Now that in France they speak of giving the rooms of the museums a smell related to the exposed art starting with the Maqueos de María Antonieta, perhaps the galleries and exhibitions of bicycles, maillots, posters and photos of old cyclists should consider adding a touch of liniment sloan in the air, smell of massage and arnic fluid for the pains, and of children He would associate Proust, for example, to his childhood follower. It would give a certain life to the life of the cyclists now, which do not smell like anything, and the long corridors of the Novotele, formerly caves for the senses, so aseptic now, are operating rooms without smell or bleach or a dentist anesthetic. And the kitchens of the equipment, chemistry laboratories, such as Ferran Adrià. The tour, drawn in search of rapid reward emotions to be reduced by boxing fights in the final stages slopes, has entered the routine of a vicious circle that condemns the escapes in stages before appropriate to run to 50 only to maintain an advantage of 90s for endless kilometers of agony, unless the geniuses like Ben Healy rebel. The slope show is only a stage, a red carpet, so that Pogacar looks. The fans get tired. Cycling does not smell of anything. Where emotion. The unforeseen.
That the mass sprints return, stories so unbridled that neither the wise men of the watts nor the AI can control, and there, in the last meters of a flat stage under the heat of the Mayenne, both cereal field already in the harvest, it does smell like cycling. Sweat and fear. Bulldozer technique, Mirage speed, raises, finally the arms. And there is talk of cycling and not of Pogacar’s whims, always yellow, and his kisses with Vingegaard. Extinction or sprint. The need will make you virtuous.
Not that Pogacar seems to bother him not to be the protagonist, nor that one day nothing until the end passes. “It is fine to have a day of rest, recovery, four Horts in the sun, with the heat, on the bike. And it is also good to see João [Almeida, su lugarteniente, portugués como el Yáñez de con una costilla rota] on the bicycle and finishing the stage. I know that today has suffered a lot, but Chapeau to finish today and start the stage. That is why for me it has been a good day. But I think that with the broken rib it costs him a lot to breathe and today he has suffered with the accelerations, so I hope he has less pain in the next few days, but nobody expects him to exceed the limit, after all it is only a cycling race, the body must not be destroyed for this, ”says the Slovenian before the press while scratching the outer wall of the right ear, digs and investigates the fruit of the exploration of the exploration of a nail Discreetly in the yellow jersey, calm there in the same place where Milan responds in the clouds, almost breathlessly still 40 minutes after his victory. As If you run the return: “I still have no program defined. I will decide after the tour … I’ll see if I want to spend another month away from home.”
He discovered cycling before Pogacar and wrote a great booklet comparing the mountain stages to the passion of Christ, the climb to Golgotha, insidies and suffering, but surely if he still lived he would have changed his vision on Saturday, he struck in a barrier of Josephine Baker’s walk in his town. A curve in that at 1,600m breaks the meninges and physics, where centrifugal force, centripetal, peralte. Science is forgotten, the law of the jungle, instinct, desire enters thromba. Passion is not the mountain, but the stark struggle in the brain of serotonins, dopamines, adrenalins, gasps and glutamates. Who said fear. Who vertigo at 78 per hour brushing the fences.
Large muscle groups to 120 revolutions per minute. A codazo, a push, a lane change … Milan is alone. His Lidl Train, Theuns, Consonni, Stuyven, have let him be handled only the last kilometer, which makes him eternal while he shakes his imposing housing from side to side, looking for others that guide him. At 300m finally, locked by the left, after Kaden Groves, whom voluntary, always arranged, delivers the last grain of energy his partner Mathieu van der Poel, whom the alpecin do not let him rest. When the Dutch prodigy will laugh, the heavens open for Milan. It imposes its mass, its large volume of distribution, accelerates. A hole finally, a thrust of arms, head, legs and body. A cry and a Uff. Arms up. First stage victory in the third sprint of his first tour for the Tolmezzo whip that began on the track chasing and discovered the true smell of cycling in the last meters of the asphalt. Four stages in the Giro and a Maglia Cicuita, and the end of a drought of 113 stages, five years and nine days since the last Italian victory in the Tour, Nibali, Val Thorens 19.
