The injured cyclists of Itzulia return to compete in the Dauphiné with their sights on the Tour de France

With the solitary ballad of Tadej Pogacar in pink finished in the Giro d’Italia, in June cycling already smells like the Tour de France, and those who intend to make the untouchable Slovenian sweat in July meet, from Sunday the second to Sunday the ninth, in the East French, between the Loire, the Rhône Valley and so many Alps, to compete in the Dauphiné Libéré.

Four fell in Olaeta. Two months later, three return. Perhaps not to clash with the disruptive model that guides the advances of humanity after the pandemic, its year 2024, that of Jonas Vingegaard, Primoz Roglic and Remco Evenepoel (and his special lieutenant, his Yáñez, Mikel Landa), is marked by the disaster they suffered in Itzulia on April 4, the fall in a curve on the Olaeta descent that sent the four to the hospital. While the fractures of Roglic, Evenepoel and Landa barely affected their preparation for the Tour, Vingegaard’s injuries, ribs, clavicle, lung contusion, pneumothorax, have disrupted the plans of the only cyclist that Pogacar fears, since he has defeated him twice on the Tour. Roglic, Evenepoel and Landa will fight for the copper in the Dauphiné: sprint on Sunday, steep slope on Monday and Tuesday, 34-kilometer hard time trial on Wednesday, sprint on Thursday and alpine festival on weekendFriday, Saturday, Sunday, with three arrivals in three major ports, Collet d’Allevard, Samoëns and Plateau de Glières, respectively.

And with them, against them, the couple of inseparable Spaniards, and this since youth, not long ago, Carlos Rodríguez and Juan Ayuso, protagonists in Itzulia (final victory for Ayuso) and in Romandía (Rodríguez). The third Spaniard top for the Tour, Enric Mas, also absent from the races since April 28, Romandía, will rest for another week, until June 9, when the Tour of Switzerland begins.

The only one missing from the meeting of the fabulous will be Vingegaard, who also planned to do his last pre-Tour test in the Dauphiné, but he will not be far away, as he is already training in the altitude concentration of his Visma in Tignes. Also in the Alps, but further south, almost in the Mediterranean of Nice, in luxurious villas rented by his UAE, legion of cooks, nutritionists, trainers, biomechanics, directors around him, Pogacar will spend more than half of June, which will begin on Monday a three-week concentration in Isola 2000, in the heart of the Mercantour, the border region with Piedmont, where the July legions found a way to cross the Alps from the Mediterranean, the paths along which in recent years the Wolf returned from Italy to the continent, the same ski resort where the Tour will arrive on the penultimate Friday of July.

The eventful events of early spring have only emphasized the trend, theorized years ago by physiologists but only demonstrated in practice during the pandemic, to train more, in a more controlled manner, loading blocks, rest, compensation, and Thus, and compete less but to the maximum, always seeking victory and more times than not finding it. Pogacar, despite the excess of having ridden the Giro, will arrive at the Tour, on June 29 in Florence, with only 31 days of competition, while Evenepoel will do so with 26, Roglic with 20 and Vingegaard with only 15, which should be 23 if I would not have given up the Dauphiné. The fashion that seduces everyone was summed up by the Slovenian at the beginning of the Giro: “It is better to train very hard with rest periods between blocks. That is the only way to improve, because if you compete a lot it is easy for you to suffer fatigue right away without even realizing it. For me, at least, that doesn’t work. So now we will compete for a month at full strength, then a month of hard training and then, in the Tour, another month full gas”.

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