Atlético Bucaramanga fans had been waiting their entire lives for a star. Since its founding in 1949, Leopardo was the only team of the 14 traditional members of Dimayor that had never won a title. That curse finally ended this Saturday.
Bucaramanga’s first star shines since this Saturday, with a hit in El Campín against Santa Fe. The Venezuelan Rafael Dudamel thus achieved his second crown in Colombia as a coach, after having won the League with Deportivo Cali in 2021-II.
Many of the current Bucaramanga fans did not experience, or do not remember very well, the last final their team had, back in December 1997.
At the end of 1994, the club leaders approved changing the format of the League to adapt it to the European calendar and in 1995 a six-month lightning tournament was played, in which Junior emerged champion. That semester, Bucaramanga was in B and went up again.
The ‘European-style’ experiment was a fiasco and only one such tournament was played, in 1995/96, which Cali won. When the next season was underway, the system was changed and the championship was extended until December. There, Bucaramanga was a finalist.
America was going to be champion in June. But Dimayor decided that that team would qualify for a final to face, in December, the winner of another six-month tournament.
The emotional qualification to the final in 1997
Bucaramanga, directed by Carlos Mario Hoyos, ranked the home runs in third place, behind Millonarios and Cali. The draw left him in the same group with the blues, Junior and Cortuluá. Only the first qualified for the next instance. And they did it with a 0-4 win in Barranquilla.
The move to the final was defined in a head-to-head duel with Quindío, who won the other home run ahead of Once Caldas, Nacional and Cali. In the first leg, Bucaramanga won 2-1, with goals from Gustavo ‘Misil Restrepo and Orlando Ballesteros. Miguel Marrero scored a penalty. In the second leg, Quindío won 1-0 with another penalty from Marrero. But Ballesteros, who at that time was still the ‘Phantom’, scored the qualifying goal in the 90th minute.
The emotion on one side and the emotion on the other was so great that the players of both teams forgot that, since the game was tied, they had to go to a tiebreaker from the penalty spot to play for one more point, as they did. established the regulations of the time. The match referee, Rafael Sanabria, had to call them… Few remember that Quindío won 3-2. Why…
In the end, América, which had been left out of the home runs and rested for almost a month and a half, arrived fresh and won both games in the final: 0-1 at the Alfonso López, with a goal from James Cardona, and 2-0 in Cali, with goals from Adolfo Valencia and Julián Téllez. The award for Bucaramanga was its first, and so far only, qualification for the Copa Libertadores.
Now, Bucaramanga had to suffer to raise its first star. They had won well at home, 1-0. In El Campín they were two goals up, but Santa Fe won 3-2 and forced the tiebreaker from the penalty spot that is now in the team’s history.
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