So, I now feel like it is time to announce to you that I have been working on for a little while. After visiting Argentina I noticed something which had always been towards the back of my mind - poverty. Just walking down the streets of any city in any country you will see poor people, begging for scraps. This shouldn't be the case. Did you know that the 100 richest people in the world have enough money to end world poverty twice over? Imagine what we could all do if we worked together.

With this in mind, I've gotten together with COBA (Community Organisations Board of Argentina) to form the End Poverty Today Cycling Challenge. This will be a 5 day stage race to be held in Argentina during the off-season, with 2 sprint stages, a hill stage, a mountain stage and a time trial. The race will be open to anyone; amateurs or professionals.

A gimmick for the race is to have people form their own teams from 3 up to the limit of 9 riders. We hope to get licenses to use real team jerseys, just to make it more fun. I'm glad to have already recruited a couple of teammates: Esteban and Jorge will be competing with me in the "Colombia" team, and we hope to recruit a few more riders to give us a bigger squad.

I'm already thrilled with the level of interest. We haven't even advertised the race yet, and we already have 23 entries. We'll have a website out tomorrow, and a TV commercial will start doing the rounds next week. Hopefully we can reach our goal of 120 participants, because this really is a great cause.