The Giro d'Italia of the generational shock begins in Budapest

The Heroes' Square in Budapest, taken by the Giro during the presentation on Wednesday. Tibor Illyes (EFE)

Like energy, the statues of the heroes of the great square of Pest are neither created nor destroyed, they are transformed together with the seven columns of the seven tribes of Hungary, heroes one day, traitors the next, depending on whether it is the Habsburgs who The castle is occupied by the Soviets, the anti-Soviet, whoever touches it, depending on whether it is 1890, 1919, 1945, 1956 or 2022. Not like in cycling, not like in the Giro, a race almost as old as the plaza.

The heroes of the Giro are born and endure, remain and are venerated, among exclamations generation after generation: Coppi, Bartali, Magni, Gimondi, Merckx, Indurain, Pantani!

Behind them, following their trail, the cyclists who arrive seek their same immortality, those who this Friday (12.00, Eurosport) will start from the square of stone and monuments dyed pink and will launch down Andrássy Avenue in Budapest,

The 105th Giro begins, the 14th time in which the more than hundred- year-old

departs from Italy – and not the most exotic, since the Giro has already left Jerusalem and, in the years in which borders and borders were disdained even more the distances, he was about to leave Washington-, and, courtesy of the fashions that are worn, of the cyclists that arrive, there is no one who does not want to see his 21 stages not as the episodes of a single narration that little by little grows in tension, characters, mystery, and is resolved in the last sequence of the last chapter, but as a succession of 21 one-day classics, the same protagonists starting from scratch every day, and acting as if there had been no yesterday, as if there were no there would be tomorrow, and only the listing of the

of actors is enough to demonstrate the truth of the proposition, and they add another component: it will be that and something more, a daily generational and cultural clash.

The very old will fight, Valverde and Nibali, who want to star in their own last dance every day

They will face the not so young: the Olympic champion Carapaz, the king of unpredictability, how scary;

Bardet, who is fed up with so much introspection to which his obsession with winning the Tour led him, feels liberated and talks about how he despises the fear of failure;

Simon Yates, one day he wins, the next he melts, he flees from regularity, it is his desire, and the Etna of the fourth day in his hunting notebook;

Tom Dumoulin, who wants to get to know himself after having come to the conclusion, and a pink

already in his closet, that he didn't know who he was, that being a cyclist bored him, and, he says, has reset, part from zero

Landa, unrepentant collector of mythical peaks and epic actions, and Superman López, a life of extremes, the soul of the absolute climber, the self above all.

The children, the generation of the pandemic, and their prince at the helm, Mathieu van der Poel, extreme ambition, and the permanent waste of apparently inexhaustible energy also act: he was yellow on his first Tour, which his grandfather could not be, Poulidor;

he will be pink in the Giro, his first Giro.

João Almeida, clinical, cold Portuguese, and the intelligence of the lover who pursues waiting, and Giulio Ciccone, the awaited one, the climber from Abruzzo to whom the Giro dedicates the Majella Blockhaus on the ninth day.

And Biniam Girmay, a young African who makes other young people veterans, and who comes from Asmara, the little Rome of Eritrea, in whose streets the Italians who fled and died left their bicycles when the ridiculous African empire that Mussolini wanted to build collapsed.

He is 22 years old and acts like the predestined he is, because as a child his father told him the stories of an African boy who conquers Italy riding a bicycle, his life, and defeats

the inventors of the

, he wins on the cobblestones that he does not know the same Belgians who carpet Flanders with them.

at the Verona Arena, and that just on that day, May 29, he will be 29 years old.

And beautiful young people will cover you with flowers.

From San Marino in 65, this is the 14th foreign departure

As everyone knows Budapest is the capital of Italy, the ironic purists joke, that no, they are not Berlanga and do not believe in the Austro-Hungarian empire, but want to highlight the contradiction that such a pure expression of national character as It is a great tour, starting from distant places, distant from its borders.

vain task.

Not only the Giro finds good financing for its outings abroad this 2022: the Vuelta will start from Utrecht, in the Netherlands, and the Tour will start from Copenhagen, the capital of Denmark,

For the Giro, which timidly started for the first time from abroad in 1965, and did so from the Republic of San Marino, in the heart of its peninsula, Budapest is the 14th foreign start, and not the most exotic.

The capital of the Danube loses in that category to Jerusalem, place of departure in 2018, and tribute to the great Gino Bartali, the Florentine cyclist friend of the Vatican, right among the nations, who saved so many Jews clandestinely during the Second World War in Assisi.

And even Jerusalem would have lost in distance and complications with the departure planned for 2012 by Angelo Zomegnan, visionary and organizer of the Giro, who was about to achieve an exit from Washington DC, from Barack Obama's White House.

The crisis took Zomegnan and his Yankee dreams ahead of him,

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