It’s not every day you see an urban downhill mountain bike race in a city known more for its history in drug trafficking than its sport.
This astounding footage comes from the Comuna 13 shanty town in Medellin, Colombia, the former home of the infamous Pablo Escobar, whose story has recently been retold once again for small screens around the world in Netflix series ‘Narcos’.
To see what was once the stronghold of Escobar, one of the most powerful, violent and wealthy criminals in history, worth an approximate $50 billion, come together over a mountain bike race is pretty damn amazing.
Medellin is clearly a beautiful city, and through the local houses, rooftops and staircases, they’ve sculpted a good looking downhill track too. Reckon you could make it to the bottom?
It’s no surprise to see such a mountain bike set up in an urban city of course. The City Downhill World Tour has been turning unsuspecting staircases into downhill tracks for years now, with the 2015 Tour set to culminate with the famous Downhill Taxco in Mexico on November 21, and even shopping malls have had the mountain bike treatment in recent years.
In fact, one of the most viewed videos in mountain biking history actually took place on similar tracks on the streets – race footage from the Valparaiso Cerro Abajo Race in Chile which you can watch below.