Nairo Quintana's retirement marks the end of an era

The day after Nairo Quintana confirmed that he would retire at the end of this season, the Colombian edition of AS ran a story that ignored his palmarès in favour of totting up his earnings. 

The headline – “How much money has Nairo Quintana earned throughout his cycling career?” – might have been crass, but it was also a reminder of the extraordinary distance Quintana has travelled in his cycling life.

Quintana’s journey from a humble childhood in an adobe home in Vereda La Concepción, perched high in the Andes, to the podium of the Tour de France and the status of national idol was a tumultuous one, even if the rider himself always gently railed against lazy shorthand accounts of his upbringing.

“Many people, in their ignorance, think that we Colombians don’t know anything about Europe when we come here, when it’s the opposite: it’s the Europeans who don’t know anything about Europe,” Quintana told El País in 2015.

“We’re not living in loincloths and straw huts… Before interviewing me, a lot of people should do a bit of research on Colombia…”

Even so, it’s still clear that Quintana’s path to the top was radically different from his contemporaries across the Atlantic. The demographics of cycling in Europe have changed over the past half century, with the sport gentrifying steadily. For generations, the sport’s champions were predominantly of modest, rural stock, but three decades have now passed since a farmer’s son – Miguel Induráin in 1995 – last won the Tour de France.

In Colombia, however, cycling would remain a sport accessible to the rural working-class in that time. As a result, Quintana’s early life on a small land holding in Boyacá, outlined in vivid detail in Matt Rendell’s authoritative Colombia Es Pasión, has more in common with European champions of yesteryear than the riders he competed against to win the Giro d’Italia and Vuelta a España.

In his early years, Quintana’s restrained media performances and impassive expression brought to mind the apocryphal tale of Sean Kelly once nodding a response in a radio interview. Like Kelly, that self-contained manner was surely a consequence of his upbringing. 

As Rendell put it: “The Quintana children scarcely saw a television. As a result, the filmic language of gesture and expression, second nature to those socialised before the small screen, was foreign to them.”

When Quintana scored a breakout victory over the Col du Joux Plane on the penultimate stage of the 2012 Critérium du Dauphiné, he was so softly spoken that half the pressroom didn’t even realise his winner’s press conference had taken place. But Quintana’s talent was now calling everyone’s attention.

In 2013, Quintana placed second at the Tour de France, capped by dropping Chris Froome at Semnoz on the penultimate day. In 2014, he claimed overall victory at the Giro d’Italia with an indelible stage win at Val Martello after a controversial afternoon on the Stelvio. 

Almost as striking as the pink jersey was Quintana’s quiet defiance amid the polemics over his Stelvio attack. Movistar manager Eusebio Unzué’s previous insistence that Quintana reminded him of Bernard Hinault – another hardy farmer’s son – suddenly made sense.

The expectation was that Quintana would eventually go and win the Tour in the years that followed, but he kept running into the brick wall of Chris Froome and Team Sky. He placed second in 2015 and third in 2016, but that was as good as it would get in July. 

Victory at the 2016 Vuelta a España was followed by a gradual decline, not helped by the messy period in which he formed a disparate triumvirate of leaders at Movistar with Alejandro Valverde and Mikel Landa.

Movistar had built a marketing campaign in Latin America around Quintana’s sueño amarillo, but that yellow dream would never materialise, at least not for Nairoman. Instead, it would be achieved by Egan Bernal in 2019, when he became the first Colombian and first cyclist from the Global South to win the Tour de France.

Bernal’s talent and sheer force of will are entirely his own, of course, but the momentum built up by Quintana, above all, but also by Rigoberto Urán and others, surely helped to guide his way to the very top of the mountain.

Quintana still tried to get there himself, and he enjoyed a short-lived renaissance at the beginning of 2020 following his move to Arkéa-Samsic, with the French squad offering an apparent breath of fresh air in the wake of a gradual breakdown in relations with Movistar. His spirited early-season showings were interrupted by the COVID-19 lockdown, however, and he had to settle for 17th at a Tour marked by a heavy crash and a police search of his hotel room as part of a doping probe.

Two years later, Quintana would place sixth at the Tour, but he was stripped of the result shortly afterwards when it emerged that he had tested positive for Tramadol during the race. Although there was no suspension resulted from that positive test, it saw Quintana spend more than a year on the sidelines after Arkéa-Samsic terminated his contract.

As 2023 drew on, it looked as though Quintana’s career was over, until he was surprisingly welcomed back into the fold at Movistar ahead of the 2024 campaign. It was perhaps a marriage of convenience – Unzué needed a name to placate his sponsor after Valverde’s retirement – but it was couched as a homecoming. “I have the M tattooed on my heart,” Quintana said at his re-introductory press conference, doubtless to the delight of the marketing men in Madrid.

By then, an industry had long since built up around Quintana. When he began his second spell with Movistar at the 2024 Tour Colombia, his face adorned billboards for the company in Duitama, Tunja and Bogotá. At stage finishes, a stall bearing Quintana’s stylised “N” branding did a brisk trade hawking his merchandise, including his own brand of coffee. 

But although Quintana went close before the Pogacar juggernaut ran him down at Livigno on the 2024 Giro, he hasn’t won a race in his second coming at Movistar, where he has been largely deployed as a gregario.

Now 36, Quintana is ten years removed from his last Tour podium and his last Grand Tour victory. The game has long since moved on.

Quintana’s announcement on Sunday came as no surprise, though it was striking that he chose the low-key setting of a pre-Volta a Catalunya press briefing. When Rigoberto Urán hung up his wheels in 2024, he announced his decision on primetime on Colombian television, after RCN had teased the interview all week, but perhaps that contrast was just in keeping with their very different personalities and the subtly different ways the Colombian public has engaged with them. 

Urán, whose life story was serialised into a sprawling telenovela, was beloved as a plain-speaking man of the people. Quintana was revered as the man who rode alone against the mountain to bring Colombian cycling to hitherto unseen heights, surpassing even Luis Herrera and Fabio Parra.

Their retirements mark the end of an era, and Bernal’s current absence from racing underscores an uncertain future for Colombian cycling. Cycling remains a national passion, but the pathways from the domestic scene to the top level seem ever more precarious in an age when WorldTour teams are scouting riders in the junior ranks and below based on their power data. 

“In Europe, a kid of 13 or 14 years of age already has a power-meter, he already has a nutritionist…” Bernal said in early 2024. “In Colombia, we’re not lacking riders – we’re lacking equal conditions.”

Quintana overcame that disparity and flourished on the highest stage during his turbulent and ultimately controversial career. But that doesn’t mean it’s going to be any easier for those who try to follow him.