Evenepoel, Jumbo, Ineos, Van Aert, Alaphilippe, Carapaz, Nairo, Bernal, Roglic ... In the old Tatra mountains, in the Jura mountains, in the Piccolo Poggio de San Remo, almost exotic or strange scenarios in a hot cyclist August and covid-19, on the weekend, 20 days before the start of the Tour, the old and the new cycling, the cycling of blocks and blocking, the cycling of anti-system individuals, have fought hard. Evenepoel in Poland (his fourth stage event of four runs) and his 51-kilometer getaway (and Carapaz fall) thrill the indomitable soul; Van Aert, an original Belgian from cyclocross, innocent of the sins of the road, wins in San Remo, and the happiness grows. They are mirages. The cycling you await is another.
The Tour entered the Sky-Ineos era in 2012, and the last eight Tours, except for 2014, the one of the fall and withdrawal of Froome, have consisted of the exhibition of a team 10 times more powerful than the others, those who cried saying that any of his gregarious, Landa, Poels, Thomas (with Wiggins, Froome and Bernal), Kwiatkowski, Porte, Froome (with Wiggins), Bernal (with Thomas and Froome), Snow, would be leader in another team. Under the motto that the recently deceased director Nicolas Portal engraved in his genes so well - "we win because we are made to defend" -, the super-team imposed catenaccio as the only law of the Tour. All dissent will be punished.
Froome, or Wiggins, or Thomas, acquired a minimal advantage in any circumstance (not necessarily in the time trial that they always won) and the rest of the Tour, the mountain, was a torpor of several first-level riders ascending to the train while the rivals were they were discouraged, and when they were reprimanded because they had not attacked, they lowered their heads and explained: “How am I going to attack if when I was alone, without companions, Froome still had three or four setting a hellish rhythm? We never have the opportunity to go head-to-head, and if we ever try, it kills us. This is how Nairo recounted his misery, for example.
Latin-British clash
This is not how Roglic will act, the Slovenian skier who won the last Tour, for whom the Dutch Jumbo, his team, has built an Ineos bis, a superblock that these days has shown its yellow glow aligned in parallel with the burgundy of the Ineos. If some impose a blockade, we respond with our own blockade, a doubly blocked Tour, and to see who wins, those of Roglic seem to proclaim, who has to organize the train in the mountain with such good and champion cyclists as Dumoulin, Kruijswijk, Gesink and Bennett, three who have been or could be leaders of any other team, and with the beast Tony Martin on the level, and in the Ain, between Lyon and Switzerland, they triumphantly reduced the stage of the Grand Colombier, a stage that will be run on the Tour, to a victorious <CF1001> sprint </CF> in the last 200m.
</CW> <CW-21> Its theoretical solidity, its quartzite hardness typical of an impact tool, will allow the Dutch team a first phase of dialectical struggle with the team of the English millionaire Radcliffe, in whose contradictions they will investigate and dig until they are made to bleed. And the contradictions in the only team that in history can line up three Tour winners (although as a team, France in 1958, 12 riders, had Anquetil, Bobet and Walkowiak: among them they neutralized, Gaul beat them), they have to exist and be important.
The fracture that is observed is also cultural, Latin-British, due to the team's commitment to Latin American leaders, Egan Rivera, Sosa and Carapaz. It doesn't take much to see a Thomas-Froome front loom, which will leave in 2021, against Egan, who has the faithful Amador and Sivakov, to counter them. And the free ones — Higuita, Nairo, Pogacar, Landa, Mas, Pinot — will be attached to a wheel and will pray to take advantage of the cracks that the dialectic of the blocks frees.
