Van der Poel points to the sky, to Poulidor, by winning the stage.MICHAEL STEELE / Reuters
In the hotel, on Sunday morning, you can hear Mariza, and Brittany is a Portugal with granite churches and stone boats, melancholic, gray sky, limitless ocean, and so the hotel owner tells it while preparing scrambled eggs , how you like the fog of fado.
It also hits the cyclists who in other hotels get up on Sunday morning, look out the window, silly rain, and decide they would be better off elsewhere, and remember how dozens of them ended up on Saturday, queuing at the hospital where they had MRIs and X-rays to see how many bones had been broken in the two tremendous falls on Saturday.
More information
Poulidor's grandson has won!
The Tour de France, ready for the second movement of the Pogacar-Roglic fight
On the radio, like an endless lament,
tzigane
music sounds,
the songs of the Roma peoples of the East, nomads in perpetual caravans like cyclists, always on the move, and sad songs speak of them, and also the prelude of Tristan and Isolde. And if this music suits the spirits of the runners' condemned so well, it also tells them, reminds them, that they are no longer the protagonists of the Tour de France, that the race would prefer that they sound every day, at all hours,
The cavalcade of the valkyries
and the overture of William Tell riding to liberate Switzerland while on Sunday the cyclists go up and down hills with the wind three-quarters of the face like tightrope walkers on roads perched on the cliffs of the north coast that fly over icy beaches and scallop crops, and even the
Monsieur
Leclerc's
first grocery store
, the Breton who built an emporium of hypermarkets that he has dressed in polka dots like the mountain jersey.
And that they sound even louder, of course, when Mathieu van der Poel, the
grandson
of world cycling, he overtakes everyone at the Mûr de Brittany, once, in the first step, and twice, in the final goal, and reaches the yellow jersey that on Sunday, yes, will honor his grandfather, Raymond Poulidor, who died A year and a half ago, he never dressed him, victim of two monsters, Jacques Anquetil and Eddy Merckx, five Tours each, behind whom he finished three times second and five times third. Mathieu, so young, gets emotional and cries out loud. True emotion, crying alive, that the cameras turn into a spectacle. One more point for the Tour. “I am proud, I am proud, the yellow one on my first Tour. What a beautiful photo my grandfather would have taken with him ”, Van der Poel, 26, later responds, and continues to wipe away his tears. "
Papy
He had asked me and I was late for him to see it, but I have arrived. I had to attack twice to get the necessary seconds. It was my last chance. The first day the stress and anxiety blocked me, but today I have freed myself. You can dream of a script all your life, but for that script to come true is incredible. "
Behind, Alaphilippe tries to defend his tunic, but cannot, and the Slovenian Siamese people temporize, mark each other, challenge each other, sprint on the two climbs to Mûr for pride and bonus seconds, and in both the young man, Pogacar, wins. The other favorites, in herd, 2s behind the Slovenians and 8s behind the Dutch son of a French woman, Corinne Poulidor, who fell in love with a Dutch cyclist, Adri van der Poel, on vacation in Martinique. The son lives in Belgium and wants to win Olympic gold on mountain biking. Only Geraint Thomas, condemned by the acceleration of his team for Carapaz, and Superman give up something else, 23s.
Tony Martin, the German cyclist who came filing down the gutter on Saturday to eat the little granddaughter who, with her back to the race, greeted her grandparents, calls her stupid, idiot, without realizing, perhaps, that she, her stupidity, his desire to appear on TV, or the funny ones who dress up as carrots, and the camera looks for them with relish, makes them stars, is part of the Tour as much as he, the cyclist who is applauded and who, stressed and accelerated by thousands of contradictory and urgent orders besieging him from the earpiece, almost as much as the aerial shots of castles, cathedrals and landscapes that dot the broadcasts or as the advertising caravan.
The Tour is a show that the next day stars the little granddaughter, the mother who saves, by the hair, her little boy and her mobile, throwing herself into a pit, from the fury of the cyclists killed at 60 per hour, to the kid sitting on his bike in the ditch being run over by several cyclists thrown off the asphalt like a whirlwind. “A massacre, a carnage!”, Shouts in the newspapers the director of the Tour, Christian Prudhomme, who chooses well the most striking, most spectacular words, to describe falls that the old men of the Tour, fatalists by obligation, take them for discounted every year. And also young people, like David Gaudu, a fallen Breton: "It's sad, but this is the law of cycling."
Other music plays in the team cars, where, in an almost baroque rite that never fails since the early days of cycling, the lament of the team owners is heard, what cruelty, something has to be done, cycling is moving towards his self-destruction, the thing about the granddaughter is an anecdote, not the reason. So claims Eusebio Unzue, whose Movistar lost a cyclist in the falls, Marc Soler, who broke both elbows, and almost another, Superman López, its leader, who lost 1m 49s, and again asks cycling to allow substitutions, such as football, to stop so much spectacle, to look for formulas to find a valve that releases the pressure that only grows. And cyclists are given faster bikes every day, light tires, aerodynamics, electronic gears,with developments that do nothing were considered impossible, 55/10 (12 meters per pedal stroke) even on flat stages, with those who set themselves to nothing at 60 per hour and at 80 they can still continue pedaling, and reach speeds that make the bikes into wild, uncontrollable horses. "It sounds like heresy," says Unzue. "But we could consider limiting bike developments, right?" Because, he acknowledges, the Tour is so important to everyone that no one can afford to stop speeding up and get into his game, on the show.He acknowledges, the Tour is so important to everyone that no one can afford to stop speeding up and get into their game, on the show.He acknowledges, the Tour is so important to everyone that no one can afford to stop speeding up and get into their game, on the show.
A spectacle that only true Poulidor and his obedient grandson do, the lives and legends with which the Tour has woven its fabric and its yellow jersey for 118 years.
You can follow EL PAÍS DEPORTES on
and
, or sign up here to receive
our weekly newsletter
.