Personal Life and Early Career
Contador was born in Pinto in the Community of Madrid, the third of four children. He has an older brother and sister and a younger brother, who has cerebral palsy. Having previously practised other sports, such as football and athletics, Contador discovered cycling at the age of 14 thanks to his elder brother Francisco Javier.
When Contador was 15, he began to compete in races at the amateur level in Spain, joining the Real Velo Club Portillo from Madrid. Although he got no victories that year or the next, he demonstrated great qualities and was soon nicknamed Pantani (after Marco Pantani, regarded as one of the best climbers of all time) for his climbing skills. In 2000, he experienced his first victories, winning several mountains classification prizes from prominent events on the Spanish amateur cycling calendar.
He dropped out of school at the age of 16 without having finished his Bachillerato and signed with Iberdrola-Loinaz, a youth team run by Manolo Saiz, manager of the professional ONCE cycling team. In 2001, he won the under-23 Spanish time trial championship.
Contador lives with his wife Macarena in the city of Pinto when not competing, and enjoys hunting in his spare time. He has a fascination for birds, keeping personally bred canaries and goldfinches at home.
Read more about this topic: Alberto Contador
Famous quotes containing the words personal, life, early and/or career:
“Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through aerial distance! What hymning of cancerous vices may we not languish over as sublimest art in the safe remoteness of a strange language and artificial phrase! Yet we keep a repugnance to rheumatism and other painful effects when presented in our personal experience.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“Crime is naught but misdirected energy. So long as every institution of today, economic, political, social, and moral, conspires to misdirect human energy into wrong channels; so long as most people are out of place doing the things they hate to do, living a life they loathe to live, crime will be inevitable.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)
“The early Christian rules of life were not made to last, because the early Christians did not believe that the world itself was going to last.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“The problem, thus, is not whether or not women are to combine marriage and motherhood with work or career but how they are to do so—concomitantly in a two-role continuous pattern or sequentially in a pattern involving job or career discontinuities.”
—Jessie Bernard (20th century)