This dissertation analyzes the social, cultural, and political importance of competitive cycling in Colombia from 1930 to 1958. It examines the sport from the appearance of the first races until its consolidation as a popular mass phenomenon. The dissertation claims that competitive cycling was a place where Colombians could represent themselves to themselves and others. It shows how several agents within the cycling field such as cyclists, journalists, civilian authorities, and spectators addressed national debates on regionalism, politics, class relations, masculinity, and social unrest. In chapter one, the dissertation discusses the place that sports had in Colombian society during the early 1930s and how sporting activities became part of the country’s consumer culture. It also illustrates, from an institutional point of view, the government’s intervention in sports through the formation of the National Commission of Physical Education. The chapter ends with an examination of the first Bolivarian Games held in Bogotá in 1938. Chapter two traces the emergence of cycling as a free time activity in the early twentieth century and the way in which cycling enthusiasts first organized the sport in Colombia. The chapter evaluates the assembly of the National Cycling Association and the celebration of the first-ever national championship in 1946. Chapter three describes the popularization of competitive cycling and the role played by the private sector through the formation of Colombia’s Industrial and Commercial Sporting Federation. The chapter finishes with an account of the way in which La Vuelta a Colombia, the country’s most important stage race, was imagined and organized. Chapter four focuses on the celebration of the first ever Vuelta a Colombia in 1951, and its social, economic, political, and cultural impact. It also shows how the “big Colombian race” became a site for the production of meanings and representations about the country and its people. Chapter five addresses La Vuelta’s regional symbolisms and examines the way in which the race was used politically during the military regime of General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla. The chapter also dissects how pedalers such as Ramón Hoyos Vallejo became recognized public figures and cultural icons nationwide.

The International Olympic Committee confronted a contentious period between 1976-1980 that featured repeated threats to unified global sport. In 1976, African states withdrew from the Montreal Olympics protesting New Zealand’s rugby contacts with apartheid South Africa. Four years later in 1980, the United States and over a third of the world’s Olympic Committees withheld their athletes from the Moscow Games opposing the USSR’s invasion of Afghanistan. Both events threatened to split world sport apart, one over the issue of apartheid and the other along Cold War lines. Even though these were successive boycotts, historians have largely treated these events in isolation. This dissertation establishes the overlap between these two boycotts and how the African walkout in Montreal directly Soviet affected the preparations for the Moscow Olympics and influenced the US boycott of the 1980 Games. It argues that the context of the anti-apartheid campaign is necessary to understand the lead-up to the 1980 Olympics and frames 1976-1979 as a period of struggle between the Global South against the institutions and countries of the Global North, thus challenging dominant Cold War narratives surrounding the Moscow Olympic Games. Additionally, by focusing on Africa, a continent caught in the middle of the Global Cold War, it demonstrates how regional concerns about apartheid competed with Cold War understandings about the Olympics. Though the Cold War would overwhelm the decolonization struggle in sport in 1980 by forcing countries into a US vs. USSR binary, this dissertation examines how countries sought to navigate through this situation and proposed contending understandings of the boycott and non-alignment. The dissertation reframes the 1980 Olympic conversation by demonstrating how the anti-apartheid struggle influenced proceedings and argues for interpreting the Moscow Olympics as an important moment in the longer anti-apartheid struggle rather than isolating it within the Cold War crisis of 1980-1984.