Victor Hugo Peña: 2004 Tour de France

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Outside Magazine, July 2004

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2004 Tour de France: The Ultimate Guide
Mountain Grown
Victor Hugo Peña grinds for U.S. Postal and Lance, but make no mistake: Ultimately he pedals for the pride of his country, the violent and tumultuous Andean nation of Colombia

Victor Hugo Peña Update

By Bill Gifford


	Rest stop: Victor Hugo Peña, a top enforcer for Lance Armstrong, in Girón, Colombia (Antonin Kratochvil)

THAT FIRST NIGHT in yellow, Victor Hugo Peña could barely sleep. He was alone in a single room, for once, with the phone turned off to keep the media at bay. The president of Colombia, Alvaro Uribe, had managed to get through to congratulate him, but after that there was silence. Peña's eight U.S. Postal Service teammates—including Americans Lance Armstrong and George Hincapie, and Czech rider Pavel Padrnos, his roommate under

Tour de France 2004

CLICK HERE for Outside’s Guide to the 2004 Tour de France, and follow the race July 3-25 with our SPECIAL ONLINE COVERAGE.

ordinary circumstances—were long asleep. Peña should've been out, too, so he would feel fresh enough to ride up front the next day, as befits the leader of the Tour de France.

Instead, his mind spun backwards, past the day's 43-mile team time trial—the fourth stage of the 2003 Tour, which his Postal Service team had won by half a minute—to an evening in late May, when his dream had nearly expired in a flash of violence. He was sitting around at home with his parents, Hugo and Rosa, and his 25-year-old brother, Ismael, drinking hot chocolate and watching TV, when four thugs burst in, brandishing guns.

In an instant, they forced Peña and his family down on the floor. They claimed they were Marxist guerrillas, at war with Colombia's embattled government, and demanded that Peña cough up the $300,000 in cash they believed he kept hidden in the house. Otherwise, they said, they would kill the whole family. Peña denied having any money and calmly invited the gunmen to look around.

This only angered them more, so they announced they were taking Ismael hostage. But after close to three hours of threats, Ismael, who's slightly pudgy and very clever, clutched his chest and groaned, faking a heart attack. The intruders thought better of their plan—a dead hostage isn't much use—so they ransacked the place and fled with the Peñas' computer, some jewelry, and a few armloads of clothing.

It almost didn't matter that the thieves were later caught and jailed, and that their "guns" turned out to be realistic-looking PlayStation toys. Until that night, Peña had never thought of himself as a target. Now he was one, solely because of his fame as an international sports star, and his life had to change. He sold his house—which he'd built himself, outside his beloved hometown of Piedecuesta, a ragged city of 80,000—and moved his family into a gated compound in nearby Bucaramanga, a leafy, relatively quiet city 200 miles north of Bogotá.

That was the easy part. It was harder to come to terms with what the attack meant for his future in a country that he loves and never wants to leave.

"You are a different person now," the police told him that night. "You are not a normal guy anymore."

At last, lying on that rumpled hotel bed in France, with cycling's most coveted maillot hanging off his chair, Peña knew what the cops were talking about. Though his countrymen had made their mark on the Tour de France for two decades, often dominating its mountain stages, he was the first Colombian ever to wear the yellow jersey. Before, he was modestly famous; now he'd become a national hero. Back home, the celebrations were still going strong, and tomorrow the whole world would see him on their sports pages, proving once again that his poor, scarred nation belonged in the big leagues of bike racing.

The next day, Stage 5, the 29-year-old Peña rode like he had wings. All the way south to the city of Nevers, the TV motorbikes jostled for position around him. Any other team would have defended Peña's lead to the death, but he knew that wasn't part of the Postal script. The fact that he was the overall leader this early in the Tour was a bit of a fluke, and the team's brain trust didn't intend for it to last long.

"I wanted him to get rid of it as soon as possible," concedes Peña's boss, 39-year-old team director Johan Bruyneel. Having Peña in yellow distracted everyone from the team's only goal, which was to help Lance Armstrong win his fifth Tour. Peña's moment of glory had to give way to a reality that defines the life of every support rider: His role was to sacrifice himself for the team leader. Still, at day's end, Peña retained his one-second lead—over Armstrong himself, awkwardly enough.

On Peña's second day in yellow, with temperatures in the nineties, the peloton blazed south to Lyon, and TV viewers watched Peña drop back to the team car and stuff his yellow jersey with water bottles—perhaps the first time a Tour leader has performed such a lowly task. What those viewers didn't realize was that Peña himself had volunteered for the errand. The next day, the race hit the mountains and Peña lost the jersey for good, to 33-year-old French superclimber Richard Virenque, who won the stage.

"My job at that time," Peña recalls without complaint, "was not to be the winner of the Tour."

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BILL GIFFORD wrote about U.S. ski pro Bode Miller in January. He lives in central Pennsylvania.

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