When Jules Verne traveled to the moon with his letters 160 years ago, he left a bottle of Burgundy in the Saint George crater as a souvenir, a pinot noir from Nuits Saint Georges, and after brushing at supersonic speed the leaves of the vines that grow on his way to the moon of the Tour, no less, when Remco Evenepoel, winner of the time trial, lands, he places a modest madeleine next to the bottle of wine. It is not Proust’s, of course, the aroma that awakens the memory of the Belgian world champion is floral, the intense honeysuckle and jasmine that invade the starting area, the hugs of Mikel Landa, who wraps him up like a father to a child, he is so young, but Curley’s madeleine, a small slope, a flattened hump like a bun, that sprouts in the middle of the plain of the time trial route, a seam that the best time trialist of the moment devours in his 64-tooth accelerating chainring.
And along with the madeleine, Evenepoel could also leave on the moon, a great votive offering of thanksgiving, the tire that he thought had burst in the last kilometers. A bang, a horrendous boom tormented his concentration as he rode happily. “The noise that a blowout makes. I spent a few meters cursing, thinking that I had a puncture and that I would lose the time trial,” he says. “But 200 meters passed and I didn’t see myself on the ground, and the tire was still full. It must have been a glass that someone in the audience dropped. I think I lost three or four seconds with the scare.”
It is the first win for rookie Evenepoel, 24, in the race that, since his birth as a cyclist after being Belgium’s best youth footballer, the wise men prophesied he would dominate as only his sole compatriot, Eddy Merckx, had done before.
On the climb where Evenepoel, with a smaller bum and a kilo less weight, say those who see his scales, flies – he covers the 5,800 scorching metres in 8m 34s, at an average of 40.620 kilometres per hour – others suffer, Julian Bernard, son of the magnificent Jeff, friend of Indurain, stops to kiss his wife and to be cheered on by his team, and his smile will not fade throughout the Tour no matter how bad times await them, and Tadej Pogacar loses the time trial and saves the yellow jersey. On the climb the Slovenian loses 7s, the portion that condemns him in the section most favourable to his announced characteristics, where, as he well knew, power takes precedence over aerodynamics.
With a time of 29m 4s, Pogacar breaks the calculations made by David Herrero, the UAE biomechanic, who, taking into account wind, temperature, asphalt quality, his boy’s threshold watts, atmospheric pressure and more, spoke of 29m 35s, but does not beat the genius from Aalst.
The world champion, the only one to go below the 29m barrier (28m 52s, at an average of 52.587 kilometres per hour), beat him, as he had publicly predicted, perhaps to deceive fate, but only by 12s, which allowed him to keep the yellow jersey by 33s over the Belgian and even increase his lead in the general classification over the Renaissance Jonas Vingegaard – his appetite whetted by the sole advice of his staffdon’t stop thinking about reaching the unreachable bike that makes way for you—, his ugly helmet magnificently aerodynamic, and the radio on his sternum, but his posture complicated by the pain from the ribs broken three months ago that still torments him (1m 15s behind), and over his compatriot Primoz Roglic (1m 36s behind).
The Spanish sun and moon, Carlos Rodríguez and Juan Ayuso, continue their inseparable Tour. A similar time trial (Ayuso slightly better, who maintains, by 1s, the pre-eminence over Almeida in the casting for being the guest star of the team after the Slovenian), a close general classification (Ayuso fifth, 2m 16s behind, seventh the quiet Almuñécar, 15s further back). Ahead of them, the highest quality general classification ever remembered. Among the four magnificent ones who occupy the first four places – Pogacar, Evenepoel, Vingegaard and Roglic – they have won four Vueltas, two Giros and four Tours in the last five years. No one is missing. And they are squeezed in at 96s when the Tour has already covered the first week. And Pogacar ahead.
In a way, though not exactly like that, the Slovenian has managed to suture a wound, a bad memory, on every important day of the Tour de la Reconquista. In San Luca, where he always bent his knee, last Sunday; on Tuesday, on the Galibier, on the steepest stage, where Jonas Vingegaard, then dominant, tortured him in 2022; and on the first Friday of July, in the Burgundian time trial – 25 kilometres at 52 per hour between Nuits and Gevrey – even if he does not win, he erases the memory of the Combloux disaster, the 98s, and the Tour, lost to the Dane in 22 hard kilometres, during which the painful memory of his broken wrist prevented him from taking a dignified position on the goat.
The 111th edition of the race would certainly not have displeased Raphaël Geminiani, the patriarch of all those who consider themselves cycling directors, who died yesterday at the age of 99 in Clermont Ferrand, in the shadow of his Puy de Dôme. Geminiani, skilful, controversial, incendiary, volcanic, wise, was a rival rider of Louison Bobet and Fausto Coppi, and a friend of the Italian, with whom he shared a hunting trip and malaria infection in Burkina Faso. very championmisdiagnosed, died in January 1960. Geminiani survived to finish shaping Jacques Anquetil, the perfect cyclist, head waiter Jacques, and to give self-esteem to Julito Jiménez, his soul mate.
Of the greats of today, he would surely go with Evenepoel, the time trialist who dreams of the mountains, or with Carlos Rodríguez, because he loved Luis Ocaña, as stubborn as him, and Julito, he always admired the climbing character of the Spaniards. And thinking about Sunday, the stage of the white roads in Troyes, he would surely have thought of some trick, like the ones he used to fool the naive, but distrustful, Bahamontes.
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