The One

Colombian sprinter Fernando Gaviria is the most exciting young talent in cycling today. His exploits are legendary: at 20 he beat Cavendish twice in one race; he won Paris-Tours with a 700-metre sprint; he won four stages at his Giro debut this year. Procycling asks Gaviria just what he is going to achieve in cycling?

- Alasdair Fotheringham

At the third of Fernando Gaviria’s four Giro d’Italia stage winner’s press conferences, somebody asked how well he got on with the other Colombian rider who was also making waves in Italy, Nairo Quintana.

When Gaviria doesn’t like a question, he has a stare, more blank than anything else, which makes it quite clear that he considers the question irrelevant. Stare deployed, he then answered, with his usual courtesy, that he had very little to do with Quintana, as they came from different areas of Colombia and that, above all, the Movistar man was a climber, unlike himself.

However, the journalist who asked Gaviria about Quintana had a point. Gaviria’s nationality adds even greater resonance to what will surely remain one of the biggest stories in cycling this year that the Colombian sprinter is the first rider to take so many stages in his debut Grand Tour since Fons De Wolf’s total of five in the 1979 Vuelta a España. (Like Gaviria in the 2017 Giro, De Wolf also won that Vuelta’s points jersey.) De Wolf was briefly touted as the next Eddy Merckx in his home country, Belgium. As a sprinter, Gaviria has no real predecessor in Colombia. Hence the interest in where, exactly, Gaviria fits into the Colombian cycling scene. The South American country has generally specialised in climbers of small stature (although there have been many exceptions, like Santiago Botero and Victor Hugo Peña).

In sporting terms, it’s simple: Gaviria doesn’t fit in. Colombia’s climbing tradition stretches back to the country’s first national Tour in the early 1950s, while in Europe, Colombia’s mountain men first made an impact when new Olympic road race champion Sergey Sukhoruchenkov was defeated in the 1980 Tour de l’Avenir by Alfonso Flórez, the first Latin American to win a European stage race.