The Giro is not Shakespeare or not, nor intense vital doubts, general or stages, the Giro is a garden of a single path for Alejandro Valverde, the first explosion and there was still so much stage left, from a fabulous day of cycling and explosive the climbs to Superga, above Turin, a hill, a garden and a basilica that burns the first time and scorches the second, and also Juanpe, who, beautiful in pink, alone, faces a new challenge, one that is greater than his powers, bursts, and can take no more, 10 days of pink, a fable that ends and a discovery of one’s own power that begins, and when Juanpe pedals like that, chest open, head held high, always on the precipice, the sun shines and on the climbs to La Maddelena, narrow shady path that deceives, the trees hide the sun, which hurts like an evil eye, but the heat stagnates and the humidity that comes from the egg a loading and calm butt rises, suffocates. And the climbs that didn’t score, that of the Parque de la Remembranza where the bora bursts the Giro in full, that of the Parque del Nobile where Simon Yates slyly and cowering sets out to win a stage all Worth 14 of the Giro and Richard Carapaz dresses in pink. Landa suffers, but does not break. He gives the Ecuadorian 32 seconds. He remains fourth overall at 59. The Giro still burned the hardest, they say, dolomites and other monsters, even harder than the 3h and 43m around Turin, at almost 40 an hour the best.
At his feet they are chasing the Ecuadorian who won the Giro del 19, allied with the cold, what is left of Giro, a gang of cyclists like him, seemingly dying beings but tough, who in slow motion turn the 20s- Dragging down slopes, and you, like Carapaz, eagerly snatch the drums from the hands of the helpers in the gutters, who arrive with an ice pack, and the ice is placed on the back of the neck, held by the neck of the jersey, and the drum irrigates the body, the releases steam from the sauna. You are a boil. They looked at each other on the way out. White Anglo-Saxons, who didn’t know what to do with the sun, which is a dagger, and who envy from the south, the Andes, Lebrijanos, Sicilians, Lucanians, so dark, so loose, a whole existence forced to love the sun, But 80 Kilometers from the finish line and the slides of the climbs had not yet begun, the dagger is them, those of Bora, Anglo-Saxons who accelerate at the front and, as if a solvent without glue remained, would have reversed The invisible gang that make a platoon a group of cyclists, everyone scatters, and everyone fights with what they can.
“A very tough day,” says Nibali, the Sicilian, who has seen days of all stripes and is not catching his breath after being with the best to the end, and is proud of it even if he could not go alone as requested his soul. “We didn’t stop for a second. It was even difficult, impossible to feed, to hydrate.”
Juanpe holds out with the chosen dozen, the strongest, Landa, Pello, Almeida, Nibali, Carapaz, Hindley, Kelderman, who keeps accelerating and muttering curses from everyone, Buchmann, Pozzovivo, the grand old man unable to elbow stretch , broken into a thousand pieces in one of his thousand falls, but also unable to bend the knee, to surrender when the time comes, when the “pazzesque” rhythm is crazy says the god of Basilicata of the German Team and his all-destroy tactic, Hindley, his little Aussie, in second overall, 7 seconds behind Carapaz.
Juanpe is there, at the top, “in the fight” as he proudly and happily says of it, and endures defending himself without thinking about not reaching the limit before giving up until the dagger of Carapaz, 29 kilometers away, defending himself without a teammate in the ambush of the attack and doing so by crowning the second Superga, and that’s where Landa’s pain begins, moderate, and Juanpe’s dream ends, but not his desire to take part in a big day in which everyone participating feels like a hero and leaves a bit of themselves to the landscape, the road, the curves and the slopes so that later those who pass by by car or on foot say something like if all the places they visit have A soul made up of the beautiful deeds, the courage, the pain of those who have passed here, the soul of Superga is not only the memory of the plane that crashed in 1949 with the Gran Torino football players standing in front of a Ford by Clint Eastwood was a football team that not even the memory of Bahamontes won a stage of Giro del 58, it’s also Juanpe alone, and his pink jersey open to the navel, gasping for oxygen and like the sun in the Pedals, and it is also Valverde, who was deprived of the right by an unexpected attack, to hell rhythm, choose which Giro he wants to do, and despite this at 42, like Juanpe a few minutes ahead, he climbs alone without giving up , without looking back, to his hump, to which those cling who cling like him only trying to survive. The 12th of the stage comes 8:4 from Yates, the most skilled, freest, in the final kilometers when a couple, Nibali, Hindley himself, caught up with Carapaz in the breakaway. Landa wasn’t there, but he wasn’t that far away either, and he wasn’t alone because Pello Bilbao sacrificed well and pushed his limits to help him.
Follow EL PAÍS Deportes on Facebook and Twitteror sign up here to receive our weekly newsletter.