If you ask a Bogotáno where they learned to ride a bike, they all have the same answer.
BOGOTÁ, Colombia—At 4 a.m. on Sunday, Dec. 15, Jerson Osorio stood at the center of several thousand traffic signs, speed bumps, and hip-high yellow cones. Walkie-talkie in hand, earpiece firmly in place, phone buzzing with voice messages, Osorio surveyed a fleet of 33 box trucks backing in around this cluster of roadway equipment. A hundred workers in parkas and ruanas began to load the trucks, each one bound for a different section of the Colombian capital.
Everyone who works on the event, whether closing the streets or selling snacks, describes it with the Spanish verb for getting up long before dawn, which sounds like what it feels like:. But there is joy in this ritual, too. Shivering beside Osorio for this occasion was the ebullient Lucy Barriga, who ran Ciclovía in the 1990s and established a similar event in Guadalajara, Mexico. “It always brings a lot of emotion to be back here,” she said.
The original Ciclovía was an environmental protest against cars and against sprawl, and a demonstration of the power of the people. “Ciclovía was the biggest civic values classroom in the world,” Ortiz Mariño said. “Bogotá has this space on Sunday where there’s no police, no money, almost no politics, it’s an absolutely unique phenomenon.”
On Dec. 15, even before the guardians strung up the yellow Ciclovía-brand caution tape , an army of cyclists converged on Patios, a lung-busting climb into the mountains. They came on Cervelos and Bianchis, but also fixies and heavy steel beaters. This uphill parade represents one side of Bogotá’s bike culture; on the Strava leaderboard for this ascent, Colombia’s Tour de France winner Egan Bernal is in fifth place.
Nearly every Bogotáno has a memory of this experience. “It’s important not to forget that the Ciclovía is where we connect with childhood,” Juan Manuel Robledo, one of the organizers of the 50birthday festivities, explained. “In some way we all feel a bit like kids when we go out in Ciclovía.” The memories are stored not in the streets themselves, but in the way Bogotános move through them on a Sunday morning.
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