They were all masked, but he was therefore to succeed in the heist of the 21st century.
Tadej Pogacar, the young Slovenian has, in 36.2 km, reversed the forecasts, the table, the respect for the elders.
The Planche des Belles Filles has become, within a legendary stage, the Planche du Jeune Homme.
And at 21, Pogacar has gone from young peril to yellow peril.
He won his first Tour de France for his first participation.
This is the lesson of this world according to: when you are gifted, you no longer wait, you no longer observe.
It is served directly from the adults.
Now, everything is going very quickly for those who do not want to wait their turn.
And this Sunday, he will spend time on the podium of the Champs-Élysées: yellow jersey, polka-dot jersey for the best climber and white for the best youngster.
“It's a childhood dream,” he says ecstatically.
My dream was just to be on the Tour de France and now I just won it.
It's incredible.
"
Roglic, the bear turned dolphin
When Lure left, who seriously believed in Pogacar's chances of catching 57 seconds from his compatriot?
Just him.
Him against the rest of the world.
He who had not been afraid of the yellow train of Jumbo-Visma.
But the story didn't just seem written, it just had to be printed: Primoz Roglic was too good a roller, too experienced.
He was going to calmly manage the assaults of the young colt, whose split times he would know.
However, over the kilometers, with pedal strokes resembling chisel blows, he eroded the statue feet of Commander Roglic even before it was inaugurated.
Ten seconds less, then twenty, then thirty.
The 57-second mattress deflated then pierced and ended up like a balloon that is released without qualms: tossed about in the air and falling violently on the ground.
In the end, Roglic, the bear turned dolphin, loses 1'56 "on the young wolf and is relegated to 59".
"Tadej is the guy for the next few years on the Tour"
Paradoxically, the last hectometers of the victim made him finally human.
Like a walking Titanic, it flowed through his head.
White with fatigue, helmet badly placed on the boiling head, Jumbo-Visma's Robocop was so far from the waxen face of the wooden tongue of the previous days.
"Tadej was better than me, coward Roglic.
I fought on every meter.
At one point, I hoped he would give up too.
Tadej is the guy for the next few years on the Tour.
"
Hagard, Roglic, 30, and his cockiness ended up cracking right at the end of his press conference.
“About my feelings, maybe I'll cry afterwards.
Or I have already done it.
I have a lot of emotions that I don't show.
I would have liked to be different, but I am.
"
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This 2020 edition, unless you are Slovenian or Dutch, breathed boredom.
Like an auteur film in Slovenian without subtitles.
She was just a long yawn.
But suddenly, she became a stammer of history.
The final scene was finally worth it to go through this masked, sanitized Tower, under a bubble impermeable to emotions.
We had to be patient and we didn't know it.
This Tour, whose reason for being in the midst of a pandemic was debated, therefore deserved to exist.
Because, by the grace of a scenario blaster, the 2020 Grande Boucle summoned the legend and sent us all back to the beautiful and cruel Tour 1989.
The one who hurt like a defeat in Seville when we loved Laurent Fignon.
Or as a success in the final in stoppage time when we preferred the American Greg Lemond.
31 years later, the same scenes have been replayed.
Other actors, same lines.
Tadej Pogacar, in the role of Lemond, alone against all, and taken aback by his own joy.
Primoz Roglic, in the shoes of the late Fignon.
Crushed with fatigue and distress on the asphalt, refusing to realize that he would be, for life, the man who lost the Tour at the last minute when he had won it.
