Pogacar, the total idol, wins the Strade Bianche with an attack 50 kilometers from Siena

Pogacar, on the attack on the white roads.LaPresse/Fabio FerrariFerrariFabio (AP)

Pogacar starts and the fans all blow at his rear wheel, and wish him a happy crossing of the clay hills that surround Siena, and they are rippled like the sea, its waves.

50 kilometers left.

They have just crowned the mount of Santa María along ancient paths, and its views of curtains of upright cypresses with vertical roots, and the headwind.

Wide false-flat roads and side wind await you, three more stretches of gritty trails, endless slopes, impossible descents.

He awaits a glory of which he does not think.

"I left early," he says, already victorious, after receiving the hug of what could be his father and is still his tough rival, Alejandro Valverde, second, at 37s, and wise as always, like when he was 23 years old, like when he is, now, almost 42, and he laughs almost as happily as the Slovenian boy who gives vintage cycling a sense of surgical cleanliness, the epic of an exorbitant and calculated attack at the same time.

“It was the moment when the first selection is usually made, on the Santa María climb.

I went ahead, I got ahead a little, and nobody followed me… So when I saw myself alone I gave it my all, but until five kilometers to go I didn't think I won, and I was still looking back all the time”.

Nobody had won the Strade Bianche, its Tuscan landscapes that speak of the harshness of permanent medieval battles and the Renaissance sweetness of its fountains and its Chianti and Montalcino vineyards, with an attack of more than 20 kilometers, and the 20 of Van der Poel already seemed like something from another world, science fiction.

Or Cancellara's attacks on the same paths that left everyone with their mouths open.

The foam of a morning beer next to the strength of Pogacar champagne, winner of stage trials, dominator of the Alps and Pyrenees and time trials, king of the classics.

“When Pogacar jumped I was tenth or so”, says Valverde, who already had two third places in the race that opens the great classic season.

“He is gone and it has been impossible for me to follow him.

And we already knew that it would be impossible to reach it.

We regulated and arrived alive”.

It's a fantastic, crazy attack, down a white gravel path skidded by 21st-century bicycle wheels, carbon frames woven on 3D printers, ceramic bearings, a graphene composite instead of grease to lubricate the chain, which doesn't even whistle despite the white white powder of the white roads that covers it.

It is Pogacar who attacks but the old men think they see the cannibal in person, his style, his long shot, his love of solitude, his pedaling stroke, his 23 years, so young, Eddy Merckx revived, and only the mischievous blond locks that they escape from his head through the cracks in his helmet and make him look like someone else, the boy with the face of Pikachu, they say, who has fun where others, the rivals who strive,

full throttle, world champion Alaphilippe for Tour of Flanders winner Asgren;

Oliveira and Serrano for Valverde;

Cataldo for Simmons;

greats working for greats, all annihilated, suffer and remember the astonished fans who reach the goal of Siena through the Contrada de la Oca, from Fontebranda to the Torre del Mangia in the Plaza del Campo, up the cobbled and steep street, at 16%, of Santa Catalina de Siena, the holy mystic who found stupor, ecstasy, in the pain that was inflicted, and in her invisible stigmata.

And they want to say that cycling is pain, and the Strade Bianche, the sixth monument of cycling, even more so.

And the stigmata of all of them, of Valverde, of Alaphilippe, of Pogacar too, blood on his left knee and elbow, are not invisible or mute, they scream and hurt.

Carlos Rodríguez, just turned 21, from Almuñécar, follows Pogacar.

He is not afraid.

He does not think that he can go wrong.

The myth is made to be embraced, not to be feared.

To throw himself towards him, and enjoy him in the full pain and suffering of total solitude, and the headwind.

Once, as a youth, not so long ago, Rodríguez, already an important cyclist for the gigantic Ineos, ran the Paris-Roubaix, and he says that he saw all the rivals, and also colleagues, who made their way in the toughest pavé areas in single file along the gutters, clean of cobblestones, smoother.

“But me”, says Rodríguez, a 10-year-old engineering student, who, according to Paco Cerezo, the Spanish youth coach who sometimes put him up at his house in Tomelloso, and there, on the eve of the races, washed his dishes ,

he made his bed and took out the books to study, “I preferred to go to the top, where he bounced the most with the pavés.

Since I was there, I wanted to know what pavés was…” Finishing 20th, at 2m 7s, Carlos Rodríguez, his gaze always hidden behind dark glasses, his mouth always serious, is already the present, with Ayuso, with Arrieta, of cycling Spanish, grandson of Valverde.

The fans see him, and he sighs with pleasure.

In pain, Pogacar enjoys in ecstasy, winner of two Tours, of a Liège, of a Lombardy, of everything he proposes, and now he thinks, on Saint Joseph's Day, in the San Remo, the corridor of the century, the total idol, who wins.

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