The early season UCI calendar could have a major gap in 2025 with the Tour Colombia currently battling to keep the event going amid budget constraints.
Tour Colombia (February 4-9, 2025) is scheduled to overlap with the Volta a la Comunitat Valenciana (February 5-9), but the Spanish stage race which may also face cancellation in 2025 following the terrible floods of last month in the region, which killed hundreds of people and devastated property and infrastructure, including much of the material in the race's logistic base.
If Valenciana and Colombia were both cancelled, the only European men's stage race that week currently on the UCI calendar would be the Etoile de Bessèges in France, with the Herald Sun Tour also taking place in Australia.
Cyclingnews understands that a definitive verdict on whether the Tour Colombia will take place has yet to be taken. A dramatic cut in public funding, a currently inactive website, and media reports of pleas for its ongoing survival are hardly encouraging omens.
El Tiempo reported recently that the Colombia Ministry of Sport, which provides the key backing for the Tour Colombia, suffered a 66% global budget cut for 2025. The Ministry's budget will drop from 1,300 billion Colombian pesos (roughly $328 million US dollars) to 464 billion ($145 million US dollars). The cost of the race to government coffers is estimated by El Tiempo to be around seven billion Colombian pesos.
Tour Colombia has been a hugely popular event with riders, teams and fans alike. In past editions of the 2.1 race, figures of the stature of Mark Cavendish (Astana Qazaqstan) have chosen the Tour Colombia - where Cavendish won a stage last year - to make their season debut. Other top international names taking part in past years include Chris Froome (Israel-Premier Tech), Julian Alaphilippe (Soudal-QuickStep), Egan Bernal (Ineos Grenadiers), Nairo Quintana (Movistar) and Rigoberto Urán (EF Education-EasyPost).
However, according to El Tiempo, the most seriously affected members of the peloton by the possible cancellation would be members of the local Colombian squads. The other major South American race, the Vuelta a San Juan, ended after the 2023 edition. Colombia's highest-ranked race forms an almost unique chance for the country's teams to battle against some of the top names in the sport.
"We need to give our U23 riders a chance to race, and the Tour Colombia is a great opportunity," Raúl Mesa, whose Nu team won the race last year with Rodrigo Contreras, told the paper.
"We race on home terrain against major names, it gives our riders a great opportunity to know what it's like to take part these kinds of events. If it doesn't happen, it really hits us hard.
"Losing the chance to have a race of this level in this country is terrible news," added Luis Cely, the sports director at another Continental Colombian team, GW Erco Shimano.
"Riders who can't get to Europe only have the chance to race against the best in the Tour Colombia, and the competition is a boost for sponsors to invest and benefit from their investment."
As chance would have it, the potential loss of the Tour Colombia may contribute to a brief but notable dearth of races in the early season calendar sparked by other outside circumstances.
Top Colombian riders like Nairo Quintana (Movistar), well-known for his social activism, have not been slow to react to the potential crisis to the nation's sport created by the impending massive budget cut.
During a ceremony last week when he received the 'Order of Democracy Simón Bolivar' medal, an honour awarded by the Colombian state to citizens who have performed exceptional services to the nation, Quintana recently made the most of the high-profile opportunity to deliver some pointed criticisms.
The winner of a stage of the Tour Colombia in 2019 and second overall in 2018, Quintana did not refer to the stage race directly during his speech to the country's parliament. Instead he took a broader perspective.
"This big cut for sportspeople and the Ministry of Sport - here, nobody has heard anything, nobody knows anything and nobody talks about it," he said in his speech. "As people here can see so many challenging situations for our country, I invite them to think about us. We sportspeople are facing a massive cut."
The latest revived version of the nation's national stage race that began in 2018 but ended in 2020, the Tour Colombia subsequently only returned, post-pandemic, for a new edition in 2024. However, this year's race was in much more uncertain circumstances for the sport in general than when COVID-19 initially brought it to a halt.
As Cyclingnews reported before the race start this year, the three-year hiatus from 2021 to 2023 was partly due to shortfalls in funding, which prevented the Colombian Cycling Federation from resurrecting it.
Its return in 2024 came too late to persuade many WorldTour teams to change their early-season programmes and at a point when Colombia's previously high profile in the sport, in part thanks to a Tour de France win for Egan Bernal in 2019, was ebbing away.
Current ambitions that the 2024 Tour Colombia would provide a foothold for future editions still exist - on paper at least. But as the weeks tick by towards a definitive decision on its viability, those hopes are looking to be in painfully short supply.
