Chroniclers from half the world balance in their analyses. A few recognize that the Catalan cyclist is a genius, but the majority blame the second and third, the great veterans and Kasia Niewiadoma, for not taking Blasi’s attack seriously on the penultimate ascent of the Cauberg, 22 kilometers from the finish line. But to maintain the escape with force, without exhausting yourself, in the face of such a chase, you need something more than unconsciousness, luck or apathy on the part of the rivals, and three days after surprising the world around Maastricht in the Dutch countryside, Paula Blasi, who is no longer a surprise, demonstrates it in neighboring Belgium on the tremendous wall of Huy, one of the sacred places of world cycling, where only two cyclists surpass her, the great Demi Vollering, who takes Sunday’s rematch, and last year’s winner, the young Dutchwoman Puck Pieterse, who overtakes her in the endless final 100 meters with a punch refined year after year in cyclocross events.
Blasi enters the wall poorly positioned, 1,200 meters at 9%, and is still far from Vollering when she accelerates, sitting on the bike, more than 600 meters from the finish line. The Catalan progresses to second, her long braided ponytail emerging from under her helmet like a wild lioness’s tail, waving from side to side, as she maintains a fierce, triumphant side-by-side with Niewiadoma. Vollering is unattainable. The second place reaches out to him. Pieterse, redhead bombshell, cuts them off.
The UAE runner – who arrives next to her, helping her, at the foot of the Wall, in the group of 16 that broke up in the previous climb, to Cherave, and passes her her bottle to quench her thirst – wants to be a general classification runner, but she wins classics because she still maintains the explosiveness that she trained so much last year when she was led by Paolo Slongo, the Italian who made Vincenzo Nibali and Elisa Longo Borghini. This year he has returned to work with Fran Escolá, his athletics coach. “And progress,” he said in Cross-country cycling A few weeks ago the runner from Esplugues lived in Cerdanya, near Alp, and trained in Andorra. “Before I just endured the pull and now I do the races; I read them better, and I can anticipate the movements of others and calculate mine better.”
No one can say anymore that Blasi was a young newcomer to whom no one paid attention. Blasi – 23 years old, a middle-distance athlete until she was 20, also a duathlete, a soccer player, hyperactive, an unrepentant reader, a graduate in Physical Activity and Sports Sciences, so many things and more – can no longer repeat what she explained in the magazine: “Not knowing anything about cycling works in my favor. When I started I had not even heard of Vollering or Marianne Vos. That helps me not feel intimidated on the road. On the bike we are all equal.”
She had already arrived at the Walloon Arrow as one of the favorites. She already knew who Vollering was, and everyone already knew who she was. And so Sunday will arrive at the end of the spring road before thinking about the Volta a Catalunya and the Liège-Bastogne-Liège, the great classic of the Ardennes. The Monument that awaits you.
