A week in Bolivia at the Pan-American Track Championships

How quickly things decay after only one year since the 2018 south American Games

It may sound exciting and exotic--a week in Bolivia. But at the end of the week, the better description for this trip might be "monotonous and tedious, with a few colorful moments interspersed." Sorry to sound a bit on the subdued side, but because this was work-related travel--and since many velodromes have a tendency to be located on the outskirts of cities--this trip did not have the pizazz that I had secretly hoped for when I got this assignment.

Far too many of Cochabamba's streets are unpaved and laid out in haphazard fashion

The Rio Rocha, close to the modern center of town

At least the busses remain colorful!

A field right next to the modern Ciudad Deportiva

Don't get me wrong: I am glad for the opportunity to visit Bolivia a second time, after Judy and I had been to La Paz and Lake Titicaca something like a decade and a half ago. I don't exactly remember when we took the trip, but I do remember colorful native dresses on the women, markets with exotic fruit, and an exciting, even forbidding, landscape. The name of the place where the 2019 Pan-American Track Championships took place, Cochabamba, suggested similar visions. Yet when I arrived last week Tuesday, I was greeted by a sprawling city of more than 670,000 in a dry, dusty, hilly part of central Bolivia that really has few charms that I got to experience.

Enjoying an ice cream with my colleague from Argentina, Juan

An old movie theater, with a certain panache

I saw scenes like this only once, in the historical center of the city

An interesting, and slowly dilapidating, solution to separate pedestrians and cars

Think about those dusty Star Wars settlements on some arid planet, whose denizens live in clay-brick hovels and where most of the streets are unplanned and unpaved. From what I have seen, a large part of those almost 700,000 inhabitants (almost 2 million in the extended metro area) live in barrios that fit this image, on the hillsides surrounding what is not an inviting, formerly verdant valley. The Quechua name for the city comes from the words for "lake" and "plains" (pampa), and indeed there is a lake, filled with brackish, muddy water. At night, with the sparkling lights from the surrounding hills, it is actually rather pretty. Cochabamba, so close to the Amazon on the other side of the sierras, is as dry as Lubbock, or worse. It's located on the east side of the Andes, with some high mountains visible in the west but everything else blurring into a general vision of various shades of brown. To be fair, according to my friend Miguel much of that dreariness can be attributed to the Amazon fires (as well as "controlled burns" closer by, and one morning it was clear and we could actually see a sprinkling of snow in the mountains.

Hurray, Cochabamba will get light rail service, to be completed by the end of the year

The current state of the light rail project

Common sight in Cochabamba's suburbs, which constitute 90% of the city

Cobblestones close to the Ciudad Deportiva are finally being paved, a year after the 2018 South American Games

It would have been easy to just accept fate and stay put in the Ciudad Deportiva, the ultra-modern sports complex that was stamped out of the ground for the 2018 South American Games, which were hosted by Bolivia and Cochabamba. Outside of our barb-wire fenced and moderately guarded (yet not like what I experienced in Rio!) compound, emaciated cows were trying to find something to eat. We (the athletes, entourage, and various officials) were housed in a modern on-site hotel that lacked only small touches such as shower curtains and reliable internet service. We had an on-site cafeteria where we took all of our meals--good thing, because there was not a single restaurant (not even a tiny eatery) within at least a mile of the complex. I know, because one day I went on a long walk around the village.

The multi-purpose sports facility built for the 2018 South American Games

Our on-site modern hotel

Goats outside the hotel, on the other side of the fence

The 2018 Athletes' Village, empty, fenced, and guarded

Immediately adjacent to the hotel is the velodrome, one of the fastest tracks in South America, if not the world. To prove the point, numerous World and Pan-American records were set during the competition. On the other side of the hotel is another large multi-purpose indoor sports arena, bordered by track and field as well as soccer facilities. On the other side of the fence, grazing goats, irrigation ditches, a pot-holed, cobblestoned access road, and dusty shrubs. And lets not forget the dozen or so 13-story apartment buildings that were built (just like in Rio for the Olympics) to house the delegations from all South American countries in 2018 but that have been standing empty ever since, surrounded by a barrio that defies description in its poverty and squalidness. Between those happy-colored towers are paved parking areas, meticulously striped--yet there is no asphalted access road to the area. On my walks I came across a paving project that was covering the cobbles with fresh asphalt, kinda in the middle of nowhere. The towers, too, are fenced in and guarded. The gazillion stray dogs don't give a flip...

Go to Wikipedia and you will learn that, thanks to a year-round spring-like climate, the region used to be and still is an important agricultural center. Yet, you don't feed two million people just by growing potatoes, regardless of how many varieties you find here. Over the years, Cochabamba has also developed into an important industrial city, and over the past few years it has gained the reputation of being Bolivia's Silicon Valley. Boliviana de Aviacion, Bolivia's national airline, is headquartered here, and the fact that the South American Games visited in 2018 speaks volumes as well. Add to that the fact that this is one of the most important hubs for cocaine in South America, and suddenly the picture starts to become clearer.

Old and defunct passenger jets line the local airport

My Boliviana de Aviacon plane in Sao Paulo's GRU airport

Flying into Cochabamba, one of Bolivia's three largest cities

I was able to escape our compound on several afternoons, between our morning and evening sessions. The organizers had arranged for local transportation for me and my old friend and colleague Juan from Argentina, and we were ferried to various areas of the city center. One day I went just by myself and that was probably the most "fun" day of all since I did get to see some of the beauty that Cochabamba does have to offer. The historic center is similar to that of all South American cities, with a spacious square, a cathedral, and gazillions of locals milling around. (I did not notice any gringos during my one-and-a-half hour walk that day.)

It was truly refreshing to stroll through the markets, watch kids and vendors in the park, and witness the cacophonic craziness of Latin traffic. It occurred to me how silly it is that I try to use my bike to do a recycling run when there are half a dozen diesel-belching trucks and busses stalled in just one city block of traffic. Plastic container and bags are all over, putting our attempts at reducing and recycling into a different realm. Global climate change is an all-world problem, but sometimes I think we first worldlers don't understand what is happening in the third world.

I am glad that I had a chance to see more of Cochabamba than just the velodrome and the unreal and antiseptic sports complex. The athletes and support staff from the US and Canada that I asked in this regard all said that they hadn't been out of the compound and would be able to do so before their flights back home. What a shame to travel the world in the name of sports yet not be able to see it.

And so we come to the athletic component of the week. As I said before, the track is second to none. What a fine facility! It may lack spectator space (just maybe a couple hundred seats on the homestraight, and even those were not really filled to capacity), but it has modern timing equipment, sound system, and results display, just as one would expect. A total of 19 nations sent athletes to these Pan-American Championships, and the quality of the racing was high. Of course, in a pre-Olympic year the stakes are even higher than normal as results play heavily into the decision on who will go to Tokyo next year. My conversations with various athletes in this regard were highly interesting and revealing.

My days were split into two distinct halves. The morning sessions lasted generally from 10:00 until about noon, and even though none of them featured any finals, every session carried the potential for new national, Pan-American, or World records in various track disciplines. So, Juan and I had to be on-site just in case a new record was set and we could add validity to it with our work. After the morning session everyone would sooner or late show up in the cafeteria for lunch, which was served until 14:30 hrs. Our excursions had to happen between the lunch hour and the start of the evening session at 18:00.

Thanks to the proximity and the good organization of our personnel we were able to arrive at our offices in the catacombs of the velodrome just a few minutes before six o'clock. We'd fill out some forms, Juan would instruct our medical observers and chaperones, and then we'd all go to the infield to watch the action. Once the first finals had finished I would duck back into the office while Juan would work with the chaperones to dispatch athletes to our controls. In other words, I did not see very much of the evening races but would later interact with the athletes on a much closer basis. Obviously, there is a lot of waiting for the athletes to appear, but when they do, things are expected to happen quickly and efficiently. In our metier we like to call it "hurry up and wait." It's part of the job, and I did get to read two books on my smartphone.

Depending on how many riders we needed to see and how quickly they were able to contribute their part to the whole operation, we might be out at 21:30 or at 23:00, being the last to leave the velodrome and hoping that the cafeteria was still open for a late-night dinner. So, as you can see, there's less glory and excitement in what I do at these races than one might think. During the morning sessions I did see some amazing rides and also some spectacular crashes, but it wasn't just all non-stop action. Juan and I interfaced extremely well and we did the job we came to do, and that was the reason why we had been dispatched, and we both took pride in accomplishing our mission.

Juan and I with our entire crew

Overall, this was an interesting trip, but I wouldn't have minded had it been two days shorter. The travel was unusually convoluted: Each way I spent two days to get to my respective final destination. From Lubbock to Dallas is always a given, but then I continued overnight to Sao Paulo (GRU), where I had a six-hour layover before my three-hour flight to Cochabamba half-way across the "fat" part of the South American continent. And going home, it took me two flights from Cochabamba (via Santa Cruz, VVI) to get back to Sao Paulo where I spent most of the day in a lounge before a pleasant overnight trip in Business. (On the way down the effects of hurricane Dorian had made an upgrade to biz impossible and I had to camp out in Premium Economy.) And then it was back to Lubbock and a pre-noon touchdown in Lubbock the following day. Four days of travel, five days of work, and some lasting memories of my time at the 2019 Pan-American Track Championships, but just not the really cool South American adventure that I may have had hopes for.

Jürgen

PS: I put the finishing touches on this blog entry in the LATAM lounge in GRU, before actually taking off for DFW--obviously, I was hoping for a pleasant biz flight, etc. etc. If that doesn't come true, well, there'll be a second PS. But I need to add that last night, after we were finally all done with our work, Juan and I joined Miguel, whom I had met at Winter Park where he was part of Jon Gallagher's timing crew, for a few hours out on the town. We had hoped to hit the one-and-only microbrewery in Cochabamba, but it was closed. Still, Miguel, who is a Cochabambino, took us on an evening sightseeing tour of his city, showing us how beautifully the lights reflect in the lake and how majestic the statue of Christ the Redeemer, which is taller than the one in Rio, appears when illuminated high above the city. We met up with some of his cohorts, Umberto, Marco, and Abel, three gregarious individuals who have timed events not just in Bolivia or South America but all over the world. They took us out to a nice restaurant in the Cineplex district--Huari, a cerveza con miel (a honey-infused pilsner) as appetizer, bife de chorizo steak as a main, and an amazingly good Bolivian meritage of Tanat, Malbec, and Petit Verdot to enjoy the dinner, the conversation, and the company. Thanks guys--this was an unexpected yet wonderful end to our trip!