The tour climbs the slope of the White Cross through forests of straight oaks, along the banks of the popular Cher, and passes near the town of Nasigny, one of the half-dozen places claiming the title of Geographical Center of the Hexagon. Daniel Oss, son of Pergine Valsugana’s pizzaiolo, sprints to meet Andrey Amador, son of a Russian engineer and Costa Rican laborer. His flight is a mirage in many ways. The bell rang at the end of the break. The macarilla students, rebellious but really good, have returned to the tedium and routine, and the fans regret it. Another flat stage. Another day of punishment for Mathieu van der Poel and Wout van Aert, the beloved couple.
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Poulidor’s grandson, doomed to disappear because of a cold, even refrains from joining the train tracks of his Alpecin to make way for his partner in the green Jasper Philipsen on the Moulins straight, curves and potholes on the banks of the Allier, untouchable, who, despite an absence everyone thought was a killer, knows perfectly how to squirm dangerously, find his place and, beating Groenewegen at 70 an hour, prevail in a triumphant fourth sprint. And Van Aert, the taciturn Belgian, sentenced to silence, closing ranks in Jonas Vingegaard’s army and enduring the crush of everyone in an impossible sprint that finishes ninth. His meaningless youthful outing the day before descending to Pello Bilbao, lit by the beautiful Cézallier bog that looks like the land where the cows of Ávila roam, granite steppes 1,000 meters above the sea so far away where gravity weighs so little as in a sea moon, it was nothing more than a heat-lit day full of bulls, a vacation with no next day.
The Tour is an animal with a monstrous digestive system that assimilates everything, an industrial still that distills impurities, and he has integrated the two unruly children as he has integrated the early retired Peter Sagan, the ideological and irreverent father of both phenomena At the exit of the stage, an anonymous and round figure has walked between the buses on the Place de Jaude, the center of Clermont Ferrand, the very point from which Blaise Pascal’s brother, with a Torricelli barometer in hand, started the Puy de Dôme you prove, as the mathematician had guessed, that the higher he climbed, the less the air weighed on his head. Physiologists later realized that breathing at altitude is more difficult because of this, and that the body produces more red blood cells in order not to lose the oxygen needed to move muscles and wake up the brain. So much knowledge and the science that uses it is appreciated by cyclists who, in these years, cannot go more than a month without climbing Mount Teide or Sierra Nevada to fill their blood with hemoglobin, and more in the heart of deep France, so they also passed Vichy, who worships and mistreats them.
Among the buses of the teams that have invaded his city, anonymous, unknown to the cyclists and their clans, all so cyclocentric, a whole life revolves around two wheels, the Olympic champion Renaud Lavillenie, son of lightness, speed and strength, goes with him his rod in a naked body, the most famous citizen of Clermont-Ferrand. He jumped 6.16 m and broke Bubka’s unbeatable record, someone informs the cyclists, who indifferently answer: “Who is Bubka?” they ask.
The tour weighs more on the flat and Tadej Pogacar is bored too. He’s adapted to the heat so well, he’s coping so well in the heat this year that he even seems sorry for the rain refreshing the nervous peloton in Gipcy County, thick storm clouds churned and accelerated by the wind That hit her from the side, as if he preferred his UAE’s private rain, which cooled him with calculated frequency in the days of unbearable heat.
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Pogacar, the man of the cold stages, suddenly loves the heat, perhaps thanks to acclimatization accelerated by accident, which never leaves unanswered questions. He lives in Monaco to save on taxes, where he spent several weeks recovering from a broken wrist he sustained on April 23 in his expensive 50 square meter apartment. Anquetil, who owned a castle, built cool brick and stone vaults in the basement; Pogacar did it in the tiny and overheated kitchen of his apartment for a few weeks, 3-hour sessions during which he sweated so profusely that he lost 4-5 kilos. Having already acclimatized, on days of great heat two domestiques are regularly in charge of going to the car to get barrels of cold water with which to irrigate his legs, head and body, and at the finish before before he starts rolling in Degreaser, where he organizes downright hilarious TikTok appearances for the mobile cameras, and on the podium to collect his white jersey, he dips for a few seconds in an ice tub installed in a personnel carrier. And it lowers his core temperature – that of the inside of his body – for him and most of the troupe when he feeds. Isotonic, carbohydrate and salty drinks are individualized because, thanks to the sweat patches, each runner’s sodium loss is known. They are consumed in the form of slushies, which are prepared at night with a slushies machine, and frozen gels look like hard candies. Hard candies take them frozen from the freezer and store them in electric refrigerators in cars. “When you eat slushies and popsicles, the cold gets into the digestive system via the esophagus,” explains Íñigo San Millán, the Slovenian’s coach. “And with that comes a drop in body temperature, an increase in which, like fever, is so bad for performance.”
After the lost tour, the UAE analyzed hundreds of details that could have separated them from the jumbo. Vingegaard always claimed that he performed better in the heat. Pogacar is already his equal. One difference factor less in times of climate change.
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