Sport in Colombia - Cycling

Cycling

See also: Cycling in Colombia and Vuelta a Colombia

Cycling in Colombia became very popular, after the triumphs of Martín Emilio "Cochise" Rodríguez in European cycling competitions, which in turn helped to develop the Colombian Cycling Federation. Rodriguez was later followed by a generation of bicyclers known as the "Colombian beetles", which include up to this date Luis "Lucho" Herrera, Luis Felipe Laverde, Fabio Parra, Víctor Hugo Peña, Santiago Botero, and more recently Mauricio Soler. These competitors created a fan base in Colombia, which in turn helped to create the Vuelta a Colombia, a local cycling competition.

During the 1990s, the government of the Colombian capital, Bogotá introduced the Ciclovía, which became popular and were introduced later into other Colombian cities. The government of Bogotá later built Bogotá's Bike Paths Network to sponsor the practice of sports by the population and to curb the city's increasing pollution by drivers. The network extends throughout the city with bicycle use increasing five times in the city. There is an estimated 300,000 to 400,000 trips made daily in Bogotá by bicycle. A large portion of this use is in southern poorer areas.

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Famous quotes containing the word cycling:

    “If all feeling for grace and beauty were not extinguished in the mass of mankind at the actual moment, such a method of locomotion as cycling could never have found acceptance; no man or woman with the slightest aesthetic sense could assume the ludicrous position necessary for it.”
    —Ouida [Marie Louise De La Ramée] (1839–1908)

    “I shall not bring an automobile with me. These inventions infest France almost as much as Bloomer cycling costumes, but they make a horrid racket, and are particularly objectionable. So are the Bloomers. Nothing more abominable has ever been invented. Perhaps the automobile tricycles may succeed better, but I abjure all these works of the devil.”
    —Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)

    “From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
    —Charles Darwin (1809–1882)