Jonas Vingegaard, in front of the Cathedral of Santiago, on the last podium of O Gran Camiño.IRAIA CALVO
It’s still night in Santiago when Jonas Vingegaard jumps out of bed at 7:30 in the morning. It’s cold and dark outside, the same vision, the same distemper that awaited him when, a year ago, injured from cycling, he was filleting and packing cod at a fish market in the North Sea in Denmark and working six to 12, and then did he train He’s not afraid of the cold or the snow, which he braved on the bike on Saturday without gloves or leg warmers or long sleeves. You know him. Another routine awaits you in the Galician capital, breakfast, recognition of the time trial course, rest and a roll before setting off at 2:08pm. At 2.42 they weren’t there yet, 23 minutes and 47 seconds later he stops pedaling and sees that he has won, the only one of all to average more than 45 kilometers per hour over the 18 kilometers. He beats Australian specialist Rohan Dennis, two-time world champion and jumbo partner, by 35 seconds. In general, he is joined on the podium by the Spaniard from Mota del Cuervo Jesús Herrada (Cofidis) in 2m31 and the Portuguese Ruben Guerreiro (Movistar) in 2m48.
It is O Gran Camiño, the Galician race, a laboratory for the cycling of the future, without scales and on narrow roads, and a stone Via Crucis, for the existence of which Ezequiel Mosquera fought against the established, always reactionary, powers, the UCI, the judges, fights In it, only the last Tour champion has won stages in its second edition. He faces the final time trial in front of the Portico de la Gloria, with the yellow jersey somewhat loose, not as tight as he would like, as if he were in the Tour de France, with the same seriousness and meticulousness, the same care for it smallest detail, and Willem, his spokesman, always by his side with a bottle of hydroalcoholic gel with which he rubs a few drops on his hands with a fan after each signed autograph or photographic pose.
For Vingegaard there are no small races on the way to the Tour. All are a step that must be performed flawlessly. It’s not the only one. That’s how life is for all of today’s cycling champions. For Tadej Pogacar who doesn’t know how not to run 100%, whether the race is a classic in Jaén, the Tour of Andalusia or the Tirreno-Adriatico. Also for Remco Evenepoel, the world champion and last Vuelta, who does not think about the tour in July but about the Giro in May. All three have already won this season, each in their own way. For them, the season is divided into weeks of concentration and weeks of competition. An alienated life. They are no longer February, March, April, May, the months in which the races were used to train with the bib, as they said, to lose the weight and fat accumulated between November and January, the champions of before , Jan Ullrich, Lance Armstrong, Greg LeMond, Pantani, Froome, so human in the distance.
On the road to maturity, Remco discovered the fear of sin, the value of calculation. Win the Emirates Tour without winning any of its stages, look for bonuses without exhibitions. None of the distant and sometimes insane attacks that earned him the admiration of fans. “But I wasn’t quite sure because I hadn’t concentrated on the altitude yet,” Evenepoel apologizes after the last stage, in which he finished second behind Adam Yates from England. “I’m proud that I knew how to defend myself.”
Pogacar, as always, without wanting to fear anything, is the carefree kid who runs spectacularly, attacks wide, instinct just to win and doesn’t cry when he loses. In Galicia, Vingegaard shows he’s no small winner, the result of the jumbo’s extreme science, a mix of physics, mathematics and group management. I’m also a champion, that is against the golden stones of the Obradoiro. A champion who’s discovered he too can have a cannibalistic appetite – like cannibal Eddy Merckx, an example of an all-out winner – and wins with more calculated, measured attacks than Pogacar, and he’s so content that every win is his whet appetite seems more. “I want to try to win as much as possible. I’m still looking forward to winning. I want to win a lot of races,” says the Dane in the Obradoiro, after confirming the clumsiness with the zips of the President of the Xunta, Alfonso Rueda, who left him with his back in the air after donning the last yellow jersey him. His next week clash with Pogacar in Paris-Nice has fans dying to see the top two from the last Tour de France go head-to-head. “Yes, he’s doing very well too, but I’m just worried about myself trying to do my best. And yes, I will go to Paris-Nice to try to win.”
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