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 walk strong, not women) –, and half Tuscan too. For him, half an Englishman from Man, for his obsessive desire to break the tie of 34 stage victories with Eddy Merckx, the absolute record of the Tour, which has tormented him for three years, the race betrays Fausto Coppi and runs through his flatter Piedmont , without Langhe or asperities, without slopes, none of the mountains that made Coppi campionissimo, up to Turin through the Padan plain; For him, for Cavendish, who is now 39 years old and does not talk about retiring, the Astana of the conniving Vinokurov arrives at the Tour with a single mission, that he is never alone, that if he stays in the first mountains, that the entire team stays. with him, let him dry his sweat, let the cars be at his side, let him not suffer. Everyone wastes time. Astana sinks. And Cavendish doesn’t float.
He doesn’t even sprint and he can’t even see, so far away he is, the magnificent serpentine between the fence and the fast ones of Biniam Girmay, the conquering Eritrean, who silences and freezes everyone and, after being a pioneer in the Giro two years ago (first black African winner of a stage in the Italian race before retiring after almost putting out his eye with the cap of an exploding prosecco bottle) extends his dominions to the Tour de France, where the only African winners were white and blonde South Africans, Robbie Hunter ( 2007) and Daryl Impey (2019). “It means a lot to be the first black African winner,” 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 afternoon in July told me that I had to see the Tour, that it was the greatest show in the world, the best sport, and I saw Sagan, the way he celebrated the victories, and I told myself, one day I will be there”.
On the great avenue of the endless Soviet Union that leads to the communal stadium and the finish line, a fall from others cuts off the peloton. Although only Philipsen is missing in the last stretch, like Cavendish, delayed by the crowd, it is a reduced sprint: there are no throwers, only stars, and Girmay shines more than Gaviria, second, De Lie, third and Pedersen, third. “On the left, where Gaviria was going, the wind was blowing a lot, so I decided to stick to the fence on the right,” he explains. “That’s sprinting, getting into places where you don’t seem to fit, closing your eyes, pushing and passing. Today I won. The next one will be won by Cavendish, who is my idol.”
Girmay shines less, happy and bright, and with both eyes wide open, 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 break in the fall to infiltrate ahead and dispossess the Slovenian, who indifferently lets him do it. Carapaz arrives in yellow at the first hours 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 in the Galibier, where he hopes to resist, will be more of a spectator and of hope – “he hoped to be the first of humans” – than of an actor on a stage that must examine for the second time Vingegaard’s extraordinary recovery, 88 days after the fall that left him in pieces, 12 days in the hospital, as many days on the couch at home, two more weeks learning to ride a bicycle again in Denmark, and six weeks of training to recover, with the courage of desperation, the six lost weeks. The cellular memory of his organism responded brilliantly when he jumped like a child for candy to the Pogacar wheel in San Luca. The Galibier, a 50-minute climb where Pogacar began to lose the Tour of 22, subdued by the combined attacks of Vingegaard and Roglic, should favor the Dane, the man of long slopes. However, two doubts – has the fishmonger from Denmark also recovered the bottom of it? Has Pogacar also 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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