Not so long ago, the Revancha hill was a large hole, a quarry of grinding stones that miners pulled out with hard calluses that cut like knives and scraped like rasps on their hands, and arms gnarled like vine shoots, perhaps like the arms of David Valero, a farmer from Baza, in Granada, who changed the hoe for the mountain bike and was a bronze medalist in Tokyo, and is still as tough, as capable of subjecting his body to efforts as ungrateful and as hard as ever, and in that work, and with the heat that scorched the gravel and the stones on the road, as dry and inclement as that of his Granada in August, he would have been the best, surely, but 50 years ago the quarry became the dump of Versailles, and then a dumping ground for the construction of the city of Saint Quentin, and it grew and grew until it became a hill 231 meters high, the highest elevation in the entire region of Île de France, and now it is a It is called Col de Élancourt, and from its summit, flags fluttering in a silly breeze, you can see the Seine and the Eiffel Tower, and there the trees grow, and paths like snakes crisscross it, where a hard peasant gets lost, but the Englishman Tom Pidcock bustles and jumps like a elf, A mischievous genius in the forest, and when he launches his assault, nothing can stop him, not even a puncture, not even an excited and strong Frenchman who sees the gold medal there, so close, and does not reach it.
Tom Pidcock is a child who doesn’t want to grow up, a Peter Pan on a bicycle, who flies through life and at 24 years and 364 days old – he turns 25 on Tuesday 30th – he is already a two-time Olympic mountain bike champion. He won, as he did in Tokyo three years ago, and behind him, second, came the Frenchman Victor Koretzky, who chose the wrong path, and the South African Alan Hatherly, who, with his effort, earned the right to watch from close up, and at times almost star in, one of the most beautiful battles remembered in an Olympic race with bicycles with fat wheels, filled with foam to gain inertia, short and intelligent suspensions and very hard heads. Valero finally finished tenth, breathing down the neck of the immortal Swiss Nino Schurter – 38 years old, Olympic champion in Rio 16, 10 times world champion – who was encouraged by Fabian Cancellara behind the ropes and ended up astride his rear wheel on a descent of roots and rocks. The other Spaniard in the race, Jofre Cullell, was 24th in a cruel race. “I have done enough to survive,” he says, with dry foam in his mouth, like a warrior.
The start was a sprint and the second lap of the seven on the circuit – very fast, 110 metres of elevation gain on each lap of 4,400 metres – a solo recital by Pidcock, who destroyed the race like Pogacar and who was only resisted, with great effort, by Koretzky, who, unlike Pidcock – a season mostly of road racing, cyclo-cross in winter and mountain biking after the Tour, who dropped out halfway through with Covid and in which he did not help his boss at Ineos, Carlos Rodríguez – is a pure mountain bike specialist, and races on a circuit that is known as his home, and 15,000 people – hats on their heads like roosters: the French sense of the ridiculous is a difficult characteristic to understand – chanting his name, Vic-tor, Vic-tor.
The real race, which made it memorable and, for most, epic, began on the fourth lap with a mistake, like all great events in humanity. Pidcock punctured – he risked using foam tyres and not anti-puncture liquid – and the British mechanics, slow, startled like someone caught off guard, took a while to change his front wheel. There was half the race left and Pidcock started again like a golfer punished by his low handicap, 40 seconds behind Koretzky, who was left alone in front, and in tenth place on a circuit, so narrow are most of its roads, that it is difficult to overtake. Four laps in which Pidcock, the little devil, showed off his entire repertoire, the technique that allowed him to be world cyclocross champion in the times of Van der Poel and Van Aert, and went to races in a purple Porsche that could not fit through the streets; the handling on gravel that allowed him to win the Strade Bianche; the punch that makes his continuous attacks into whiplashes that he shows in the Amstel or the Fleche du Brabant, the classics that he has in his showcase, and, finally, the ability on the descents, the layout of curves Galibier style the day he won his stage of the Tour in Alpe d’Huez, and with which on the last lap, when he has already reached the Frenchman, with whom he has exchanged intense blows, he sneaks to the left of a tree, the element that gives him life, planted in the path, and overtakes Koretzky, and wins the position from him. All in a succession of moments that leave no time to breathe. The Frenchman, sporty, recognizes that there he made a mistake that cost him the gold, and Pidcock is reminded that at some point in his life he said that winning two Olympic golds would make him a “legend.” “I don’t remember saying it,” the Englishman, who will face Van der Poel and Evenepoel on Saturday on the Montmartre slopes in the road race, told reporters. “But if you think so, I won’t be the one to say no.”
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