Last Monday’s morning started with the kind of news that make a day look negative since its early hours. Juan Pablo Pino had dissapeared, leaving no trace. The same that happened with the contracts of companies such as Viña Santa Cruz or Minera Candelaria, which were supposed to be among the sponsors of PinoRoad. This leaves twelve riders -eight Chilean and four Spaniards- as well as the rest of the staff without a clear future, just a few days before the start of the season for them.
On their side there are their suppliers, Berria and FullWear, as well as Rotor and Spiuk, despite having been apparently pressured by Pino to make his alibi more credible by saying the payments were made, as there were some suspicious thoughts among the team. Some of these sponsors have even made statemets showing their support to those who have done their best for the team: Juanjo Oroz, Salva Guardiola, Mikel Bizkarra, Pablo Urtasun, still training together in the North, as well as Fran Reyes and Andrés Cánovas.
The fact is that Monday’s news are worse than every member of the team could have ever imagine, after a team meeting in Chile when they have asked Pino to leave the head of the team. That seemed to be the next chapter for the squad. The place: Spain. The date: February 12th. But these are the latest news known of Pino, who even sent some photos to Reyes showing him taking a flight -a flight nobody knows its destination-. What looked like a transfer of responsibilities ended up with Pino dissapearing into the nowhere with all the money from the sponsors (there’s no evidence he took any money from Viña Santa Cruz or Minera Candelaria, though).
“As much as I think about it, I don’t get what’s going on with Pino”, said sports director Jesús Buendía, during the program Demarraje. But the truth is that Juan Pablo Pino had been already charged with accusations of fraud before starting this adventure. He cheated Gonzalo Garrido, Trek‘s sales representative in Chile, with a quantity of 100,000 euros (admitted by himself here). The same he did with the bike shop Megapack Carbono -below, the statement of the shop’s owner accusing Pino of cheating-.
There are more issues going out there. Some of them mention the former Movistar rider Carlos Oyarzun among the ones cheated by Pino. According to some Spanish sources from the PinoRoad team, Oyarzun was the only who warned them about Pino being a cheater. They listened to him, but the signed contracts didn’t look suspicious and they went ahead, as practically everybody would have done in their case.
Both Buendía and Oroz commented during Monday’s radio program Demarraje that the Chilean adventure was a chaos. “It was all lies. The payments were going postponed and we knew something was going wrong”, said the sports director. In addition, they even got more worried after some Chilean riders told them Pino wasn’t trustworthy. “We reached a point where the Spanish part of the team decided to quit“, Buendía concluded.
This way, the current situation can be described with one single word: uncertainty. It’s all ready for the team to make their debut -scheduled on the 1st of March, Vuelta a Murcia-, so nobody in the team wants to give up. Both Chilean Cycling Federation and the UCI have offered a longer deadline for a solution to be given, and the team have given themselves a week to find the required funds so the project is not dead even before starting to ride (they are supposed to have been given that deadline, but it might be longer).
The initial budget was 650,000 euros, but Fran Reyes have mentioned on Chilean media that they could go ahead with less money. They could even start riding tomorrow with 250,000 euros while they fight to reach 450,000 euros, the minimum bugdet they have stablished themselves. That’s why they’re looking for Spanish companies with interests in Chile, or some Chilean ones that want to support the project. The work is done; both the Chilean Cycling Federation and the UCI also support a serious team looking forward to ride.
