About to reach the key age, when the sub-23 stage ends, David Lozano was diagnosed with diabetes just before a major international Mountain Bike competition. They told him his life as a professional cyclist was over, but he didn’t give up. He now faces his fourteenth year as a runner after having renewed his membership in Team Novo Nordisk, a team made up of runners with type one diabetes. Concentrated in Altea (Alicante), he attends to La Razón to make its history visible, talk about future challenges and inspire those diagnosed who have doubts.
He will turn 36 in December and will be completing his fourteenth season as a professional. Did you imagine getting here?
The truth is that cycling, and in general all sports, you have to do them out of passion, they are never done for money or anything else. You never imagine that you have a career of two, five or ten years. It depends on the value they give you and what you contribute to where you are working. In my case I have found a place where I feel loved, I have to provide what they need and little by little we have created this relationship that is like being at home. I have been cycling all my life and if I weren’t racing professionally I would be a bike sufferer, the typical one who goes to the Camino de Santiago because I love it.
However, he has developed an extensive sporting career and is already one of the oldest Spanish cyclists in the peloton.
There are very few of us left with so many years, but in the end cycling is rotation. There are many very talented people, with tremendous contracts and enormous teams, who leave you the bike because they are burned out. It is a sport that, if you don’t enjoy it, you better dedicate yourself to something else. For money, believe me, it’s not worth it.
You are what is known as a ‘one club man’ and have managed to develop a career always in the same team, Team Novo Nordisk, a very particular team. What has that path been like to becoming the veteran of the squad?
When I started with the team, well, it’s like everything. You are with one foot in the other, you almost don’t know whether to put it in to see what you are going to find. Actually, Andrea Peron and I were left from the first year’s team, but the ‘heart’ of the team: Southerland, Davidenko, Podenzana… the staff is the same. When I had the best years, in 2017 and 2018, I had offers from other teams, but I have never hesitated to stay here. It is not only the human team we have, it is also the possibility of helping people who live with diabetes.
The Novo Nordisk is a special device. All of its cyclists are diagnosed with type one diabetes. You were 22 years old. What was the process like?
When I was diagnosed I was in a very cool moment, I went to the bottom of the sub-23 class. I had won the Spain MTB event, I was selected for the World Cup, for me I was very young, I considered that I had my entire career ahead of me and that cut my plans short. Wanting to be Olympic in MTB, which was always a dream, I had managed to be fourth in Team Relay, I had won the Junior World Cup, but I wanted to win something under 23, because in the end what counts is when you are older. Everything was greatly affected. The day before racing in that World Cup, I started to feel very bad and ended up in the hospital. There they diagnosed me. Being super lost in the hospital bed, the first thing I asked the nurse was when I could go out on my bike. They asked me if I had studies, they told me to start studying because the bicycle “has finished.” As I had a certain projection, the news had some echo and Javier Megías – a former cyclist, also diagnosed – contacted me, he told me not to get discouraged, that there was a mixed team, Team Type 1, which at that time had some cyclists with diabetes. I thought if they could do it, so could I. It was the first set ball solved. I thought “my career has been screwed up, but there are people who run like that, so I’m going to be one of them.” I spent almost all of 2012 running in America and then they signed me for the end of the year, and until now.
Once we had a team, it was a matter of turning around the image of diabetes in professional cycling and in society. Has it cost a lot to break those prejudices?
This is a character thing. Think that all the runners we have on the team, from first to last, are fighters. For me, each one has their own story and level of improvement, but at some point all the riders on this team have been deprived of doing what we wanted to do. In itself, I consider that you already start fighting from the beginning. What’s happening? We make the gap for ourselves. No one forces us to compete with diabetes, but we do it nonetheless. We could have chosen cycle tourism, but no, we hit it hard and we have this platform. Worse if you don’t have the numbers, the attitude… you stay on the road. Not because we have diabetes are they going to let us pass in a race, they will still elbow us, and even more so now with the points.
Furthermore, the objective is the same as for any athlete: to win, or to go as far as possible.
Maybe we don’t have the demands of a WorldTour team that has a huge budget, okay, but in the end we have objectives and within the same competition you can do many things. You see the one who wins the race, but what about the one who is running away? And the one who wins the Mountain? It seems silly, but with that you are getting into the race, and maybe you will come out the next day with a points jersey. Maybe you can’t beat Evenepoel, but you can focus on realistic goals that give visibility. It’s about finding the best version of yourself.
How has the image of the team, and its riders, changed in the day-to-day life of the peloton and in its projection outside?
Well, at first we were diabetics riding bicycles and now we are cyclists with diabetes. At a nutritional level, at a training level, at a technology level… everything has evolved so much that if you don’t eat the same as everyone else and you don’t train the same as everyone else, you won’t finish a race. It goes very, very quickly. Many times you say “how bad I went today” and then you look and you have completed the stage in 20 minutes less than five years ago. That’s a long time. Everything is becoming very professional, and 14-year-old kids start with a power meter, nutritionist, trainers… they have many more resources than we had. Before they gave you a calm, but now that is no longer the case, the riders who dominate come from junior, jump to professionalism and fly. I think that’s what has changed the most, everything has taken a huge leap. It has turned around. And in the end, we all evolve, we go faster and we take better care of ourselves. Age is still a factor, I don’t feel that old either. I don’t feel worse than I did two years ago, for example, but you do see that the new generations come up and know more than you knew at that age.
From this position, another of Team Novo Nordisk’s objectives is to show people with diabetes that it is possible.
The goal of the team is that, the same thing that happened to me, anyone can experience it. Every day there are many diagnoses, many mothers who see their child diagnosed at three or four years old and do not know what will become of their child. I’m not telling you to be a cyclist, you have to like this and it’s very hard, but if we are running with these people, at these temperatures and with this training, don’t worry, your son will have a normal life. It is motivating without realizing it, in a natural way. No one had to tell me “David, you can do it.” I saw them doing it and I said “by my balls.”
What difference is there in the training of a cyclist with diabetes compared to the rest?
In our case, we have the watts, the time, the temperature, the heart rate monitor… and the glucose. But this has evolved so much that we have turned the tables. In the past we had to measure ourselves on our finger with test strips, now we all have a continuous meter that tells us the level in real time and, in addition, has arrows that give you the trend. You can very easily anticipate hyperglycemia or hypoglycemia. At the nutrition level, we eat like anyone else, we don’t have to invent anything. What I do is adapt my day to day so that I can eat the amount of carbohydrates that I have. It’s more about getting involved. If I have to eat and a 20-minute rise is coming, it’s better to start eating now because, now, with how fast it’s going, going up, you can’t eat. I remember when I went out with a bar to do four hours as a sub23, and now you do everything very measuredly. We are at a point where even runners without diabetes are using continuous glucose sensors. Many times we have even been asked how these sensors work.
Have they really gone from being “diabetics on bikes” to being at the forefront and even pioneers in some things?
Well, more or less. In the end, these sensors can have many applications. If you are recovering, if you are eating what you have, if it feels good to you… in our case it is something about health and because it is a great tool, but at a performance level they are doing great. About a year and a half ago it became a trend to go to altitude and monitor glucose to see how the adaptation was, how the training felt and if the body recovered well. And now we even give advice on how the meters work. The change is brutal.
This year he has ventured into racing in a segment like gravel, which is on the rise. Coming from MTB it will be almost a return home. Are there more plans to go deeper in 2025?
In the end, all the teams are seeing that the market is very strong for gravel, at a technological level there is crazy evolution. All the gangs invest a lot of money, we use Argon road bikes, but they are investing a lot in creating Gravel bikes. What better than running on this surface doing MTB and Cyclocross all my life, we started very well with the Santa Vall, I was third behind two professional runners. I got hooked and the team proposed to go do the Kansas Unbound, which is more than 300 kilometers. I had prepared like an animal, I trained a lot, and at kilometer 90 they threw me, I hit myself tremendously and broke my scapula in several places. The x-ray was as if it had been smashed with a hammer. I was immobilized for two months, I did a roller in a sling and little by little I started getting out again, but soon I was running gravel again. For 2025 we will do some races, we don’t know which ones yet because this is decided by the sponsors, but the idea would be to do about 12 international gravel events and qualify for the World Championships. This year I qualified but couldn’t go because I had road races. In 2025 I would love to be there.
In addition, it can be a way to find a new incentive and make training not as monotonous as if you only went out on the road.
Well, notice that no, it is not my case. I promise you that every year I have a better time training. At first it was difficult for me, I always tried to go for a few hours with a group, I tried to meet people… but little by little maturity, having a family, gives you that know-how of being alone for six or seven hours and not needing anyone . You take it as a job and it is still a passion. Which in the end is what this is about: passion for what you do.
This 2024, the season began in Comunitat Valenciana. What is the calendar preview for next year?
It would be cool to start in Valencia, also to see that normality is recovered. From home I have tried to help with what we can with my wife and others, it would be nice if the race itself gives value and economic help to the Valencian Community. In the end they are hotels, the teams buy food in the stores, the masseuses go out for a while and spend… then the organizer decides, but in my head an ideal situation would be to start there, plus I always like to race in Spain.
