Surely Héctor Abad would love to be on the Tour like every year, counting on his unique words, the hope, the faith and the resurrection of Egan Bernal, who touched death a year and a half ago and is now touching it in the mountains of the Basque country, to the best cyclists in the world sticking together. But the soul of the writer from Medellín, marked by violence since childhood, is far away. As the body recovers from the Russian bombardment that hit him while having dinner in Kramatorsk, Ukraine, his mind struggles to move beyond the moment and the pain deepens when he learns that Victoria Amelina , the fellow writer he spoke to, died as he feared. The moment the bombs interrupted life.
Around five in the afternoon, slowly fanned by countless Ikurriñas of the Basque people, the Tour celebrates, immersed in their contradictions and disputes, minimal, as small as the thumbtacks that bother the cyclists, but so important for its protagonists and those who do it They accompany them – will Cavendish be able to with Merckx at Bayonne? No. Belgian sprinter Jasper Philipsen won. Will jealous Van Aert and Vingegaard clash before the frustrated Belgian phenomenon gives up with the expected birth of his second child? Chi sa. Will Pogacar keep smiling happily as a kid? Sure – he crosses the border via Irún and enters France unaware of the war in Ukraine and the pain, as well as the social revolt of young people without a future living in Ukraine under disintegration, police violence, death and social Exclusion suffers the ghettos of the cities, the real real world in Paris, Marseille or Annemasse, so isolated from all worlds like Zumaia, which crosses the peloton and lets the melancholy cyclists caress it with the sea smell of its breeze, from the sea through its flysch cliffs, which vary in texture like a cake, crunchy and soft as geologists describe, and full of giant shell fossils.
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The tour is a protected species. It is 3,000 people who, at each stage, build their own reality, their borders, along 200 kilometers of privatized highways for 24 hours, protected from reality by 28,000 police officers and 25 kilometers of fences, a mobile border with a weight of 420 tons from which they transport 46 trailers XPO Logistics, a multinational transport company run by Cantabrian Luis Gómez, prides itself on its efficiency and the skill of its 65 drivers, who will act as drivers in transporting the Women’s Tour, and the workers nearly beat each other to get a steering wheel, up and down mountains and valleys, bogs and volcanoes, will cover 150,000 kilometers in the three weeks of the race. “And since the entire fleet runs on HVO, a biofuel derived from refined, discarded oils, we will reduce CO₂ emissions by 100 tons in 21 days. “That’s up to 90% of the emissions of regular fuel,” says Gómez, and his concern reproduces another contradiction of the Tour: how cycling’s greatest showcase, the most sustainable mode of transport, must stand out from the noise and the noise. Bad fumes from dozens of helicopters, hundreds of cars and trucks littering the mountains throughout July. “Well the helicopters are not our responsibility but they are intended to make the Tour more sustainable and with our electric trucks which we will be debuting in Paris on the last day we are close to that.”
In the happy world of the Tour, isolated from all evils, arriving by motorway in Bayonne, capital of ham, chocolate and Iparralde, the conductor Pogacar, virtual leader, finished 6 seconds behind his partner in the yellow jersey, Adam Yates, the Peace decrees, an unarmed truce, two days ahead of Adagio’s arrival on Wednesday in the Pyrenees of Soudet and Marie Blanque. After two days of intense hell, the peloton pedaled calmly along the coast and already at dusk delivered the first big sprint between the Nive and the mighty Adour. The ending, canonical and predictable – Mathieu Van der Poel, enormous, perfectly tosses his Belgium teammate Jasper Philipsen, 25, who beats Germany’s Phil Bauhaus and Australia’s Caleb Ewan with ease, and Van Aert, fifth, always close to tackle the last to remember – three major sprints of the Tour – two in 2022, including that on the Champs-Élysées – won by him – leaves an aftertaste of imperfection in those who seek to understand the narratives. If Cavendish, who finished sixth, had won, he would have surpassed the cannibal Eddy Merckx in the number of stage wins, 35 to 34, allowing us to speak of the utter isolation of the Tour, reflected in its records and history is completed . If little Ewan had won, maybe more would have been said, and maybe Héctor Abad would have told it, about the great work of his thrower, the Italian giant Jacopo Guarnieri, who in those days, with hurt pride, remembered his courage to show the LGTBI flag on the podium of the Giro del 22 in hostile Budapest and how his gesture, like the words of Guillaume Martin, cyclist, philosopher and writer, on the French insurrection was: “Violence is never good.” It’s a bit trite to say, but there’s no harm in repeating it. What’s really shocking is that it’s about police brutality” – these are signs that in reality, no matter how hard you try, all worlds are porous. The bubble doesn’t exist. Or as the Norman cyclist puts it: “Just because we are cyclists doesn’t mean we aren’t citizens.”
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