Día por día. Not even Rigoberto Urán’s Latin American Spanish make interesting three of the most mundane words in professional cycling. Day by day. A phrase that has become so widespread in press conferences and mixed zones the world over, but one that says so little. You get the sense, however, that Urán actually means it. “For me, there is no past, there is no future, only the present,” he tells Procycling in a hotel meeting room in Japan. Urán drives his point home with a smile: “There is only today, right here, right now.” The words ‘día por día’ passed his lips countless times in July as he made his way to second place at the Tour de France. Having last graced a Grand Tour podium at the 2014 Giro, he flew into the race under the radar but claimed a thrilling victory on stage 9 in Chambéry, millimetres ahead of Warren Barguil. From then on, it was one pedal stroke at a time all the way to Paris. Urán’s approach to a Grand Tour mirrors his approach to life in general. “At the Tour, on the first day I’m not thinking about the final stage in the mountains – no, today is the first stage, tomorrow is the second. Día por día. That’s how I try to see things in life,” he explains. “The future, we don’t know about. The past has gone. There’s only today.” Urán’s outlook has been shaped by the extraordinary nature of the journey that led him from provincial Colombia to the upper echelons of European cycling. It has been a path marked by obstacles, setbacks and even tragedy. When he was just 14 years old, Urán lost his father, who was killed at the hands of paramilitary fighters in the midst of long-running conflict in Colombia. The innocence of childhood ended abruptly. “I had to take on all responsibility for the family,” says Urán, who went around on his bike selling lottery tickets to provide for his mother and sister. “At 14 I was, let’s say, the ‘papa’ of the family. I had to become a grown-up at 14.” It’s at this point that Urán’s vision fixes on what’s immediately in front of him. He quickly got on with his life and has never liked to dwell on the death of his father, or at least open up about it publicly. In our interview, he refers matter-of-factly to his childhood as “normal” and “without problems”. “Obviously I lost my father at a very young age, but I overcame it. Everything, everything, everything can be overcome. “We, as human beings, adapt when we have to. If there’s a need to do so, we learn and we adapt. So that period wasn’t difficult – not at all. Now I can say, ‘Oh, it was tough,’ but at the time, in the moment, no problem.” In the moment. No problem. Is it any wonder that Urán would want to live day by day? When the past is painful and irretrievable, and the future suddenly so unreliable, the present becomes the only solid ground. Urán had to grow up fast. He had been given a bike just before his father died and won his first race. He quickly made a name for himself on the local scene and at 17 he attracted the attention of the regional Orgullo Paisa team. Colombian rules state that riders can’t be salaried until they’re 18, but he somehow talked them into giving him a pay packet so that he could send money back to his mother. It wasn’t long before he was making the journey to Europe. An acquaintance arranged for him to join the Tenax team in Italy in 2006, and suddenly Urán was a professional cyclist at the age of 19. It was a rocky road to begin with. He suffered two bad crashes in his first two seasons, the first resulting in a broken collarbone on his introduction to Belgian cobbles, the second in two broken elbows and a broken wrist at the Deutschland Tour. “With that one, they told me it would be difficult to make a complete recovery. So I was worried I wouldn’t go back to being a cyclist – I’d barely started.” On top of the bumps and bruises came the alienation of being thrown into an entirely different culture and a language he didn’t understand. Did he ever worry that this life might not be for him after all? “I didn’t know. The future, you don’t know. You just get by.”
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