Julian Alaphilippe
rides alone on the plaster ridge and everyone who sees him wants to be him, to be where he is, to feel like him, his emotion.
And he does not pedal, he rides, rather, like a rider on the
express pony
, and the world at his feet, below, spreads, and eats the wind and the helicopter approaches, his camera almost in a trance, and tells his attack, his freedom, his beautiful passion, alone against everyone, with a travelin, which is not a movement but a declaration of principles, like those of John Ford in Monument Valley.
The beauty of the moment makes us believe, in the midst of depression, that life sometimes feels compassionate and gives a break, and the joy of Alaphilippe, 28, the Valverde of now, and carries out the task that the Murcian, eighth In spite of everything, it becomes impossible for him, when he climbs to the top of the most important podium of his life, just 20 minutes later.
And next to all this, the greeting-nudge-covid, which he receives from the president of the IOC, Thomas Bach, the most important in the line of protocol, seems less.
"I can't feel better," later reflects the Frenchman who, 23 years after Brochard in San Sebastián, brings the rainbow to his country.
“This has always been the only race of my dreams.
It is the peak of my career.
I have wanted it so much that now I have a very special feeling ”.
And his career is not a minor thing, of course.
He has a monument (San Remo), an Arrow, a San Sebastián, Tour and Vuelta stages, and a yellow jersey for two weeks that made him the favorite child of the French in July 19. He was close to victory in the World Cup. 17, that of Bergen, with an attack that was not seen because the cameras failed;
he was demoralized against Valverde in the 18;
froze in the Yorkshire rain a year ago.
The French are closely pursued, 10s, 15s, never again, those who discovered the Tour does nothing and ate it in bites, the child prodigy Marc Hirschi, who attacks as much as he can and hard and with his narrow handlebar he looks like a
wriggling
rider
between cars in Madrid;
the phenomenal Wout van Aert, whom everyone fears, and also veteran specialists of hard World Cups, of classics of great fatigue, Kwiatkowski, the Pole who cried on the Tour when Carapaz gave him a stage, and Fuglsang;
And Roglic is also after him, who does not forget his grief, although in Imola, where it only starts to rain when the props that have turned a Formula 1 circuit into a great cycling scene disappear, his friend and dethroning Pogacar, generous as anyone , works for him and prepares the ground for him with a mad attack in the previous Tour, when there were 40 kilometers to go and the World Championship was already in its sixth hour, the one that separates the good from the best.
And Pogacar attacks happy and determined, and gets up to half a minute ahead, and for 20 kilometers you can even dream that 41 years after LeMond you win the World Championship the same year you won the Tour, which before the very great, Roche , Hinault, Merckx or Louison Bobet.
But on the ninth climb to Mazzolano Dumoulin moves, Pogacar is over.
The fireworks begin.
And then Alaphilippe jumps like a cap of champagne, like he jumps when he feels big, like he jumped in Nice to win the second stage of the last Tour, which helped him to meet goals and dedicate the rest of the
great boucle
to thinking about his World Cup , finally.
They do not wear a yellow ribbon, but helmets and glasses that cover their desire and despair, they are not the Seventh Cavalry, nor do they sound rescue horns, even if they seem so, untied and disunited.
Each one is his navel.
They don't reach their goal because Van Aert is going, and the others know that even if they caught up with the Frenchman who flies over the valleys and vineyards, the victory would be for the Belgian, who finishes second, so fast, and how unhappy he already feels at 26 years, and only two in the elite of the road, who even considers it a curse to leave his first World Cup with two silver, the time trial and the line, he who only thinks about winning.
"And it is still too early to be proud" <NO1> of having achieved two silver "<NO>, he says with an angry air that has not left him yet an hour after finishing the race." I came with other expectations " .
They do not reach it because Alaphilippe only looks ahead and is simply doing what he said he was going to do, attacking on the last climb to Gallisterna, the hardest steep slope, a Redoute in the heart of Italy, which crowns 11 kilometers from the finish line, and after eight slides and narrow roads, he enters the Imola circuit and for three more, after the very encouraging nightclub
La vie en rose, he
goes through all its curves, the high variant, the square curve of Aguas Minerales to the left, Piratella and Tosa, so closed, to the right, and in the last kilometer the Tamburello straight and the curve in that, Senna's that, before coming out to the right on the straight, and there can be no further entry triumphal.
Alaphilippe's attack was prepared by Guillaume Martin by accelerating at the foot of the Gallisterna, in the horseshoe curve, and disorganized the Belgians, the team that has carried the weight of the race the longest, and that, as Van Aert affirms, has been on the defensive all the time.
"That is why I did not collaborate a few kilometers before, on the previous slope, when Landa, Nibali and Urán attacked and I went with them," he says.
"There were no French, I knew this would be played on the last raise."
It was the great movement of Nibali and that of Spain, that the rest of the World Cup was run intelligently by wheel, witness of the generational struggle for the hierarchy of world cycling, without ever weighing in the development of the test.