July 14. It is the day of redemption and reckoning, Enric Mas and Jonas Vingegaard dream of, and they toil, and their teams with them, on the ungrateful roads of the Pyrenees. Everyone fights. Mas escapes and empties himself. Vingegaard attacks and dies. Carlos Rodríguez fades away.
It is the day of judgment, answers Pogacar, an inflexible God, and laughs.
The great day of the yellow jersey. The day of the cannibal of the 21st century, insatiable glutton, merciless, with a demonic smile, who with a climb to the Plateau de Beille that brought to mind the best of Eddy Merckx, delivers the coup de grace to the Dane and the entire Tour. The peloton that brings together the best cyclists of the decade, proud winners of races of all kinds, is reduced to splinters, cyclists alone, lost, exhausted, who reach the top crawling through a cloud of fans who can only feel sorry for them after having cheered the Slovenian, one by one, and far, far away from the tyrant.
Vingegaard came in at 1m 8s, Evenepoel at 2m 51s. A minute later, Landa, the first Spaniard, and Rodriguez, at 5m 8s, is six minutes away from the podium. The classification is a war report. Fighters fallen in battle.
“Pogacar is from another planet,” he repeats, and every day the same, every day all the riders in the peloton, Evenepoel, who clings to the podium and his white jersey, and is 5m 19s behind in the general classification, third man. “But I also breathe and suffer,” Pogacar replies when asked to show compassion for those he sees suffering beside him while he keeps his legs strong and fresh. “That’s how it is. Some suffer more, others suffer less. It’s a bicycle race. You always have to go at full speed.”
Far from the chic rurality of the Massif Central, in the villages of the Pyrenees the guest houses are run by old peasants, pure nerve, who one day will see the Tour pass in front of their door and marvel at the sight, in the background, of the mountain slopes painted on the side of the mountain with the T-shirts and costumes of a larger and crazier crowd than ever, carnival in the ditches and in the fields that smell of dung and slurry, and the next day, in front of the TV, instead of taking a nap after an energetic ride along the roads already abandoned by the Tour, they grab the knife. laguiole and with their sharp blades they patiently scrape off artichoke leaves, 50 leaves each, counted, to extract the pulp while on the screen the Visma troops, Benoot, Tratnik, Lemmen, Keldermann, Van Aert, try to absorb the pulp, and the life, of the cyclists in the peloton, one by one, three times 50, ascending Peyresourde, and then the tragic mountain passes, cycling is also death and blood, the Ocaña curve in Menté, the parapet of Fabio Casartelli’s still red bridge at the Portet d’Aspet.
On the radio, Françoise Hardy sings with Jane Birkin the little papers.And nothing could be further from the velvet paper caresses that the singer throws with a grimace than the scrape of the sandpaper with which the Vismas, while exhausting the UAEs and isolating Pogacar, try to file down the flight of Movistar’s hopes more roughly than the old asphalt of the roads in the desolate Ariège valleys towards the Col d’Agnes and the Beille. And as the Visma team provoked the UAE the day before on the way to Pla d’Adet before Pogacar’s blow, the Slovenian team could well return the taunt to the Dane team, keep going, keep going like this, it’s the best favour you could do us, we’re whistling. And Vingegaard is motivated: the harder, the longer the stage, the better for me.
It is a breakaway of 15, of gregarious and princes, of Aranburu and Romo, after their adventure on the gravel, and of Enric Mas, a newcomer to the experience and rested after a Tour dedicated to losing time to obtain permission to break away. Also going are the usual stubborn ones, Guillaume Martin, Carapaz, Healy, and a couple of Red Bulls, Sobrero and Jungels, who carry on their shoulders their Hindley, the leader after Roglic’s withdrawal.
His lead never reaches four minutes. Agnes’ 15 are five. Carapaz, Hindley, the kid from Perth who beat the Olympic champion and Landa in the Giro in 2022, Mas – greats who are looking to save their Tour and that of their teams – Johannessen, the Norwegian who beat Carlos Rodriguez in the Tour de l’Avenir in 2021, and the Belgian climber De Plus, a big man who pedals unhinged. The peloton is 18, sucked up artichoke leaves, juiceless but tenacious, always so much fiber, so much will to become indigestible, to not let themselves be devoured. Pogacar, no, is the heart of the artichoke, always juicy.
Three minutes at the top of Agnès.
Tour de France heat and 2m 25s in Les Cabannes, at the foot of the Plateau de Beille, a thick, dark forest before the pastures and the bend where Contador, after nailing Rasmussen dancing the mambo, invented the pistolero salute to greet some friends on the side of the road who had come from Pinto to celebrate his first Tour. It was 2007. Contador was the fourth to win on the hardest climb in the Pyrenees (16 kilometres at 8%, and always a crosswind up high), the fourth to arrive in Paris in yellow after Pantani (1998) and twice Armstrong (2002 and 2004). Since then, in the territory of breakaways, of Vanendert and of Purito, the last winner, in 2015.
Too much valley, 16 kilometres, for so many scrawny climbers. The kings of the kilowatt are exhausted on the flat. The big ones arrive. There are seven of them. Jorgenson takes the last baton from Visma. Vingegaard, with polka dots borrowed from Pogacar, on his wheel. Only Adam Yates with the leader. And Landa, ass up, hands down, supports Remco. Carlos Rodríguez resists and gives in.
Four kilometres up, and the hardest part still to come, they slow down the cars of the doomed breakaway. That’s when Mas attacks. He is once again a few metres away from the young Mas who reminded us of Contador, standing on his bike, like someone dancing the mambo, the spark, the change of pace, the genius that has been extinguished for so many years. A short flight that is brought down by the owners of the Tour. A song of hope that ends nine kilometres from the summit.
At 11 kilometres, Vingegaard. An artificial hump under his moles. An aerodynamic keel, a shark fin. Sunscreen on his face, on his whitened arms. He doesn’t look back, only at his little screen. The world is only two. It’s a mirage under the dazzling sun. Six kilometres away, at the hardest part, 9.5% gradient, Vingegaard gets up from the saddle for the first time, reaches the red line on his computer. He crosses it. Boom. As if it were nothing, Pogacar gets up and leaves. Fantasy and dreams fade away, the duel is settled. A man alone at the head. Few doubt that with a week to go, and all the Alps, the Tour is over. “And no, and no,” proclaims Pogacar. “The Tour ends when you reach the Champs-Élysées… well, not this year, this year it will end when we reach the Promenade des Anglais, the main street of Nice. When we cross the final finish line we can talk about the end. Not before. And I will be focused until then.”
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