fact, in the drug organization no one ever called me Roberto. Pablo was “the boss,” “el patrón,” sometimes “the doctor,” but I was always El Osito.

Almost always when I raced Pablo was with me. He was my assistant. He’d wash my bicycle and prepare my uniform for the next race. And before the race he would kill a pigeon for me. Some people believed that the blood of pigeons provides energy, so Pablo would go to a park and capture a pigeon to give to me. Pablo would also make sure that big groups from our neighborhood would come to the races to cheer for me. In those days, I was his hero.

With the first salary I earned as a member of the national team in 1965 I purchased my first car—a blue German Warburt, and I saved my mother’s house. Even with her teacher’s salary and the money my father earned working on a farm, she had fallen months behind on the rent and was about to be evicted. It was the proudest day of my life when I was able to pay the overdue balance to the bank as well as several months in advance.

It’s very difficult for me to describe the feelings that I experienced during a race, but in a life that has been full of extraordinary events I’ve never known anything comparable to it. Bicycle racing requires great physical stamina—but also an extreme mental toughness. And when everything is working perfectly in unison, the bicycle, your body, and your mind, the result is a sensation far beyond any kind of conscious thought.

It can be a dangerous sport too, and I was injured badly twice. Once while training I was racing behind a large truck on its way to a construction site. We used to like to do this because the body of the truck protected the rider behind it from the wind. What I didn’t realize was that this truck was carrying pieces of wood. A small piece fell from the back and I couldn’t avoid it. When my bike ran over it I lost control and went flying through the air. I landed on my right side and slid a long distance, basically ripping off a layer of skin from my legs, arms, and face. My helmet was cracked, the shoe on my right foot was destroyed, and I was bleeding very badly. They rushed me to the doctor. I hadn’t broken any bones but it felt like my whole body was on fire. The doctor told me the therapy was going to be very painful. “Your skin is going to start growing back so you have to keep moving or your body will be very tight.” To prevent the whole right side of my body from becoming one great scab I had to work out on a stationary bike for hours every day for more than a month. It was the most painful experience I’d ever gone through—until later.

When I retired as a racer I became the trainer of the team representing Antioquia, the second largest of the thirty-two departments or states that comprise Colombia, and later the trainer and assistant coach of the Colombian national team. While I was working with the national team we competed in Europe and Latin America and won several medals. By that time I was already married—the first of my three marriages—and was the father of two beautiful children, a son, Nicholas, and a daughter, Laura. My wife and I had dated two years and we were married on Halloween night because she was pregnant with Nicholas. We couldn’t even afford a car at that time; we took the bus home from the small church in which we were married. Our dream was that someday we would be able to afford a home of our own.

I was a hard worker, and always honest in business. But also clever. To take advantage of the reputation I’d earned as a racer, in 1974 I took the money I’d saved and opened a shop in the beautiful mountaintop city of Manizales to build, sell, and repair bicycles. The El Ositto Corporation I named it—using two ts in the spelling because a popular Italian manufacturer used two ts in its name. The first thing I did was rent the outside of a large truck, I couldn’t afford to rent the truck itself, and put a large advertisement on it. To begin building my business, one day I borrowed the truck and