Four days at Givelo in Medellín: what we went to see in Colombia

For most cycling apparel brands, there is an ocean between the table where a garment is designed and the mountain where it ends up. At Givelo, there are the roads of Antioquia: the countryside, climbs above 2,500 metres and scenery that makes you want to stop halfway up. We went and rode them.

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The starting point is already at 2,100 metres

Wednesday morning, 8:30, outside the hotel in Rionegro. Bikes are out, bottles are filled and the GPS already reads 2,100 metres. That is not the high point of the day. That is the parking lot.

It is probably the first thing to understand about riding in Antioquia: altitude here is not an achievement, it is the floor. For our part, we are rather more used to Mount Royal, which tops out at 233 metres. In Medellín you start nine times higher and keep climbing. Your legs are fine. Your lungs take two days to work out what is happening to them.

We were Givelo's guests. Four days during which the Colombian brand brings together, on home ground, the retailers who carry it abroad.

The roads and the Colombian coffee are worth the trip on their own. Come along with us.

The start, every morning, outside the hotel.

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Day 1 — Santa Elena, or the country where everyone rides

65 km, 1,136 m of climbing, high point at 2,611 metres. (see the ride on Strava)

The first ride climbs towards Alto de la Virgen, crosses Parque Arví and drops back down through Santa Elena. Three hours in the saddle. Three hours that are also entirely typical of a Colombian road: the vegetation changes every five kilometres, valleys open up all at once around a bend, and the countryside is lived in from end to end. Farms, cattle in the fields, woodworking shops open onto the road, vendors, children. Nothing is empty.

The Antioquia countryside: valleys as far as you can see, and farms everywhere.

And cyclists. A lot of cyclists. Clubs, families, riders in replica kit of their heroes. In Antioquia, cycling is not a weekend hobby: it is a way of getting around, a national sport and a local point of pride, all at once.

On the locals' wheel.

Traffic follows a different set of codes too. The horn here does not express irritation: it announces a presence. "I'm here", "I'm coming past", "I saw that you didn't see me". It takes a little time to stop flinching and get used to it, then about a day to find it reassuring. Givelo had motorbikes escorting the group throughout the rides — a local standard worth borrowing.

Halfway through, we stop at a roadside café. A track bike hanging from the ceiling, painted wooden tables and, on the wall, the faces of Nairo Quintana and other legends of Colombian cycling. Not chain-store decor: posters put up by people who watched those races live, in this village.

The coffee is excellent. Obviously.

Postobón jerseys, a road bike on the wall, hand-painted portraits. A village café in Antioquia.

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Day 2 — La Unión, a brewery and a steel frame workshop

84 km, 1,216 m of climbing. (see the ride on Strava)

A longer second day: El Retiro, the famous La Unión climb, San Antonio, then Llanogrande. Roads the locals know by heart and that pro teams wear down on altitude camps.

La Unión is signposted at the bottom like a race climb, with its official board: 7.3 km at 5.1% average, 369 metres of climbing, summit at 2,536 metres. Puerto de segunda categoría. It is all written down. All that is left is to ride up.

La Unión: 7.3 km at 5.1%, summit at 2,536 m. Second category.

The finish is like no ride ending we know: Torrealta, a craft brewery sitting in the greenery in El Retiro. A guided tasting, lunch on site and a view that justifies the 84 kilometres all on its own. If you ever pass through Medellín with a bike, write that name down.

End of the ride at Torrealta. We have had worse recovery protocols.

Scarab Cycles, a fine surprise just down the road

A few minutes from the brewery, we had the chance to visit the Scarab Cycles workshop. It is not a brand we carry at Bicycles Quilicot, simply a discovery worth the detour.

Scarab builds custom steel bikes, designed, brazed, painted and assembled in El Retiro, one rider at a time. You find there exactly what we were about to discover the next day at Givelo, transposed to metal: people who talk about their work with a watchmaker's precision, who explain why this tube rather than another, why this geometry for this rider, why that paint takes three more days. Their line sums it up: bicycles shaped by the people who ride them and the mountains we call home.

Every frame carries a tag with its future owner's name.

A frame mid-assembly, and the jig where the whole geometry is decided.

Two workshops, two materials, the same mountain on the horizon. The pattern was starting to show.

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Day 3 — Envigado, where the jerseys are actually born

Friday morning, heading to Envigado, right in the heart of Medellín. Givelo's headquarters is not a factory on the outskirts: it is a house. You walk in the way you walk into someone's home.

Givelo was founded here in 2017 by three friends. Nine years later the brand rides on several continents and its garments are still assembled in this house. If you want the full story, we told it in our article about the brand.

Givelo's headquarters in Envigado. More a house than a head office.

And everything happens there. Under one roof: administration, the team handling shipping to North America and the rest of the world, the designers, the partners — and the people who cut, sew and inspect every piece.

A workstation at the Envigado workshop. Nothing automated: hands, a machine and a measuring tape.

That is where you find out what is really behind the brand.

You can read "locally made" on a hundred product pages without it registering at all. It is a selling point like any other. Then you find yourself a metre from a cutting table, watching a seamstress assemble a jersey panel by hand, check the tension of a seam, start again. At that point the selling point becomes a person.

Every piece passes through these hands.

The materials come from a carefully considered selection: some Italian fabrics for their quality, others Japanese for their technical properties, each chosen for what it does best. But everything else — the cut, the assembly, the quality control, the decision to reject a piece — happens in this house, forty minutes from the climbs where those garments will be worn.

The fabric wall. Every textile is chosen for a specific reason.

That is Givelo's real distinguishing feature. What someone draws on a Monday morning can be sewn on Tuesday and tested on Wednesday on a climb at 2,500 metres, by the people who drew it. No European or North American brand has that loop. Between the sketch and real life there is normally an ocean, three time zones and six months of calendar. Here, there is a mountain road.

People who know their craft inside out

Rafael, Mateo and Nicolás, the three founders, welcomed us warmly into their home. We also had the chance to be walked through the upcoming ranges by Steven, head of strategy — a genuine cycling lover and an insatiable expert on the technologies of today and tomorrow.

Steven was our guide for the whole stay. He knows the roads as well as he knows the products.

Ask him a very specific technical question and you will know right away that you are getting your money's worth:

• Cargo bib pockets: why they have to be oriented one way rather than another
• Silicone grippers: why one version holds the thigh better than another
• The chamois: what separates a good chamois from a merely adequate one on a five-hour ride
• The choice of a fabric across the shoulders rather than another one down the back

These are not talking points learned for a visit: this is the everyday vocabulary of people who ride what they make.

And the ambition does not stop there. The line that comes up most often in this house is not "we want to be as good as the big European brands". It is: where has nobody gone yet? On materials, on cuts, on details most brands consider settled. That is perhaps what struck us most — a quiet dissatisfaction that pushes them to redo a garment that already worked.

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What we bring back to our stores

You come home from a trip like this with photos, a few sore legs and one certainty.

What stays with you, in the end, is neither the climbs nor the numbers. It is the people. A team that talks about its garments the way a craftsperson talks about their workshop, that rides what it makes, that rejects a piece because a seam is not perfectly straight. That love of work done properly cannot be written into a specification. You see it on people's faces when you ask a precise question and they answer for twenty minutes, with the smile of someone who loves the subject.

Mauro, one of the brand's ambassadors and our guide on both local rides.

And then there is Colombia itself. Colombian hospitality gets talked about a lot and is still underrated. In four days, nobody left us on our own for a minute.

The quality of a cycling garment is not settled on a spec sheet. It is settled by the distance between the person who designs it and the person who wears it. At Givelo that distance is short.

What that changes for the customer: when we recommend a Givelo piece in store, it is no longer on the strength of a catalogue. We have seen who sews it, on which table, to what standard — and we have ridden the same roads that are used to test it.

There is also everything we cannot tell you yet. We were given an exclusive preview of the ranges coming over the next few months. Without giving anything away: it carries on in the same direction, several ranges are going to be refined further, and there are some genuinely exciting new things we cannot wait to share more widely.

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Discover Givelo at Bicycles Quilicot

Givelo apparel is available online and in our six stores. Our advisors can guide you towards the cut and the collection that suit your riding: Rosemont, Villeray, Laval, Sainte-Thérèse, Mascouche and Mont-Tremblant.

Photos: Javo Agudelo.