
In the small village of La Playa, nestled more in the Andes than by the sea, the Richard Carapaz Club welcomes children from 8 to 18 years old to offer them a better world. The program was started by Richard Carapaz, 31, the reigning Olympic road cycling champion at the 2021 Tokyo Games, in his hometown of Ecuador.
In this Latin American country, cycling is almost nothing, but it gives a way of life. It prevents people from falling into trafficking and violence, a common shortcut, in a poor region on the border with Colombia. A kid from La Playa who rides is one less kid in prison. And it is with this mission that Richard Carapaz wins the biggest cycling races, the Giro d’Italia (2019), the Olympic Games (2021) and the seventeenth stage of the Tour de France, Wednesday July 17, in the mountains between Saint-Paul-Trois-Châteaux (Drôme) and the Superdévoluy resort (Hautes-Alpes).
The rider for the North American team EF Education-EasyPost is running a parallel race in the 2024 Tour de France. Sometimes he establishes a relationship of equals with the favorites – whom he joined on the third step of the final podium of the Grande Boucle in 2021 –, he attacks them and even takes the yellow jersey, for a day, between Turin (Italy) and the stage of the Col du Galibier, in the Alps. Sometimes he starts from afar, as an “adventurer”. In all cases, he thrives on the attack, in a claimed “freedom”, on the bike and in life, and a sum of values that he intends to transmit to the young people of his country, enshrined in the club’s charter. “Treat your teammates, staff and opponents with dignity. (…) Learn to recognize your limits and not forget that each individual is only part of a whole, always at the service of others.
Pocagar-Vingegaard duel continues
His career is part of the old tradition of hard-working and generous cycling. In a region of a new world – South America – which is no longer so new in the geography of this professional sport, Richard Carapaz grew up in a family of farmers. He got up at five o’clock to milk the cows and returned to the cattle after school. His first bike was a BMX recovered by his father from a scrap heap, restored, and with which the boisterous little boy jumped and sprinted – at first without any tires.
Unlike neighboring Colombia, which has cherished cyclists for over a century, Ecuador is completely unaware of their existence. However, Richard Carapaz hesitates to sign up for a Colombian team, even more so a European one, fearing that he would end up like many cyclists on the continent: a simple water carrier, without money or respect.
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