Only knowledge allows madness, says Alejandro Valverde, champion and philosopher of cycling as well, and of its history, and the people of Visma park their van in front of the Duomo with its airy and light dome, in Florence, from where on Saturday the 111th Tour de France.
Knowledge, says Valverde. And power, control of all the levers, add the Medici, who finance Brunelleschi to give form and substance, brick, to his dream, a weightless madness that has defined the skyline of the Tuscan capital for almost 600 years, and also the Visma and their financial fortune, who have turned the interior of the van into a sort of mobile television production center, so many screens, control room They call it, in which the team director receives all possible information in real time – images from television cameras, weather information, sound from Radio Tour – and from where he passes it on to the second directors who guide the cars in the peloton so that they can decide what to do as quickly as possible.
Knowledge, its transmission, power, madness in the face of a challenge that seems impossible, are Visma’s weapons for its Jonas Vingegaard to leave Florence with the hope of winning for the third consecutive Tour in the endless duel with the phenomenal Tadej Pogacar, winner in 2020 and 2021, who monopolizes the big loop this decade. “Being here is already a victory,” says the Dane who fell in Itzulia, who broke his ribs and collarbone on April 4 and suffered a lung contusion that kept him hospitalized for 12 days. And since then he has not competed again. “I’m not bad, but I don’t know if it will be possible to win the Tour again. If I hadn’t broken myself I would clearly say yes, but in these circumstances, just going day by day we will see how far I can go.”
The madness of someone who knows how far he can go and still always tries to do something else, to set a new limit, detachment, audacity, are also the weapons of the Slovenian, who, as they used to say before babies, grows visibly, and continues to grow without ever losing the tender complexion of a pre-adolescent with white acne spots, even as he approaches 26. He assimilates gargantuan feasts, like 21 days of Giro and exhibitions in pink, and does not gain weight. On the contrary, he transforms everything he ingests, everything he pedals, into new energy and not fatigue, and generates adaptations and overcompensations perhaps unheard of since the times of Miguel Indurain, who won two Tours in a row after winning two Giros a month earlier, 1992 and 1993, and won a new Tour, in 1994, despite having been defeated in the Giro. “I feel better than ever,” Pogacar promises, with the Brunelleschi dome shining behind him in the distance, and his words seem prophetic. And not even the Covid that he suffered, he explains, during the three weeks of training at altitude, in Isola 2000, in the Alps next to Nice, altered his progress. His team, without any hesitation, agree with his words and more, say the people who train him, led by the Sevillian from Alcalá de Guadaira Javier Sola, and they assure that his prodigy is on a higher level, that he has not gone crazy training in Isola 2000 but that he has assimilated the Giro very well, considered as a good training load. And everything confirms that Sola was not exaggerating in December when he described Pogacar as someone “touched by the magic wand.”
And as if his wonderful physiology were contagious, and thanks to the bottomless pit that the UAE’s finances seem to be with the emir’s purse, all his teammates, and it would be almost disrespectful to call them gregarious, have achieved the best performance of their team this season. life. Adam Yates, already on the podium in the last Tour, and João Almeida 10 days ago turned the Tour of Switzerland, and its proverbial toughness, into a yours-mine with no greater interest than admiring its superiority. And Juan Ayuso, the fourth man, won the Itzulia and fought until the last day for victory in the Tour de Romandía. With them, and with Tim Wellens and Pavel Sivakov, the happy Slovenian will be able to organize a train from hell on Tuesday in the Galibier until they are left alone and one more isolated survivor, before the coup de grace that the leader will deliver.
It is the feared scenario.
Something like this happened in the Giro d’Italia, decided on the second day. There is a difference that brings us closer to the desired scenario. In the pink corsicathe UAE was a dream team surrounded by nothingness; in the Tour his eight is spectacular, as spectacular is the list of participants, a dream list, As if Noah had designed it to allow entry into his ark, no one is missing. There is the debutant Remco Evenepoel, on whom so many hopes are placed, and there is Primoz Roglic, now freed from his servitude to Vingegaard, leading Red Bull-Bora. The Belgian, and his lieutenant Mikel Landa, will make noise and tense nerves before hitting the high mountains, and they will do so on the first day, on Saturday itself, the long march to Rimini, on the Adriatic coast, through the Apennines and San Marino, a route and slopes reminiscent of his beloved Ardennes. Roglic will be a constant shadow, as will Carlos Rodriguez, who starts with number 31, leader of the Ineos of the four friends —Thomas, Pidcock, Egan and him— and the cyclist who is closest on the mountain to the Danish-Slovenian couple.
“It is difficult to set a goal, because it does not depend on me, it depends on others,” says, always restrained, the Granada native from Almuñécar, fifth and stage winner in 2023 and, according to Mauro Gianetti, the head of the UAE, the closest rival. dangerous next to Vingegaard. “But I would like to be better than last year, fighting with those in front.”
Two other Spaniards start with the number ending in one that indicates the leaders of the teams. After two unfinished Tours, and one, that of 2023, which fell in Bilbao, almost unstarted, Enric Mas, number 151, heads the roster of a Movistar tuttifrutti —sprinter like Gaviria, one-day men like the debutant Oier Lazkano, and view his progression in the mountains Mas already calls him Oier Indurain, and Alex Aranburu, champion of Spain—with aspirations for a good position in the general classification and not giving in to the fatalism that wants to mark the best as unattainable. “There are rivals who are outstanding but we cannot go out to the first stage and think that they have already won the Tour. We have to have confidence with the team we carry ourselves,” says the 29-year-old Mallorcan, before his sixth Tour. “We are going to fight to be the team we were again and to be high class again.” At 61, leading Bahrain, Pello Bilbao is stability and wisdom. The cyclist from Gernika thinks about repeating his performance – in ’23 he won a stage and was sixth overall – and advocates saying goodbye to so much concentration at altitude that tears the cyclist away from his family and his roots, and accelerates the formation of stress and anxiety, and it is, precisely, one of the pillars of the knowledge revolution that leads to madness.
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