More than 20 years ago, the now-defunct magazine Cycle Sport ran a feature about Francisco Cabello, a pro from southern Spain who lived for most of the off-season at the Sierra Nevada ski station, 2,500 metres above sea level. He would then descend from his winter base to win the Mallorca Challenge, and other early season races, year in and year out.
While a stage win in the 1994 Tour in Britain was the highlight of his career, Cabello was something of a loner back then, with Cycle Sport claiming that no other professional cyclist lived at a higher altitude in Europe for such long periods.
But even if altitude training was hardly rare in the 1990s, Cabello unwittingly blazed a trail for other riders to follow him to Sierra Nevada ski station as an ideal location to do it. And since the 1990s that path has become so well-trodden that when Cyclingnews heads up there this year in early April, two decades on, it's to find plenty of pros continuing to follow Cabello's example, albeit for much shorter periods, in Europe's most southerly ski station.
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Not that the weather is what you'd call ideal for riding a bike this April in southern Spain. Outside Sierra Nevada's High Performance Centre [CAR], a vast, grey, concrete slab of a building on the higher reaches of the ski station where many altitude training camps are based, there's a metre of snow on the ground, and the temperatures crawl up to just above freezing at midday before plunging back down again. Sometimes there's an occasional ray of sunshine, but most of the time it's chucking down a charming mixture of rain, hail and snow.
The station's higher roads are - just - passable, though, with snowploughs battling through the strong winds to clear at least a narrow strip of tarmac, and in the process, bury parked cars in even higher snow drifts. It certainly doesn't stop a tall, athletic-looking woman in her thirties, wrapped up from top to toe in outdoor gear, from running past the CAR at full tilt in a seemingly interminable session of sprint series.
Inside, despite the poor weather, the CAR - with facilities including a large indoor swimming pool, gym, restaurant and hotel rooms - is a hive of activity of athletes of all types. Cyclists form a substantial percentage of Sierra Nevada's most regular, non-skiing, visitors. Bora-Hansgrohe had a large contingent there earlier in the season, for example. Come April, Rafal Majka can still be spotted wandering through the CAR lobby, but the one team truck visible is a Jumbo-Visma branded vehicle. To judge by the snow levels now well above its axles, it won't be going anywhere for a while.
You can read more at Cyclingnews.com
via Cyclingnews Latest Interviews and Features http://www.cyclingnews.com/features/from-the-spanish-sierras-to-the-giro-ditalia
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