Former-professional Joseba Beloki(Image credit: AFP)
Joseba Beloki (Liberty Seguros) two seconds before take off(Image credit: Christine Grein)
Joseba Beloki (Liberty Seguros) looks like he might have a toothache.(Image credit: Fotoreporter Sirotti)
Joseba Beloki (Liberty Seguros) even more upbeat today(Image credit: Unipublic)
Three-time Tour de France podium finisher Joseba Beloki looks set to be the latest former professional rider to run in the New York Marathon. Following in the footsteps of ex-professionals such as Lance Armstrong and Michael Boogerd, the 36-year-old Basque told El Diario Vasco that he has started training for the 26.2-mile challenge with former world marathon champion Martín Fiz.
“I’ve started training for the New York Marathon, which takes place in November,” admitted Beloki. “I go out with Martín Fiz, or it would perhaps be better to say that I go out with him as far as I can. It will be the first marathon I’ve taken part in.”
Beloki has stayed extremely busy with a number of business ventures since his racing career fizzled out following the exclusion of the Liberty Seguros team from the 2006 Tour de France. He now acts as a training consultant to the Cafés Baqué team and writes for Spanish magazine Ciclismo a Fondo and works for Basque radio. He has also kept up with his bike training to some extent, and has been involved in organizing a cyclo-sportive bearing his name that will take place around his home city of Vitoria on May 29.
Beloki, who still follows the professional scene closely as a result of his media work, said that he had never considered coming back to racing as his former rival Armstrong has. “Everything has a place in life and racing’s place in mine passed some time ago,” he said.
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Peter Cossins has written about professional cycling since 1993 and is a contributing editor to Procycling. He is the author of The Monuments: The Grit and the Glory of Cycling's Greatest One-Day Races (Bloomsbury, March 2014) and has translated Christophe Bassons' autobiography, A Clean Break (Bloomsbury, July 2014).
