Memory, the past, is a mass that we twist and reconstruct, and we retell it every day to live the present to our liking, and in beautiful Livigno, postcard Alps, Tadej Pogacar, coffee break in the middle of training, dozens of fans following him, He stretches out on the terrace in the morning sun and dreamily contemplates his youthful days in the neighboring valley of Sankt Moritz, an old house, its little lakes, his bicycle rides with his Slovenian teammates and trips in an old van, a coffee maker almost, to Livigno to fill up the gas tank and buy food at the supermarket, cheaper in Italy than in the Swiss madness, and he also remembers that in Livigno he met and loved Urska, his long-time girlfriend, and since then he has been happy .
Pogacar is the epic of sweetness, the cannibal who caresses, without violence, killing them softly.
And, dressed in pink as he is, a permanent color now, he can add to the florilege of his memories that there, in a super popular ski resort, he got a little closer to Eddy Merckx, the Cannibal that he himself wants to be, and bigger , that in 1972, prehistory, right there, the same climb to the Passo di Foscagno, the same slope to the Eira in which Pogacar shot down Nairo, definitively ended the resistance of the Tarangu, by José Manuel Fuente, an unfortunate attacker who punctures in the final descent. Around him, the old journalists also remember and talk about how the day after that defeat, Tarangu, who did not know peace, returned it to Merckx, now unreachable, and took two minutes off him in the ascent of the Stelvio after descending from Livigno, and, continuing with Merckx, until the Tour, they talk about a day of rest in Orcières Merlette in 1971 and of Luis Ocaña and his Bic stretched out on a deck chair in the sun of the southern Alps, gloating in the beating they had given him that day prior to Cannibal. This, heartbroken, unable to find peace in defeat, meditated on the response that he put into practice the next day: an exit attack on the descent towards the Mediterranean, all of his Moltenis in front; Ocaña, cut back, suffering.
And the more the old people remember, the more they adapt the past to their whim, the more they regret that in the Giro there is no Ocaña, a Tarangu, who makes Pogacar doubt, and they discover that the greater the Slovenian is, the more beautiful his demonstrations. , the more enormous is the weight of the absence of a rival. And they long for the Tour to arrive, and there Pogacar will not only have to compete with the mountains or the time trials, but with Jonas Vingegaard, who defeated him twice and these days goes up and down the Col de Sóller, in Mallorca, a tattooed butterfly, and his broken ribs don’t even hurt anymore; with Primoz Roglic, who awaits him growing; with Evenepoel, who dreams. Like Coppi had his Bartali. “And I’m sure everyone will be very strong, even Jonas,” he says in a press conference from the hotel shared by all the teams at the top, his nose red as a tomato, so much sun, pale, transparent eyelashes, and he says what he expects. a last week of control, or not, who knows?, that he likes the day of the double Mount Grappa (Saturday), and that afterwards he will take a week off, chill out, to supercompensate for all the Giro work, and then 110% to think about the Tour. “I need to finish the Giro with high morale, in good shape. Winning it, if it finally happens, will be one of the best moments of my career, but for a cyclist the best moment is always a victory in the Tour de France.”
Those who accompany him in the Giro, Thomas, Martínez, can only follow him with their mouths open, fearing the moment when he will notify his Majka through the earpiece, at the exit of that curve, he will attack. And when he arrives, they dissolve and comfort each other. Symbolically, from Tuesday’s stage the passage over the top of the Stelvio, avalanches and landslides at more than 2,600m had to be erased, replaced by one of its tributaries, the Umbrail Pass, the Swiss border at 2,498 meters and Cima Coppi. Premonitory, furthermore, meteorologists announce torrential rains in the valleys towards Bolzano and on the final ascent to Santa Cristina, in Val Gardena, Mount Pana, the great mass of pale granite of the Sassolungo, the gateway to the Dolomites.
The Giro is reduced to rhetoric and waiting.
To Enrico Gasparotto, the director of Bora who won the Giro against Carapaz and Landa with Jai Hindley two years ago, and did not need to attack, just wait for the Ecuadorian in pink to choke on the Marmolada, managing the same strategy, patience, the wait, the wheel of the other, with Dani Martínez, the prince of Soacha, Cundinamarca. To win the Giro? No, of course, what madness (third overall, the Colombian is 6m 56s behind Pogacar), to finish second, and that’s it, behind the “phenomenon”, and he advised him on Sunday to stop trying to follow Pogacar, It would be better to stay behind Thomas, who is only 15s ahead of him in the general classification. “Attack?” says Martínez. “Of course I’ll try. Thomas has to fall.”
Behind Pogacar, cycling remains the same.
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