Egan Arley Bernal Gomez was born on 13 January 1997 in Bogota, Colombia, and raised in the town of Zipaquira, a municipality north of the capital perched at high altitude in the Andean highlands. In 2019 he became the first Latin American rider to win the Tour de France, the most prestigious bicycle race in the world, and did so as the youngest champion since 1909. Two years later he added the Giro d'Italia to his palmares. His story, from second-hand bicycle on the streets of Zipaquira to the podium of the Champs-Elysees, is one of the most remarkable trajectories in modern cycling, all the more so because a catastrophic crash in 2022 nearly ended both his career and his life.
The cycling environment of Zipaquira shaped Bernal's development in ways that high-altitude training facilities cannot fully replicate. His father German worked at the famous Salt Cathedral carved into a mountain near the town and was himself a passionate amateur cyclist. Bernal began riding a second-hand bicycle at age five, and at nine years old, acting against his father's wishes, he entered a local race and won it with ease. The prize was a training scholarship, the first recognition that his ability was exceptional.
Before committing fully to road cycling, Bernal became a competitive mountain biker. He excelled across multiple countries, winning races in Brazil, Costa Rica, and the United States, and earned a silver medal in 2014 and a bronze in 2015 at the UCI Mountain Bike World Championships in the junior cross-country category. These results established his credentials internationally and demonstrated the engines of power and climbing ability that would later devastate opponents in the mountain stages of Grand Tours.
His transition to professional road racing came through Italian team director Gianni Savio, who signed him to Androni Giocattoli-Sidermec on a four-year contract. Part of the basis for this signing was an astonishing VO2 max reading of 88.8 milliliters per kilogram per minute provided by his agent Paolo Alberati, a figure that placed Bernal among the most physiologically gifted endurance athletes measured at that time. Savio chose to send him directly into senior racing rather than taking the usual route through the under-23 category. Through 2016 and 2017 Bernal accumulated steady results at professional level, winning the Tour of Bihor in 2016 and then adding stages and the overall title at both the Sibiu Cycling Tour and the prestigious Tour de l'Avenir in 2017.
His potential attracted Team Sky, the British professional cycling organization that had dominated the Tour de France through the 2010s. Despite being under contract to Androni, Sky purchased his contract for a reported fee of 350,000 euros, and Bernal joined the team for the 2018 season. He repaid that investment almost immediately. In February 2018 he won the Colombian National Time Trial Championship, and in March he won the first edition of the Tour Colombia through an attack on the final climb on the final day. A crash in the Volta a Catalunya that spring, which fractured his clavicle and scapula, interrupted his season but could not slow the overall arc of his development. He returned to win the Tour of California in May, his first UCI WorldTour victory, finishing more than a minute ahead of the field.
At the 2018 Tour de France, Bernal rode as a domestique supporting team leaders Chris Froome and Geraint Thomas, but observers noticed how he could drop established climbers with apparent ease in the mountain stages. His presence in the high passes was a warning of what was to come the following year. In 2019 he announced himself to the world. At the Tour de France that summer, racing for what was now called Team INEOS, Bernal took the yellow jersey in the Alps and defended it to Paris, becoming at twenty-two years old the youngest Tour winner since Henri Cornet in 1904 and the first ever from Latin America. Colombia erupted in celebrations. The country had produced great cyclists before, but never a Tour champion.
In 2021 Bernal delivered his second Grand Tour victory at the Giro d'Italia, a race he dominated through the high mountain stages in breathtaking fashion, confirming that his 2019 triumph was no accident of circumstance. The combination of two Grand Tour victories before his twenty-fifth birthday placed him among the most gifted stage racers of his generation, and speculation about future titles seemed entirely reasonable.
Then came January 2022, and a crash during a training ride in Colombia that fractured his spine in multiple places, broke his kneecap and femur, punctured a lung, and briefly raised the possibility that he might never walk again, let alone race a bicycle. His recovery was arduous and astonishing in equal measure. He returned to racing in 2023, completing the Tour de France and other races, but the same effortless domination of the mountains that had defined his peak years proved elusive. The cycling world watched with a mixture of admiration for his resilience and sadness at the gap between what he had been and what the crash had left behind. His story, even in its more uncertain later chapter, remains a defining narrative of courage and brilliance in the contemporary sport.
