There are triumphs that go beyond time and classification. The one of Andrey Amador, at the Titan Desert Morocco 2025it is one of those. The Costa Rican, 38, won the general victory in his year of debut in this demanding career, just twelve months after having been on the edge of death after being hit by a truck in Barcelona. “It was like being born again,” he repeats again and again, now that the red jersey waves on his back with both pride and scars on his legs.
That curve that changed his life still chases him. “I took a curve to the right and a truck came out. The fractures were so many that doctors could not even operate: it was only waiting for the bones to weld alone. And so it was.
After a recovery as painful as it is slow, in which the forecast was devastating (“they told me that it would take a year to reassemble normally”), Amador reappeared little by little, first with short exits, then in mountain tests. Until I get here. “I have taken an important step, but until the last Stage I did not want to sing victory. Here things can happen every day,” he said in the Jorf, still with the tension of the decisive stage.
A return between friends
During the tour, he was not alone. In Morocco he shared pedaling with old acquaintances. Among them, Luis León Sánchez, with whom he shared team in 2009, and who was key on the day where Amador took off in the general. “We went together to the finish line. The other day, ordering memories at home, I found a clock that Luisle gave me when he won the Paris-Nice in 2009. Now, 15 years later, here we are, fighting in the desert. We both carry cycling in the veins.”
Luis Ángel Maté, a partner at the KH-7, protector of the leader in winds of wind and silent ally at key moments, was also vital. “You have to know how to distribute, and I did not need to win a stage, I needed to win the general. Without them I would not have succeeded,” he confessed.
Amador himself had to keep his head cold on complicated days, such as when his rivals Fran Herrero and Noel Martín took a shortcut. “I had to keep calm, see where they went and follow them until they reach them. Everything can change from one moment to another.”
Sleep in mats, go cold, swell his own bag … far from the luxuries of the world Tour, Amador has rediscovered his passion. “I lived a professionalized cycling, of a lot of stress: running to the bus, to the hotel, to the massage … always in hotels with clean sheets. Now we slept with the stall, with thermal blanket if necessary. It has returned me to my youth, when I went from colonies. It is beautiful,” he says. He even dreams of making the race “wilder, more self -sufficient. In the marathon stage we could take to the food on top.”
-The unwanted goodbye
When Amador retired from professional cycling in 2024, after two years at EF Education, he did not want to. “The accident gave them the perfect excuse not to renew me. They turned their backs. They preferred young people and did not trust me to recover.” He wanted to say goodbye with a last career, not with a truck involved. But fate had another end.
Cycling, like life, offered a second chance. “I said that I would not take a plane for cycling. But this is passion. In the end you come back. Ibiza, Los Monegros, now Morocco …”.
An ambassador for Costa Rica
Stage winner in the Giro, leader of the ‘Maglia’ Rosa and former luxury man in Movistar, Sky and Ineos, Amador now looks towards his country. He wants to return to cycling everything he has given him. “Costa Rica lived only football, but now there is a cycling wave. There are boys with a profession of professionals, although reaching Europe is not easy. It is not just wanting it, you have to have opportunities.”
That is why you train young people without charging a euro. “I am the cheapest coach in the world,” he says with a laugh. He dreams of having a velodrome so that the kids do not depend on the weather, and works in the organization of evidence as a tribute to local referents, such as Federico Ramírez, the ‘lycus’, a peasant who could not run in Europe for lack of resources.
The circle that closes
From mud to sand. From frustration to glory. From the operating room that never reached the podium of Maadid. Andrey Amador has closed his circle. Not that of the professional cyclist who fought in the great ports of the turn or the tour, but that of the man who understood that living is pedaling, even if it is uphill.
“Today I feel very happy, very proud. I dedicate this to my family, to all those who believed in me. I never imagined that I would live again. But here I am. Winning the Titan Desert. Living again.”
