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Roberto Heras, Svein Tuft to race La Ruta
Three-time Vuelta a España winner Roberto Heras will toe the line at next month’s La Ruta de los Conquistadores mountain bike race in Costa Rica. The four-day race covers 250 miles from Jaco Beach on the Pacific coast to the finishing city of Limon, on Costa Rica’s Caribbean coast.
The race will mark a return to top-level racing for Heras, who retired from competitive cycling in 2005 following his record-breaking fourth Vuelta win. That victory, however, was negated after Heras’ urine sample tested positive for the blood booster EPO.
Racing alongside Heras will be Canadian Svein Tuft, silver medalist at this year’s world time trial championships in Varese, Italy. The Canadian races professionally for the Symmetrics cycling team, and won the 2007 UCI Americas Tour.
The two road cyclists will battle an all-star cast of off-road talent. Taking his second crack at the Costa Rican race is Frenchman Thomas Dietsch, the 2007 UCI marathon World Cup winner. Dietsch finished third at La Ruta in 2007, and won the final stage into Limon.
Dietsch’s Bianchi-Agos teammate, Leonardo Paez of Colombia, is also returning. Paez dominated the 2006 edition of La Ruta, becoming only the second non-Tico male (besides Swiss Thomas Frischknecht) to win the race.
Also coming back is four-time La Ruta champion Federico “Lico” Ramirez, who is the defending champion. Ramirez will be joined by talented Tico riders Paolo Montoya, Deiber Esquivel and Southern Californian Manuel Prado.
