Poor Cavendish with his proud bike, rainbow on the sleeves, psychedelic rainbow in the frame, and the bad idea of the cameraman on a motorcycle who doesn’t take him out of frame for a second, and exasperates him because he can’t calmly hold on to his Astana car until he has scared it away and return without sweating to the peloton after changing the wheels and stocking up on fuel, chocolates for his pocket. Uninhibited and fantasist, like Raffaele di Paco, the heart-stealing sprinter of the 1930s, who laughed when his director, Everardo Pavesi, The Lawyer, He admonished him in dialect — “Remember that if you are a strong and inexperienced citizen you will not” (remember that if you want to ride strong, women don’t) — and half Tuscan too. Because of him, half English from Man, because of his obsessive desire to break the tie with Eddy Merckx at 34 stage wins, an absolute record for the Tour, which has tormented him for three years, the race betrays Fausto Coppi and runs through his flattest Piedmont, without Langhe or rough spots, without hills, none of the mountains that made Coppi a champion, up to Turin on the Po Valley; because of him, because of Cavendish, who is already 39 years old and does not talk about retiring, the Astana of the schemer Vinokurov arrives at the Tour with only one mission, that he is never alone, that if he gets stuck in the first mountains, that the whole team stays with him, that they dry his sweat, that the cars are at his side, that he does not suffer. Everyone loses time. Astana sinks. And Cavendish does not float.
He can’t even sprint and can’t even see, so far away, the magnificent meandering between the fence and the fast Biniam Girmay, the Eritrean conqueror, who leaves everyone speechless and frozen. After being a pioneer in the Giro two years ago (the first black African to win a stage in the Italian race before retiring after almost poking out his eye with the cap of an exploding bottle of prosecco), he extends his domain to the Tour de France, where the only African winners were white and blond South Africans, Robbie Hunter (2007) and Daryl Impey (2019). “It means a lot to be the first black African to win,” he says. “It means a lot to me and to my continent and to the hope of my country, Eritrea, where cycling is part of our history. We have cycling in our blood. And my father, every evening in July, told me that I had to see the Tour, that it was the greatest spectacle in the world, the best sport, and I saw Sagan, the way he celebrated his victories, and I said to myself, one day I will be there.”
On the long, endless avenue of the Soviet Union leading to the municipal stadium and the finish line, a crash by others cuts the peloton. Although Philipsen is the only one missing on the final straight, like Cavendish, who is delayed by the crowd, it is a reduced sprint: there are no lead-out riders, only stars, and Girmay shines more than Gaviria, second, De Lie, third and Pedersen, third. “On the left, where Gaviria was going, there was a lot of wind, so I decided to stay close to the fence on the right,” he explains. “That is sprinting, going into where it seems there is no room, closing your eyes, pushing and passing. Today I won. The next one will be Cavendish, who is my idol.”
Girmay, happy and lucid, with both eyes wide open, shines less than Richard Carapaz, the first Ecuadorian in yellow in the history of the Tour, who at the finish calculates the positions in which Pogacar is ahead of him and takes advantage of the cut of the fall to infiltrate in front and dispossess the Slovenian, who indifferently lets it happen. Carapaz arrives in yellow at the first under category The Tour, the early father of the Galibier and its 2,625 metres, which is ascended by the Lautaret face and descended by the Télégraphe, after crossing the border via Sestriere and Montgenèvre. That Carapaz is, along with the debutant Evenepoel, the only one to reach the Alps in the same time as Pogacar and Vingegaard, a shadow of their former selves, and reciprocal, always together on the road, is a tribute to his intelligence in San Luca (disoriented when the Slovenian attacked, he reflected, waited, saw Evenepoel react and chased with him) and brings back memories of the 2021 Tour, when the Ecuadorian from Carchi, winner of the Giro in 19, faced Vingegaard and Pogacar almost on equal terms in a fight that allowed him to climb onto the podium after the Slovenian and the Dane.
His role on the Galibier, where he hopes to hold on, will be more that of a spectator and a hopeful – “I hoped to be the first of the humans” – than that of an actor on a stage that must examine for the second time the extraordinary recovery of Vingegaard, 88 days after the fall that left him in pieces, 12 days in hospital, another 12 days on the sofa at home, two more weeks learning to ride a bike again in Denmark, and six weeks of training to recover, with the courage of desperation, the six weeks lost. The cellular memory of his organism responded brilliantly when he jumped like a child with a candy on Pogacar’s wheel in San Luca. The Galibier, a 50-minute climb where Pogacar began to lose the Tour of 22, subjected to the combined attacks of Vingegaard and Roglic, should favour the Dane, the man of the long climbs. However, two doubts – will the Danish fishmonger also have recovered his stamina? Will Pogacar also have improved on the endless climbs? —they maintain the uncertainty of the fight that will be refereed, in yellow, by a smiling and deadly Ecuadorian Olympic champion.
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