Technology hates force. Materials rebel against the will of Oier Lazkano, who punctured in the Tour at the key moment on the gravel of Troyes, the stage he most wanted to win, and three weeks later, an electronic gearbox rebelled in the Olympic time trial. Lazkano went out to take Paris and in the Bastille, he had had enough, betrayed by the gears on his bike, a single chainring, 60 teeth, which got stuck at the moment of revolution. The control on the time trial handlebars didn’t work. The chain got stuck in a hard sprocket and he came out of so many curves, 27 in total, with so much gearing that it was difficult for him to regain cadence. And, given the dangerous route, he had to catch them with his hands down, on the road handlebars. Then, the chain went crazy. It rose to the largest sprocket. “We had to change bikes,” says Pascual Momparler, the coach. “That was the end. He completely lost his focus. It’s a shame, because he could have finished 10th or 11th…”
His afternoon would not have changed much either, with so much rain in Paris, if he had not suffered the breakdown. The Vitorian, who finished 26th out of 32, and entered by eating the barriers of the last curve, leaving Saint Germain by the Quai d’Orsay, so much literature and power, and turning right towards the finish line, drawn in the centre of the Pont Alexandre III, would not lose more than half a minute between the stop and the change of bike. Remco Evenepoel, Olympic champion at almost 54 km/h before turning 25, beat him by almost three minutes (2m 56s) over the 32.4 kilometres of the course, a soaked skating rink that the Belgian converted, with his power, into a motorcycle circuit.
The Olympic gold adds to a list of achievements that already includes a rainbow inline (2022) and a time trial (2023), as well as the Vuelta in 2022 and two Liège races.
64 tooth chainring that, pure flowmoves lightly, Evenepoel, the last step of the Tour podium six days ago, led the Games as he had also led in a rainy and dangerous Glasgow at the last World Championships ahead of the same Filippo Ganna who in Paris suffered a chill with a slipping wheel and also finished second, 15s behind. The favourite to complete the podium, and repeat Scotland in France, the Welshman Josh Tarling, who was cornering like no one else, risking more than anyone else, passing millimetres from the fences, without touching them, punctured the front wheel. Despite changing bikes on the corner of the Daughters of Calvary Boulevard, deserted pavements, he only gave up 27s to Evenepoel and 2s to Wout van Aert, who finished third, second Belgian on the podium, second son of Eddy Merckx, who won everything, but was never an Olympic champion. In his time, the Games only admitted amateurs. At the age of 19 he took part in Tokyo 64. He finished 12th. The gold medal went to a 24-year-old Italian named Mario Zanin, who was later only known to have won a stage in the Vuelta in 1966.
Apart from thanking Tarling for his puncture, Van Aert may owe his podium to the risk he took in daring to fit a lenticular front wheel, a practice abolished as ridiculous decades ago. Although the rain posed a risk, the total absence of wind made the Paris route an ideal laboratory. According to the calculations of British aerodynamics expert B Xavier Disley, the wheel saved the second Belgian five watts. At the finish he was only one watt ahead of Tarling.
Van Aert, 1.90m, and Ganna, 1.93m, and even bigger and wider, hug Evenepoel, 1.71m, with his streetwise face whose hair is starting to grow after having it cut short. They look like protective older brothers, Zumosol’s cousin or something, and they would even like to pick him up in their arms, such tenderness awakens in the giants the cyclist who dazzled Merckx before anyone else. “Ho, ho, ho,” warned the Cannibal to the Belgian journalists, unaware of what was approaching. “I’ve seen a junior who, uff, what’s he going to be like?” He was talking about Evenepoel, with whom he has not been very affectionate afterwards – “I love to tease him, provoke him, so that he always goes further,” admits the best cyclist of all time – but whom he does not lose sight of. “But you must be happy to have finished third in the Tour,” he tells his Belgian colleagues before watching him roam around Paris like a machine, perfectly fitted, aerodynamic magic.
Australia’s Grace Brown The women’s race was a disaster for some of the favourites, such as the American Chloe Dygert and the Belgian Lotte Kopecky. The Australian Grace Brown, the only one who did not skate, clearly won with a 1m 31s lead over the British Anna Henderson and 1m 32s over Dygert. The Spanish Mireia Benito also crashed, finishing 22nd.
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