INEOS Grenadiers have just announced that Café de Colombia is returning to professional cycling as an official coffee partner — and if you know your cycling history, this should give you a little thrill. If it doesn’t, let me explain why it should…
(Despite them pairing up with the Death Star Team of cycling).
The Golden Era – (for my Generation)
Cast your mind back to the 1980s (I’m old enough to be able to – it’s a privilege, trust me).
Professional cycling was a European sport, played mostly by Europeans and a few Amercians, on European roads, largely for European audiences. The Italians had their tifosi. The Belgians had their cobblestones and their Eddy Merckx mythology. The French had the Tour de France, and some good bread, and their heyday was coming to an end, not that they knew it, with the likes of Hinault and Fignon rampaging all over the shop.
And then — seemingly out of nowhere — a group of wiry, high-altitude-turbo-charged Colombian climbers showed up and exploded onto the scene.
The Café de Colombia team wasn’t just a cycling squad — it was a cultural statement. These riders came from a country with no road cycling tradition (not that we knew of anyway), no historic development system, no domestique pipeline. What they did have though were lungs trained at 2,500 metres above sea level and an absolutely fearless approach to racing. They didn’t sit in and calculate – they launched.
“Herrera doesn’t just climb — he flies. The Europeans had never seen anything like it.”
— French press blurb, Tour de France, 1985
Lucho Herrera and the Mountain Kings
Luis “Lucho” Herrera was the fulcrum of it all.
Small, slight, almost birdlike — and utterly devastating on any steep climb. He won stages at the Tour de France, the first Colombian to do so, took the Vuelta a España overall in 1987m becoming the first non-European to win a Grand Tour. He also dominated the mountains classification, winning the King of the Mountains at all three Grand Tours: the Tour de France, Giro d’Italia, and Vuelta.
He was quite simply one of the most influential climbers in history.
That he may have ordered the murders of four young farmers a few years ago in his native land is another thing matter and I will be looking into that later… back to the cycling.
He wasn’t the type to sit in and wait. Herrera preferred sharp, repeated accelerations, often attacking multiple times on the same climb until rivals cracked. On very steep sections, especially above 10%, he thrived, dancing lightly out of the saddle with a high cadence and minimal upper-body movement. His small, lightweight build let him glide uphill while heavier riders struggled.
Unlike more calculated climbers, Herrera rode on instinct. He’d go early, sometimes far from the summit, trusting his ability to sustain the effort. This made him unpredictable and exciting to watch. Sometimes it worked, something it didn’t, but you knew always knew he was in the race and whatever the outcome, he’d make you suffer at some point.
In essence, he was a pure climber—less about pacing and portioning out his watts by the teaspoonful – he was rather all about aggression and dominance.
When Herrera attacked on Alpe d’Huez, even Laurent Fignon and Bernard Hinault couldn’t follow. That’s not a small thing -that’s the 1980s version of dropping Pogačar.
Alongside Fignon.
Alongside him rode Fabio Parra, who came third overall at the 1988 Tour de France — still the highest Grand Tour finish by a Colombian until Egan Bernal arrived decades later. These weren’t anomalies. The Café de Colombia squad was producing elite climbers the way Belgium produces sprinters: systematically, proudly, and with a very particular national flavour.
The Jerseys
The Café de Colombia kit was a classic. Rich, warm red with yellow and blue details — the colours of the Colombian flag, worn with obvious national pride. These weren’t the output of a corporate rebrand exercise. They looked like something you’d want to frame.
They had identity. They had a guy in a poncho with a horse.
Compare that to what we get today. A brief scan of the current WorldTour peloton reveals a gallery of navy-and-white geometric exercises, mid-blue corporate rectangles, and the occasional aggressive fluorescent accent that somehow manages to look timid in person. INEOS themselves — with their deep pockets and design resources — have spent years in variations of black and blue, perfectly fine, deeply forgettable. Jumbo-Visma wore yellow because yellow is their brand colour; it works. But where’s the story? Where’s the je ne sais quoi?
Cycling’s jersey design peaked somewhere around 1992 – in CP’s honest opinion – and has been quietly declining ever since.
The Other Thing the Colombian Riders Were ‘Allegedly’ Bringing to Europe
No article about Colombian cycling’s golden age would be complete without acknowledging the fine white powder in the room.
The 1980s peloton had an appetite for cocaine that would make a rock band blush, and it has been widely alleged that some Colombian riders found a profitable sideline as informal importers.
The reasoning, as it went, was elegant in its simplicity: Colombian riders were crossing international borders constantly, their team vehicles searched no more thoroughly than anyone else’s, and demand among well-paid European professionals was robust. The peloton of the era was also swimming in amphetamines and corticosteroids, so the bar for what constituted acceptable pharmacology was set somewhere near the ground.
Cocaine was simply the Colombian contribution to the buffet.
None of this was ever officially proven against the Café de Colombia team itself, and the riders who have spoken about it over the years have been careful with their words. But the stories persist in cycling’s oral history, passed between journalists, soigneurs, and retired domestiques the way all the best peloton gossip does. It adds a certain texture to the era.
Romantic, chaotic, dangerous, alive!
You may frown at that but I’d bet you’d watch an interview with the current Golden Boys off their faces on an 8-Ball of South American Marching Powder…
So What Does the Return Actually Mean?
INEOS CEO John Allert has spoken about coffee being “embedded in cycling culture.” Coffee is undeniably cycling’s official tipple. It’s consumed before, during (in gel form), and after many a ride.
The café stop for many is sacred.
That Café de Colombia would return as a sponsor is less a commercial deal and more a theologically correct arrangement, like bringing a wandering Saint back into the fold.
The broader context is INEOS shoring up its commercial base alongside partners like insurance broker WTW, and many teams are doing similar, with other companies we’ve never heard of.
But Café de Colombia is different. It’s the one signing that carries actual emotional weight. It connects a team that can sometimes feel like a logistics operation that Darth Vader has a sizeable investment in, back to something wilder and more human — mountain stages ridden in anger, a country discovering it could conquer Europe on a bicycle, to jerseys that looked like they were designed by someone who actually loved the sport and had taste, and COCAINE SMUGGLED IN SEAT TUBES!
Of course none of this will happen ever again but, yeah, them were the days…
I mean, what’s more human than cocaine?!
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