From spotting condors and wild horses to training at 36 degrees Celsius in January, Tom Pidcock and six of his Pinarello-Q36.5 teammates are making the most of a pre-season altitude training camp in the ski resort of El Colorado, Chile.
The team are present in Chile for a 25-day camp in the Andes mountains, before returning to Europe in early February, staying at 2,780 metres above sea level whilst in South America.
In a series of first-person comments published by Het Laatste Nieuws, the three Belgian riders taking part – Quinten Hermans, Xandro Meurisse and Brent Van Moer – described how life felt in their trailblazing training camp.
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Overall, the riders seemed very pleased with the experience. They pointed out that not only are they able to train in very warm conditions, but the hotel was also 400 metres higher above sea level than the famous Parador hotel in Teide, where many of their European-based counterparts will be training at altitude in the weeks and months to come.
"It's these extreme conditions that push our bodies to perform at their peak in March," Van Moer said in the HLN article.
"I won't claim I'll be riding 5kph faster than if I had completed this altitude training camp on Mount Teide, but the conditions here are good, and it's nice to be somewhere different for a change."
The weather was certainly more pleasant than in most of Western Europe at this time of the winter, although it has to be remembered riders in the Tour Down Under are enjoying almost equally hot conditions.
Earlier this year, in an interview with Nieuwsblad, Q36.5 Head of Performance Kurt Bogaerts explained that "At this time of year, you need to be able to go on a training camp somewhere with a good climate for training, so you don't have to constantly improvise."
Tough winter weather mean that usual destinations like Sierra Nevada in Spain or Livigno in the Italian Alps are not at all practical, while Teide is often overbooked. Bogaerts also called Pidcock "the driving force" behind the training camp.
Meurisse added that even at 2,700 metres above sea level, it was over 20 degrees when he woke up at eight in the morning and 36 degrees in the valleys where they do their interval training.
"It's like an oven," he said. "The sun is burning brightly here. The UV index is currently 14. If you were to sit in the sun for ten minutes without applying SPF 50 sunscreen, you'd be completely sunburned," he told Het Laatste Nieuws.
Altitude camps in South America are not totally unheard of for European-based teams, although Chile is not a usual destination by any means and back in the 2000s riders used to head to South Africa – at lower altitudes – as well for their off-season training.
Sprinting great Mark Cavendish and some of his Astana teammates spent time in the mountains in Colombia in January 2024. Then about a decade ago, Giro d'Italia winner Richard Carapaz once told the now-defunct ProCycling magazine he had been inspired to try to turn pro after the Astana team bus appeared one off-season in his high-altitude home region of Carchi in Ecuador.
What the Pinarello-Q36.5 riders are enjoying enormously, too, is the chance to see a lot of wildlife, in remarkably beautiful terrain.
"The landscape is incomparable to that of Europe's mountains. When we have to ride an hour and a half uphill to El Colorado after training in the valley, you see wild horses on the mountainsides and condors in the sky," Hermans said to HLN.
"This ski village is almost empty and it's currently home to more condors than people."
There is no lack of other cyclists in the area, many of them stopping Pidcock to ask for photos, with Meurisse joking in the Het Laatste Nieuws article that "there were even more people out cycling than on a busy day at the [famous training ascent of] Coll de Rates in Spain."
"The road surface here does have some cracks and potholes, but you get that in the Ardennes too."
Pidcock himself will be starting racing on much more familiar roads in just under a month's time, beginning with the two-day Vuelta a Murcia on February 13. He then goes onto the Clásica Jaén on February 16, the five-day Vuelta a Andalucia on February 18 and a return to Omloop Het Nieuwsblad on February 28.
