Kuss celebrates his victory with fans before crossing the finish line.JOSE JORDAN (AFP)
Desolate wasteland, ungrateful countries, dusty air from an abstracted film by Wim Wenders. The disbanded platoon advances towards Pico del Vulture. Small groups of survivors. Everything is wrong. It costs misleading. Real wind, head-on. Supersonic speed. Without break. An average of more than 40 per hour in a day in the mountains and on steep terrain. Abandoned are the cyclists who have sweated, even the weakest, the newcomers who will never forget the experience. The train is uninhabited, as are the towns it passes through. Sarrión, Albentosa, Manzanera, Torrijas, Arcos de las Salinas. The lonely wealth of the hidden black truffle. Territory for an uprising that the jumbo, its cheerful colors, its people everywhere turn into a festival like Eurovision, at least. Songs and triumphs. Sepp Kuss wins.
Exuberance.
And Lenny Martínez, in red.
The Frenchman, grandson of Mariano Martínez, the Frenchman from Burgos, son of Olympic champion Miguel Martínez, fell right at the beginning of the stage. Then, like someone who knows this will be his day, whatever happens, he follows orders and is always ahead, waiting for escapes, for cuts, and if a fan cuts the train forever, he’s there. At your place. He is 20 years and 51 days old. He is 252 days younger, 20 centimeters shorter and 30 kilos lighter than Miguel Indurain, who since April 1985 was the youngest leader in the history of the Spanish round. Ayuso is also twenty years old, almost 21, and comes across as a veteran because of his behavior in difficult moments: “It’s mental work, not physical; You have to know how to suffer”, for his control in attack, and 20, since February, the new Belgian who arrives and resists, Cian Uijtdebroeks.
It’s the Tour of Spain. It’s only the sixth stage. Sepp Kuss, Stakhanovist, sociable, smiling crown next to the telescopes of the Javalambre Astrophysical Observatory, and the August supermoon so recently, despite the pain and the injured eyebrow, the strategy of his jumbo. Four kilometers from the summit, 1,946 meters, Roglic and Vingegaard attack as a pair. Mas and Evenepoel suffer, champions become crisis managers. Ayuso shines. The differences are only measured in seconds in classification, in the morale of victory, in the spirit of defeat, in fatalism, in optimism, they weigh a little more. Ayuso loses seven seconds with the lucky pair consisting of the Slovenian and the Dane, the last winner of the Giro and the winner of the last two Tours, hand in hand; 24s, Mas, who hangs on with them until the road climbs in the last 800m and shouts: “They broke me but I’m happy”, gives them 24s and allows his great companion Oier Lazkano to hilariously reflect on Rajoy’s philosophy . the former president’s reflections on the possibility of the impossible, the impossibility of the possible, nothingness.
A colder analysis, without confusion, clarified, cold, would lead Evenepoel, the egress winner, whose face is as red or even redder than the jersey that Lenny Martínez is failing, to believe that the day didn’t go bad at all, fundamentally is. He went through a crisis, “the legs were heavy,” he says, “the cotton wool that refused to take off” when he challenged his will and muscles, “it was my worst day”, that’s how he and his team got them got rid , very limited, the weight of the red and he lost only 32 seconds, which allows him to be ninth overall, still ahead of all his rivals thanks to what he collected in the team time trial and the bonuses: bring 3 seconds him out of the Mas race, 5s for Vingegaard, 11s for Roglic and 19s for Ayuso. “And the best thing,” he adds, “is that I recovered and was able to accelerate in the last two kilometers and still had something in my legs.” Nothing that can’t be resolved in Tuesday’s Valladolid time trial after over the weekend the steep slopes of Xorret del Catí and Caravaca de la Cruz and the danger of the isolated low pressure in the atmosphere and its flooding.
Summer is laziness, not killing mosquitoes, said Samuel Barber when accused of his summer-evocative quintet being so slow. Those of the jumbo spinning a roll before takeoff in the bus parked in the Vall d’Uixó with the air conditioning fully on could limit the width and state that yes, relaxed reverie, tell me about the problem Ireland, but no, every day in July or August, that on a day of the Tour or the Vuelta you have to come out of the shadows and kill, and not mosquitoes, that mosquitoes are actually an Evenepoel thing, the bonuses and things like that, but giant flies and cannon shots . A quintet, not of woodwinds, but of brass. Gargoyles and trombones as the wind slices through the peloton and four of them are ahead in a gigantic group, 40, uncontrollable for the peloton: Dylan van Baarle, the Roubaix man, who stretches out the solos but moderately – “ that was handy for us.” “Isolating Evenepoel behind him and maintaining a sufficient lead to be able to win the stage, but not too big because we had Lenny and Landa and Marc Soler with us who could be dangerous for the final podium “, explains Kuss–, Tratnik, Attila Valter, as barbaric in his Hungarian efforts as the name of Buda’s brother, given to him by his parents, and Kuss, everyone’s friend, the mountaineer from Durango (Colorado), married with a Catalan, always smiling, always available in Spanish and Catalan, who wins the stage towards a feat never before achieved by a cyclist: to be part of the winning team of the three Majors in the same year. He was at the Giro with Roglic. He was on the Tour with Vingegaard and finished both races well, and on the Tour in Andorra, Valverde had a restless year, and he is with both of them in his Vuelta, the race where he started winning Acebo Asturian, four years ago. “I don’t know if I’m the talisman of the team,” says the man who, if not, might certainly be given strength by luck.
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