and multiple short stage races in Colombia. Lilibeth Chacón still racing in South America is almost as out-of-place as Miguel Ángel López was in 2023 and she’s become a bit of a cult figure as a result.
The first part of the stage is a flat-to-rolling stretch that gradually increases in altitude until a first intermediate sprint in San Josecito, early on in the day, before what eventually becomes a long and perhaps rather harshly uncategorised grind of a climb that passes through Santa Ana del Táchira, which serves as the base for two of the longest-running cycling teams of the area, Lotería del Táchira and Kino Táchira, two related teams sponsored by state-run organs that have been a staple of the startlist of Venezuelan races all the way back to 1968. Kino Táchira is not quite a feeder team but more a sort of overspill from Lotería del Táchira, run semi-independently but obtaining many strong riders on sort of loan from the larger squad. The city is also home to Carlos Gálviz, another recent hero of Venezuelan cycling history who also has a mid-2010s doping ban to his name, in his case for Boldenone at the end of 2015. One of the founder members of Movistar Team América in 2011, his great strength is the contre-le-montre, and he did have a brief sojourn in Europe with Androni Giocattoli in 2014 and 2015 after winning the GC of the Vuelta al Táchira, and getting to race Il Lombardia. Post-suspension, he’s had a fairly quiet time of it, largely racing domestically in Venezuela or in Ecuador with Movistar-BestPC, but he remains active to this day.
Santa Ana del Táchira
This is but 2/3 to 3/4 of the way up this grind of 8km at 4% or so, before a short descent and then two smaller climbs - both cat.3 - on the way to Rubio, where the stage 5 ITT took place. We then retrace part of stage 4 but in reverse, passing through Las Dantas and then descending back down towards San António del Táchira. But before we get there, we turn right and start to ascend the other road from San António toward San Cristóbal, and this takes us up what has become a very familiar ascent for the race in recent years, the Alto de Los Cacaos. Often used as a lead-in to Cerro El Cristo in recent years, this is very much a strong European cat.1 climb in its characteristics, measuring in at 12km at just over 7%, mostly fairly consistently. This puts it into the kind of territory of ascents like Hourquette d’Ancizan, Risoul 1850 or Vesuvio - all solid climbs but not the most fearsome you can imagine. Cresting at 38km from the finish, this is unlikely to be the be-all and end-all of the stage, but it is at least going to really start to put some damage into those that suffered yesterday; however La Cortada will have been a new experience in racing conditions, whereas most of the péloton will have intimate knowledge of racing on Los Cacaos after the last several years of the Vuelta al Táchira, when it has been used as an almost annual fixture en route to Cristo Rey. There’s even a Mycols page, although we do not do the first 2km of that profile owing to the fork in the road between the Las Dantas and Los Cacaos climbs coming a couple of kilometres after San António.
While we then have the well-established 7km or so of annoying (for the riders) repechos and false flats that take us from Los Cacaos to Capacho Nuevo, we already did Cerro El Cristo three days ago, so no need for that now. Instead we have a descent via the Alto de Rancherías to Zorca and onward to the valley of the Río Torbes, which enables us to re-enter San Cristóbal for the first time since stage 1. However, we aren’t stopping here, no, there’s still a little way to go, and we’re about to investigate another former hilly ITT site in the race’s history, a long-forgotten summit/climb and a scenic, but hidden, outpost of Táchira province, as we climb the Alto de Canta Rana, and descend to the Chorro El Índio waterfall and nature park.
Scenery of the national park
Chorro El Índio waterfall at the end of the road
The final intermediate sprint takes place in San Cristóbal, around 15km from the finish, and then the final climb of the day starts. The ascent up to the Alto de Canta Rana is not the toughest - 9,3km at 6,3% is borderline cat.1 in a lot of races, here it will earn it, but for the most part it’s fairly consistent. However, there is a flattening out before a significant jump in gradient up to 1,8km at 8,8% ending about a kilometre before the actual summit, and this will be the chance to make time if there are only small gaps involved; if you need a lot of time, then you’re going to need to go from Los Cacaos. The finish is about 4km downhill at 7% and then a short flat run to the car park at the Chorro El Índio waterfall that hosts the official stage finish.
This route from the run-in has actually shown up a few times in the real race, but very few if any of the riders who are still active to race this event in the present will have competed on it; for four consecutive years from 2002 to 2005, the race included an ITT from San Cristóbal down to the river and then back up into the town, on to Canta Rana and then descending to Chorro del Índio, which on three of the four occasions would serve as the penultimate stage of the race. Noel Vásquez would win in 2002 and Hernán Dário Muñoz would snatch the lead of the race from Carlos Maya here in 2003, before José Rujano would win both of the stages to the waterfall in 2004 and 2005, the former being while wearing the leader’s jersey already, and the latter to claim it from José Chacón in an absolute exhibition and one of the most dominant TTs you will ever see, putting 2’52 into Chacón - who finished second on the day - in just 22km; even more than he’d won by the previous year (2’21 from future Tenax and Caisse d’Épargne rider Marlon Pérez). Manuel Medina did enter the 2024 edition of the race, at a sprightly young 48 years of age, but he’s about the only notable name in the results sheet of the 2005 edition, the most recent time that this route has been raced, that is still racing in any capacity today.
It’s not a mountaintop finish, but it’s close enough that it ought to be treated as a full mountain stage, especially as I should imagine that there are some tired legs among the contenders after the brutality of stage 6. This could well be an exciting stage with time to gain and lose and opportunities to break things apart on both Los Cacaos and Canta Rana. Hopefully we can get to see something like this in the future of the race, it’s been a long layoff for a climb that is right on the doorstep of San Cristóbal.
GPM:
Alto de Libertad (cat.3) 5,6km @ 4,4%
Pata de Gallina (cat.3) 4,0km @ 4,5%
Alto de Los Cacaos (cat.1) 12,1km @ 7,2%
Alto de Canta Rana (cat.1) 9,3km @ 6,3%
After yesterday saw a stage of one colossus of a climb, today is more about multiple smaller, more consistent and back to back climbs as we head back from the hinterland toward the urban centre of Táchira province. And we do so by heading back toward Troncal 5, as it heads along the southern foothills of the Andes and connects Táchira to Barinas state (a very common route for the Vuelta al Táchira to take especially in the era where it expanded out into central Venezuela, often travelling along this flat terrain to Barinas, and then over the Alto de Santo Domingo monster climb to descend down in to Mérida), and having our stage begin in the city of San Rafael del Piñal, sometimes abbreviated to just “El Piñal”, a new town established in the 1950s and officially founded in 1962 in order to provide a health centre and an agricultural hub (specialising in yucca and also, as the name would suggest, pineapples) at the mouth of the Chururú river, a tributary of the Apure. As costs have risen in San Cristóbal and its urban sprawl, El Piñal has grown rapidly, and now houses some 48.000 people.
Being such a young settlement, barely older than the race itself, it took some time for San Rafael del Piñal to appear on the Vuelta al Táchira route; stages over to this neck of the woods would frequently bypass it or simply pass through en route to Santa Bárbara de Barinas. It would be a central part of a stage for the first time in 1982 as a turning point in San Cristóbal - El Piñal - Rubio stages of that era, but the city would not formally host a stage until 1988, when a Team Time Trial was held in El Piñal, won by the Cuban national team, and it would take until 1993 for a road stage to appear, which was on the first day of the race and was won by ZG’s Italian rider Stefano Colagè, a stalwart of the Italian scene who had once finished on the podium of the Coors Classic and 13th in the Giro d’Italia, and would later score his biggest triumph by winning the GC of Tirreno-Adriatico in 1995. The following year the same stage was back, with Cuban Daniel Fuentes raising his arms at the line. Luís Barroso would win here in 1995, Julio Blanco in 1997, César Salazar in 2000 and 2004, Juan Murillo in 2006 and Michele Merlo in 2013. Since then, however, it has only been a stage start; typically mountain stages, such as the Casa del Padre stages in 2014, 2015 and 2016, and Borota stages in 2017 and 2024.
But the city also has another cycling connection, and that is in its being the hometown of one well-known rider, who is an interesting figure all of their own. A figure who, despite their somewhat chequered past, has developed into a bit of a cult figure, hidden away in a quiet corner of the cycling world. I speak, of course, of the queen of the Latin American péloton, the dominant time trialist and mythical climber that is Lilibeth Chacón.
Originally a successful track rider back home in Venezuela winning gold and silver medals in endurance track events at the Pan American Championships in 2011 and 2012, Chacón would catch the eye of European scouts and came to Spain with Bizkaia-Durango in 2013, but struggled to impact races outside of Latin America. In 2014 she would win Pan American Games and Central American/Caribbean Games medals, but the joy would be short-lived, as she would test positive for EPO and cop a two year ban as a result. During the ban, no longer any use to the Venezuelan sports authorities, she would move to Colombia at the behest of her coach, Jhoann Robayo, with whom she would live until 2018 when she spent a brief period back in Europe with the then-moribund SC Michela Fanini team. Returning to Colombia after the Giro Donne, things would deteriorate rapidly with Robayo, who is alleged to have beaten Chacón on a number of occasions and thrown her out knowing that she had no family in Colombia to turn to and would have to return. Robayo for his part did not contest that he struck her, but insists that she had been drunk and threatened him with a knife. In 2019, some more dots would be there to join regarding Lilibeth’s previous ban, as Robayo would be suspended for four years by the Colombian NADO for supplying doping products to cyclists, but this would not keep him from the sport; his sportswear company Liro Sport have sponsored a women’s team since 2020 (convenient timing, no?) and in 2024, after his suspension ran out, he returned to the Vuelta a Colombia as a DS.
Of course, by then, Chacón had long since put Robayo behind her, and the man who apparently once assaulted her would get a first-hand view of what Chacón now does best, which is destroying the entire Latin American péloton whenever races hit the mountains; with many of the other top names in racing in these events such as Colombians Carolina Vargas, Jennifer Ducuara and Andrea Alzate, Aranza Villalón of Chile and Anet Barrera of Mexico being signed up by European and North American teams, Chacón is left as comfortably the strongest climber left in the Central and South American scene, and realistically if she didn’t have that previous doping suspension in her background dissuading teams at the higher level from taking a flyer on her, she would long since have outgrown the scene; she therefore serves as a useful barometer of performance for the other riders in the Latin American péloton. Whenever the races hit the mountains, she steps up as well as having an Emma Pooley-esque “pocket rocket” time trial ability despite her compact frame and short stature. In 2021 she won the Vuelta a Colombia by taking all but one stage including dominant victories in both MTFs, and though she didn’t enter the race in 2022 after breaking her collarbone after a dog ran onto the course at the Bolivarian Games Road Race and collided with her, she made up for lost time in 2023 and 2024, winning both races well, although in 2024 she lost a lot of time in the final TT after racing the event off a cold open to match the record for most wins in the event. She has also won the only UCI-accredited women’s edition of the Vuelta a Venezuela, the Clásica RPC Radio Panama, the Vuelta a Guatemala, the Vuelta a Costa Rica, and multiple short stage races in Colombia. Lilibeth Chacón still racing in South America is almost as out-of-place as Miguel Ángel López was in 2023 and she’s become a bit of a cult figure as a result.
The first part of the stage is a flat-to-rolling stretch that gradually increases in altitude until a first intermediate sprint in San Josecito, early on in the day, before what eventually becomes a long and perhaps rather harshly uncategorised grind of a climb that passes through Santa Ana del Táchira, which serves as the base for two of the longest-running cycling teams of the area, Lotería del Táchira and Kino Táchira, two related teams sponsored by state-run organs that have been a staple of the startlist of Venezuelan races all the way back to 1968. Kino Táchira is not quite a feeder team but more a sort of overspill from Lotería del Táchira, run semi-independently but obtaining many strong riders on sort of loan from the larger squad. The city is also home to Carlos Gálviz, another recent hero of Venezuelan cycling history who also has a mid-2010s doping ban to his name, in his case for Boldenone at the end of 2015. One of the founder members of Movistar Team América in 2011, his great strength is the contre-le-montre, and he did have a brief sojourn in Europe with Androni Giocattoli in 2014 and 2015 after winning the GC of the Vuelta al Táchira, and getting to race Il Lombardia. Post-suspension, he’s had a fairly quiet time of it, largely racing domestically in Venezuela or in Ecuador with Movistar-BestPC, but he remains active to this day.
Santa Ana del Táchira
This is but 2/3 to 3/4 of the way up this grind of 8km at 4% or so, before a short descent and then two smaller climbs - both cat.3 - on the way to Rubio, where the stage 5 ITT took place. We then retrace part of stage 4 but in reverse, passing through Las Dantas and then descending back down towards San António del Táchira. But before we get there, we turn right and start to ascend the other road from San António toward San Cristóbal, and this takes us up what has become a very familiar ascent for the race in recent years, the Alto de Los Cacaos. Often used as a lead-in to Cerro El Cristo in recent years, this is very much a strong European cat.1 climb in its characteristics, measuring in at 12km at just over 7%, mostly fairly consistently. This puts it into the kind of territory of ascents like Hourquette d’Ancizan, Risoul 1850 or Vesuvio - all solid climbs but not the most fearsome you can imagine. Cresting at 38km from the finish, this is unlikely to be the be-all and end-all of the stage, but it is at least going to really start to put some damage into those that suffered yesterday; however La Cortada will have been a new experience in racing conditions, whereas most of the péloton will have intimate knowledge of racing on Los Cacaos after the last several years of the Vuelta al Táchira, when it has been used as an almost annual fixture en route to Cristo Rey. There’s even a Mycols page, although we do not do the first 2km of that profile owing to the fork in the road between the Las Dantas and Los Cacaos climbs coming a couple of kilometres after San António.
While we then have the well-established 7km or so of annoying (for the riders) repechos and false flats that take us from Los Cacaos to Capacho Nuevo, we already did Cerro El Cristo three days ago, so no need for that now. Instead we have a descent via the Alto de Rancherías to Zorca and onward to the valley of the Río Torbes, which enables us to re-enter San Cristóbal for the first time since stage 1. However, we aren’t stopping here, no, there’s still a little way to go, and we’re about to investigate another former hilly ITT site in the race’s history, a long-forgotten summit/climb and a scenic, but hidden, outpost of Táchira province, as we climb the Alto de Canta Rana, and descend to the Chorro El Índio waterfall and nature park.
Scenery of the national park
Chorro El Índio waterfall at the end of the road
The final intermediate sprint takes place in San Cristóbal, around 15km from the finish, and then the final climb of the day starts. The ascent up to the Alto de Canta Rana is not the toughest - 9,3km at 6,3% is borderline cat.1 in a lot of races, here it will earn it, but for the most part it’s fairly consistent. However, there is a flattening out before a significant jump in gradient up to 1,8km at 8,8% ending about a kilometre before the actual summit, and this will be the chance to make time if there are only small gaps involved; if you need a lot of time, then you’re going to need to go from Los Cacaos. The finish is about 4km downhill at 7% and then a short flat run to the car park at the Chorro El Índio waterfall that hosts the official stage finish.
This route from the run-in has actually shown up a few times in the real race, but very few if any of the riders who are still active to race this event in the present will have competed on it; for four consecutive years from 2002 to 2005, the race included an ITT from San Cristóbal down to the river and then back up into the town, on to Canta Rana and then descending to Chorro del Índio, which on three of the four occasions would serve as the penultimate stage of the race. Noel Vásquez would win in 2002 and Hernán Dário Muñoz would snatch the lead of the race from Carlos Maya here in 2003, before José Rujano would win both of the stages to the waterfall in 2004 and 2005, the former being while wearing the leader’s jersey already, and the latter to claim it from José Chacón in an absolute exhibition and one of the most dominant TTs you will ever see, putting 2’52 into Chacón - who finished second on the day - in just 22km; even more than he’d won by the previous year (2’21 from future Tenax and Caisse d’Épargne rider Marlon Pérez). Manuel Medina did enter the 2024 edition of the race, at a sprightly young 48 years of age, but he’s about the only notable name in the results sheet of the 2005 edition, the most recent time that this route has been raced, that is still racing in any capacity today.
It’s not a mountaintop finish, but it’s close enough that it ought to be treated as a full mountain stage, especially as I should imagine that there are some tired legs among the contenders after the brutality of stage 6. This could well be an exciting stage with time to gain and lose and opportunities to break things apart on both Los Cacaos and Canta Rana. Hopefully we can get to see something like this in the future of the race, it’s been a long layoff for a climb that is right on the doorstep of San Cristóbal.
Stage 8: Táriba - San Cristóbal de Táchira, 141km
GPM:
Alto de Rancherías (cat.2) 6,0km @ 6,6%
Copa de Oro (cat.3) 2,7km @ 8,4%
Altos de Paramillo (cat.3) 2,5km @ 7,6%
And so we finish with a stage that takes us back where we started, but not before we swoop up and around the surrounding region, a shortish stage that brings us to our traditional finish for the race, in the Velódromo de José de Jesús Mora Figueroa, but with a more challenging route that minimises the chance of a sprint in the velodrome between a large péloton, which is undesirable for safety reasons; but also a route which includes a bit of creativity and innovation - just not at first.
The stage starts in Táriba, part of the expanding urban sprawl of San Cristóbal on the north side of the Río Torbes, just north of its confluence with the Machiri. One of the oldest cities in Táchira State, it is home to 150.000 people and was founded at the start of the 17th Century as a Spanish city, but is actually on the site of a previous indigenous city first discovered by Europeans as early as 1547, but that they were driven away from by hostile natives at the time. Catholic veneration of Nuesta Señora de la Consolación in the area led to the establishment of a basilica and a shrine, with a hermitage following in 1600, and the festival of the Virgin Mary in the area has given the city a cultural centre that has survived its eventual encirclement and engulfing by San Cristóbal’s urban sprawl.
Táriba has often been “semi-involved” in the Vuelta al Táchira; its proximity to San Cristóbal has meant it has often been omitted as a host of a stage, but racing has been seen within the city, as part of the stage 1, flatter circuits around San Cristóbal used when the traditional Circuito Bermúdez has been on the last day, although it did officially host the start of that stage in 2022. Often this circuit is listed as “Circuito Metropólitano San Cristóbal - Táriba”, which has led to many sources incorrectly reporting the city as the stage finish, but this is a circuit race beginning and ending in San Cristóbal which is kind of a pseudo-out-and-back between the two cities, hence the name. The most recent time that Táriba actually hosted a stage finish was in 2014, when a slight uphill finish in a stage from Socopó enabled Yonathán Salinas to take a small advantage to the line. It has also hosted the start of several stages other than that 2022 version of the Circuito Metropólitano, including most of the recent Casa del Padrer MTFs and a somewhat hilly ITT in 2021 which was won by the evergreen babyface, Óscar Sevilla.
The city is also the birthplace of a few cyclists; Justo Galaviz was a rouleur in the 70s and 80s who won a then-record 20 stages of the Vuelta a Venezuela and set the national hour record but sadly died at the comparatively young age of 59 in 2013, and Alexis Méndez, a former winner of the Vuelta al Táchira in 1994 and the Vuelta a la Independencia Nacional in the Dominican Republic in 2000, who retired young in 2001 and is now the manager of Team Saavedra, an espoir team based out of Cúcuta, just across the border. He is frustratingly hard to search for despite his successes across the 90s simply because he has the same name as a more recent mountain bike prospect rider. Most recently, however, Táriba has given the cycling world the stalwart Venezuelan José Chacón Díaz, a staple of the national races for almost two decades from the late 90s through to the mid-2010s; he never won the Vuelta al Táchira, his personal best being 2nd overall in 2005, but he won the Vuelta a Venezuela on three occasions (2001, 2003 and 2005) and also won three national titles, one in the road race and two in the time trial, as well as a silver in the latter discipline at the Central American and Caribbean Games in 2006. Later on in his career he would be reinvented as a stagehunter, and also expand his repertoire of races, racing through the Caribbean islands and in particular focusing on the Tour de Guadeloupe, finishing on the overall podium in 2013 and 2016. However, in 2017, at the age of 40, he would test positive for corticosteroids at the same event, effectively ending his active career; after his ban he would resurface as the sports director at the Lotería del Táchira team back in Venezuela.
The first 2/3 of the stage are essentially one and three quarters of a lap of a long out-and-back circuit which follows the valley road through the land carved out by the Torbes river. This takes us as far as San Josecito, a small town which isn’t a regular host of the Vuelta al Táchira but has hosted a few stage starts, usually stages heading into the east and south of the province, finishing in places like Pregonero and San Juan de Colón. However, in the last two editions it has hosted the start of a stage which heads out to San Juan de Colón and then returns back to San Cristóbal via the town, which looks a bit like this profile-wise. Hardly the most interesting for a final stage, of course, so I’m not copying that, but the format is not that different. It’s just that unlike Colón, San Josecito is a bit of a small town to do a literal out-and-back at, so we include a 10,6km circuit around the town which includes a couple of uncategorised ascents; the first, through the town and on the Via a Agua Dulce, would probably have given points in an earlier stage - 800m at 9% is actually a fairly solid punchy ascent - while the descend down to Vega de Aza means that the 2,8km at 5,2% drag highlighted in the real life stage is climbed as well before returning to the town.
Main road through San Josecito, giving an impression of part of our circuit
After returning to San Josecito, we return via Troncal 7 to Táriba via the western end of San Cristóbal, and have an intermediate sprint as we loop back past our starting line. We then have another intermediate sprint in San Josecito on the second lap, but then, when we return to San Cristóbal, instead of continuing on to Táriba once more, we deviate and head up towards Zorca, up over a small uncategorised climb (again) amounting to just over 2km at just over 5% - this is sometimes classed as part of the San Cristóbal side of the Altos de Berlín, but is a separate ascent known as El Mirador; after its summit and a brief descent, you can either bear left to Altos de Berlín or right toward Zorca. This is the same route that we took on stage 4 but instead of following the valley road and taking the steep route into Capacho Nuevo and Páramo de la Laja, we take the more commonly known and well-renowned main road up to Alto de Rancherías. This default, most standard version of the climb (there are tougher routes, but this is the ‘standard’ one and the one used by most traffic, a bit like taking the A-395 route to Sierra Nevada I guess) is 5,9km at 6,7%, cresting 33km from the line, so serves more as the warm-up ascent here; it is the longest of the three categorised climbs, but it is also the shallowest; however, if there are big time gaps in the race, then people likely need to make a move from here, whereas smaller gaps can be sorted out later.
Although we do not need to descend into Rancherías as we did in stage 4, the descent from Capacho Nuevo into Peribeca here is the same as was included there, only whereas in that stage we turned left in Peribeca to cross the Quebrada Zorca northbound, here we are eastbound when we pass it and have some gradual uphill towards Copa de Oro which we break off in La Puente before we get there, as we’re going to return to Copa de Oro via a more interesting route in a few kilometres’ time. This is mostly just false flat but the final kilometre averages 5% and then we drop down into Tucapé on the dual carriageway route back towards Táriba. We break off from this at Tucapé with a 180º parabolic right-hander off the highway followed immediately by another 90º right-hander to pass under the highway, another right hander to bring us parallel to the highway on the opposite side of it and then a 90º left hander to turn northwards and to climb up through Caneyes to Copa de Oro via a short but very steep route, which comes out at 2,7km @ 8,4% but factoring out the false flat while we’re negotiating that series of corners from turning to go under the highway (where the “comienza puerto” sign would need to be) and at the very top approaching the roundabout that marks the summit, it would be 2,3km @ 9,3% including a steepest stretch of 750m at 11,9%. With this cresting just 16,4km from the line, it should definitely give opportunities to make moves that could be potentially decisive.
Looking down over part of the climb in Boca de Caneyes
A descent of around 7km follows this climb, with a downhill false flat into the town of Palmira and then a descent of around 4,5km at 6% with a few switchbacks that take us down into Táriba once more where we have our final intermediate sprint back on the same spot as the first. Then, we cross the Torbes and head northeastward toward Cordero, briefly, before moving on to the final categorised climb of the race, a nasty little dig called Altos de Paramillo. Listed at 2,5km at 7,6%, which seems benign enough, but there is a steeper amount in there, with an initial false flat quickly giving way to 1300m at 10,6%, the first 600m of which are at almost 15%, so this will give the puncheurs a great chance to make some time if they have the opportunity to win a stage or if somebody with the skillset of a Joaquím Rodríguez or an Alejandro Valverde is still in GC contention. Climbing just to the top of that 1300m at 10,6% would bring us to Sector Aragüaney, and from here we could go directly to the bridge over Quebrada Machiri, but we continue on to Palo Gordo with a final 900m at 5% with a kicker in the last 200m. The summit is just 6km from the line, and then we drop down briefly and cross the Machiri, before riding across to Redoma de los Arbolitos, the brief uphill of Avenida España that was included on stage 1, and then the classic finale where we head into the Velódromo de José de Jesús Mora Figueroa, the traditional end point of the Vuelta al Táchira.
The velodrome was originally constructed for the 1976 Pan American Cycling Championships, however there was no main grandstand and this was covered by temporary wooden bleachers; however the venue was swiftly upgraded with a brand new grandstand to accommodate 14.000 people in order to host the 1977 World Championships. Subsequent upgrades have left the venue - named after a prominent local sports writer - with a maximum capacity of more than double that in a standing-room-only configuration. With a road link that brings the riders under the first curve and out onto the back straight, it has become the traditional closing finish of the Vuelta al Táchira almost all the way back to that original opening. The winners are crowned in the infield of the velodrome, and the great and good (and sometimes the not so great and rather more villainous) of Venezuelan cycling have been handed their trophies in front of an adoring throng here in the velodrome. In addition to this, at times there have been prologues in the complex around the velodrome or even in the velodrome itself, such as the use of a track pursuit format as a prologue in 1982. Stage winners in the velodrome include local heroes we’ve met along our journey, like José Duaxt, Enrique Campos, Manuel Guevara, Leonardo Sierra, Rónald Bermúdez (twice), Rodolfo Camacho, Carlos Maya (twice), José Rujano, Manuel Medina (twice), Yonathán Monsalve (three times), José Alarcón, Jackson Rodríguez and international stars - usually Colombians and including some that haven’t come up yet as well as many that have - like Fábio Parra, Omar Hernández, Hernán Buenahora, Hernán Dário Muñoz, Álvaro Lozano, Federico Muñoz, César Salazar, Marlon Pérez, Miguel Flórez López and, anomalously, Simon Pellaud during his Androni Giocattoli stint. This stage should be hard enough that there are significant gaps that can be made, but it isn’t just going to be a straight watts fiesta, it’s going to need tactics and creativity to get the most out of it, given there should be some big GC gaps by this point.
So that was my Vuelta al Táchira. No real mountaintop finishes but definitely a climber’s race; but the climbing varies in style between the one stage with a colossal HC monolith of an ascent to rival some of the toughest in world cycling, and then two other ‘mountain stages’, one being an all out mountain stage with two cat.1 climbs in the run-in, both being medium-to-long and solid gradients but without rampas inhumanas, and one with some Itzulia-esque 4km climbs of crazy repechos and ramps and varying surfaces including hormigón. Sprinters had their chances on the first couple of days but with differing characteristics on the type of sprinter favoured by the route, puncheurs got the final day as well as the Cúcuta day they’ll have fought out with the sprinters (although the Cúcuta climbs are more Amstel Gold and the San Cristóbal stage climbs are more Liège-Bastogne-Liège if you like), and the time trialists have a day too. The Vuelta a Venezuela is a race I need to take a look at too, but offers far more issues with editing given the insane amount of underuse of available terrain that the race has had even during times of greater stability in the nation, whereas Táchira at least has a fairly clearly defined geographical reach even though it goes beyond its own provincial borders, allowing more focus. However, despite how well-trodden this terrain is, there remains plenty of possibilities that are not taken up in the area, and hopefully I’ve shed some light on these on my way around this oft-maligned and oft-controversial part of South America.
Also, organisers, please bring back this logo, it’s sick
GPM:
Alto de Rancherías (cat.2) 6,0km @ 6,6%
Copa de Oro (cat.3) 2,7km @ 8,4%
Altos de Paramillo (cat.3) 2,5km @ 7,6%
And so we finish with a stage that takes us back where we started, but not before we swoop up and around the surrounding region, a shortish stage that brings us to our traditional finish for the race, in the Velódromo de José de Jesús Mora Figueroa, but with a more challenging route that minimises the chance of a sprint in the velodrome between a large péloton, which is undesirable for safety reasons; but also a route which includes a bit of creativity and innovation - just not at first.
The stage starts in Táriba, part of the expanding urban sprawl of San Cristóbal on the north side of the Río Torbes, just north of its confluence with the Machiri. One of the oldest cities in Táchira State, it is home to 150.000 people and was founded at the start of the 17th Century as a Spanish city, but is actually on the site of a previous indigenous city first discovered by Europeans as early as 1547, but that they were driven away from by hostile natives at the time. Catholic veneration of Nuesta Señora de la Consolación in the area led to the establishment of a basilica and a shrine, with a hermitage following in 1600, and the festival of the Virgin Mary in the area has given the city a cultural centre that has survived its eventual encirclement and engulfing by San Cristóbal’s urban sprawl.
Táriba has often been “semi-involved” in the Vuelta al Táchira; its proximity to San Cristóbal has meant it has often been omitted as a host of a stage, but racing has been seen within the city, as part of the stage 1, flatter circuits around San Cristóbal used when the traditional Circuito Bermúdez has been on the last day, although it did officially host the start of that stage in 2022. Often this circuit is listed as “Circuito Metropólitano San Cristóbal - Táriba”, which has led to many sources incorrectly reporting the city as the stage finish, but this is a circuit race beginning and ending in San Cristóbal which is kind of a pseudo-out-and-back between the two cities, hence the name. The most recent time that Táriba actually hosted a stage finish was in 2014, when a slight uphill finish in a stage from Socopó enabled Yonathán Salinas to take a small advantage to the line. It has also hosted the start of several stages other than that 2022 version of the Circuito Metropólitano, including most of the recent Casa del Padrer MTFs and a somewhat hilly ITT in 2021 which was won by the evergreen babyface, Óscar Sevilla.
The city is also the birthplace of a few cyclists; Justo Galaviz was a rouleur in the 70s and 80s who won a then-record 20 stages of the Vuelta a Venezuela and set the national hour record but sadly died at the comparatively young age of 59 in 2013, and Alexis Méndez, a former winner of the Vuelta al Táchira in 1994 and the Vuelta a la Independencia Nacional in the Dominican Republic in 2000, who retired young in 2001 and is now the manager of Team Saavedra, an espoir team based out of Cúcuta, just across the border. He is frustratingly hard to search for despite his successes across the 90s simply because he has the same name as a more recent mountain bike prospect rider. Most recently, however, Táriba has given the cycling world the stalwart Venezuelan José Chacón Díaz, a staple of the national races for almost two decades from the late 90s through to the mid-2010s; he never won the Vuelta al Táchira, his personal best being 2nd overall in 2005, but he won the Vuelta a Venezuela on three occasions (2001, 2003 and 2005) and also won three national titles, one in the road race and two in the time trial, as well as a silver in the latter discipline at the Central American and Caribbean Games in 2006. Later on in his career he would be reinvented as a stagehunter, and also expand his repertoire of races, racing through the Caribbean islands and in particular focusing on the Tour de Guadeloupe, finishing on the overall podium in 2013 and 2016. However, in 2017, at the age of 40, he would test positive for corticosteroids at the same event, effectively ending his active career; after his ban he would resurface as the sports director at the Lotería del Táchira team back in Venezuela.
The first 2/3 of the stage are essentially one and three quarters of a lap of a long out-and-back circuit which follows the valley road through the land carved out by the Torbes river. This takes us as far as San Josecito, a small town which isn’t a regular host of the Vuelta al Táchira but has hosted a few stage starts, usually stages heading into the east and south of the province, finishing in places like Pregonero and San Juan de Colón. However, in the last two editions it has hosted the start of a stage which heads out to San Juan de Colón and then returns back to San Cristóbal via the town, which looks a bit like this profile-wise. Hardly the most interesting for a final stage, of course, so I’m not copying that, but the format is not that different. It’s just that unlike Colón, San Josecito is a bit of a small town to do a literal out-and-back at, so we include a 10,6km circuit around the town which includes a couple of uncategorised ascents; the first, through the town and on the Via a Agua Dulce, would probably have given points in an earlier stage - 800m at 9% is actually a fairly solid punchy ascent - while the descend down to Vega de Aza means that the 2,8km at 5,2% drag highlighted in the real life stage is climbed as well before returning to the town.
After returning to San Josecito, we return via Troncal 7 to Táriba via the western end of San Cristóbal, and have an intermediate sprint as we loop back past our starting line. We then have another intermediate sprint in San Josecito on the second lap, but then, when we return to San Cristóbal, instead of continuing on to Táriba once more, we deviate and head up towards Zorca, up over a small uncategorised climb (again) amounting to just over 2km at just over 5% - this is sometimes classed as part of the San Cristóbal side of the Altos de Berlín, but is a separate ascent known as El Mirador; after its summit and a brief descent, you can either bear left to Altos de Berlín or right toward Zorca. This is the same route that we took on stage 4 but instead of following the valley road and taking the steep route into Capacho Nuevo and Páramo de la Laja, we take the more commonly known and well-renowned main road up to Alto de Rancherías. This default, most standard version of the climb (there are tougher routes, but this is the ‘standard’ one and the one used by most traffic, a bit like taking the A-395 route to Sierra Nevada I guess) is 5,9km at 6,7%, cresting 33km from the line, so serves more as the warm-up ascent here; it is the longest of the three categorised climbs, but it is also the shallowest; however, if there are big time gaps in the race, then people likely need to make a move from here, whereas smaller gaps can be sorted out later.
Although we do not need to descend into Rancherías as we did in stage 4, the descent from Capacho Nuevo into Peribeca here is the same as was included there, only whereas in that stage we turned left in Peribeca to cross the Quebrada Zorca northbound, here we are eastbound when we pass it and have some gradual uphill towards Copa de Oro which we break off in La Puente before we get there, as we’re going to return to Copa de Oro via a more interesting route in a few kilometres’ time. This is mostly just false flat but the final kilometre averages 5% and then we drop down into Tucapé on the dual carriageway route back towards Táriba. We break off from this at Tucapé with a 180º parabolic right-hander off the highway followed immediately by another 90º right-hander to pass under the highway, another right hander to bring us parallel to the highway on the opposite side of it and then a 90º left hander to turn northwards and to climb up through Caneyes to Copa de Oro via a short but very steep route, which comes out at 2,7km @ 8,4% but factoring out the false flat while we’re negotiating that series of corners from turning to go under the highway (where the “comienza puerto” sign would need to be) and at the very top approaching the roundabout that marks the summit, it would be 2,3km @ 9,3% including a steepest stretch of 750m at 11,9%. With this cresting just 16,4km from the line, it should definitely give opportunities to make moves that could be potentially decisive.
Looking down over part of the climb in Boca de Caneyes
A descent of around 7km follows this climb, with a downhill false flat into the town of Palmira and then a descent of around 4,5km at 6% with a few switchbacks that take us down into Táriba once more where we have our final intermediate sprint back on the same spot as the first. Then, we cross the Torbes and head northeastward toward Cordero, briefly, before moving on to the final categorised climb of the race, a nasty little dig called Altos de Paramillo. Listed at 2,5km at 7,6%, which seems benign enough, but there is a steeper amount in there, with an initial false flat quickly giving way to 1300m at 10,6%, the first 600m of which are at almost 15%, so this will give the puncheurs a great chance to make some time if they have the opportunity to win a stage or if somebody with the skillset of a Joaquím Rodríguez or an Alejandro Valverde is still in GC contention. Climbing just to the top of that 1300m at 10,6% would bring us to Sector Aragüaney, and from here we could go directly to the bridge over Quebrada Machiri, but we continue on to Palo Gordo with a final 900m at 5% with a kicker in the last 200m. The summit is just 6km from the line, and then we drop down briefly and cross the Machiri, before riding across to Redoma de los Arbolitos, the brief uphill of Avenida España that was included on stage 1, and then the classic finale where we head into the Velódromo de José de Jesús Mora Figueroa, the traditional end point of the Vuelta al Táchira.
The velodrome was originally constructed for the 1976 Pan American Cycling Championships, however there was no main grandstand and this was covered by temporary wooden bleachers; however the venue was swiftly upgraded with a brand new grandstand to accommodate 14.000 people in order to host the 1977 World Championships. Subsequent upgrades have left the venue - named after a prominent local sports writer - with a maximum capacity of more than double that in a standing-room-only configuration. With a road link that brings the riders under the first curve and out onto the back straight, it has become the traditional closing finish of the Vuelta al Táchira almost all the way back to that original opening. The winners are crowned in the infield of the velodrome, and the great and good (and sometimes the not so great and rather more villainous) of Venezuelan cycling have been handed their trophies in front of an adoring throng here in the velodrome. In addition to this, at times there have been prologues in the complex around the velodrome or even in the velodrome itself, such as the use of a track pursuit format as a prologue in 1982. Stage winners in the velodrome include local heroes we’ve met along our journey, like José Duaxt, Enrique Campos, Manuel Guevara, Leonardo Sierra, Rónald Bermúdez (twice), Rodolfo Camacho, Carlos Maya (twice), José Rujano, Manuel Medina (twice), Yonathán Monsalve (three times), José Alarcón, Jackson Rodríguez and international stars - usually Colombians and including some that haven’t come up yet as well as many that have - like Fábio Parra, Omar Hernández, Hernán Buenahora, Hernán Dário Muñoz, Álvaro Lozano, Federico Muñoz, César Salazar, Marlon Pérez, Miguel Flórez López and, anomalously, Simon Pellaud during his Androni Giocattoli stint. This stage should be hard enough that there are significant gaps that can be made, but it isn’t just going to be a straight watts fiesta, it’s going to need tactics and creativity to get the most out of it, given there should be some big GC gaps by this point.
So that was my Vuelta al Táchira. No real mountaintop finishes but definitely a climber’s race; but the climbing varies in style between the one stage with a colossal HC monolith of an ascent to rival some of the toughest in world cycling, and then two other ‘mountain stages’, one being an all out mountain stage with two cat.1 climbs in the run-in, both being medium-to-long and solid gradients but without rampas inhumanas, and one with some Itzulia-esque 4km climbs of crazy repechos and ramps and varying surfaces including hormigón. Sprinters had their chances on the first couple of days but with differing characteristics on the type of sprinter favoured by the route, puncheurs got the final day as well as the Cúcuta day they’ll have fought out with the sprinters (although the Cúcuta climbs are more Amstel Gold and the San Cristóbal stage climbs are more Liège-Bastogne-Liège if you like), and the time trialists have a day too. The Vuelta a Venezuela is a race I need to take a look at too, but offers far more issues with editing given the insane amount of underuse of available terrain that the race has had even during times of greater stability in the nation, whereas Táchira at least has a fairly clearly defined geographical reach even though it goes beyond its own provincial borders, allowing more focus. However, despite how well-trodden this terrain is, there remains plenty of possibilities that are not taken up in the area, and hopefully I’ve shed some light on these on my way around this oft-maligned and oft-controversial part of South America.
Also, organisers, please bring back this logo, it’s sick
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