With Iván Romeo, 19, Movistar is looking for its Filippo Ganna of the future

Iván Romeo, in the 2021 European time trial.RFEC (Europa Press)

Fernando Gaviria.

Ruben Guerrero.

Ivan Romeo.

One old, one quarrelsome, one

.

The game of the Movistar signings for 2023, a year of transition, they say in the best Spanish cycling team.

None to accompany Enric Mas in his responsibilities, reinforced after his brilliant autumn in the Vuelta and in the Italian classics, and in Lombardy.

The Mallorcan will be the sole leader in the Tour and in the Vuelta.

The revolution?

In 2024. Carlos Rodríguez is expected, the pearl that arrives and who still has a year left on his contract with Ineos, in which he grows.

"The 24th will be the year, the 24th", promises Unzue.

On the 24th Iván Romeo will be 21 years old, from Valladolid in 2003, from the generation that makes Juan Ayuso feel old.

Romeo, 1.93m, 75 kilos, will be neither a Juan Ayuso nor a Carlos Rodríguez, more friends from the mountains than from the plains.

“I didn't have a bad time in the mountains, but in professionals it's another level, you still have to suffer a lot.

At the beginning, apart from trying to help the team by giving it everything I can, I am going to focus on working the time trials with Iván Velasco, Movistar's engineer, and I think I can stand out a lot”, says Romeo, who grew up as a youth in the Asturian team of Samuel Sánchez and with a year of experience as a professional in under 23 races, above all, in Axel Merckx's North American team in which he worked hard and well so that his English star Leo Hayter, already at Ineos, won the Giro Bio in June.

If Ayuso and Rodríguez look at Valverde or Contador, Romeo's idol, the cyclist he would like to be, is the Italian Filippo Ganna, king of the Giro time trials, record holder of the hour (56.792 kilometers) and of the four kilometers in track, which runs in less than four minutes.

The Indurain or Wiggins model without the obsession of losing weight to become an off-roader.

"Over time I will see if I look for the most complete profile," says Romeo.

"Now it would be enough to look a little like Ganna."

With the signing of Romeo, 19 years old, a young man who in a few months has seen the difference between going from being the best of his age in Spain to feeling like one more in a cycling world in which the kids arrive much younger every year professionals (and already Ayuso, at 20 years old, feels old), Unzue breaks one of the ideological lines of his work, 40 years old, at the head of the team.

Always reluctant to believe in all the prematures that flood the platoon, the Navarrese coach always talks about waiting for them to mature before launching himself for the first fruits.

Thus he let Ayuso and Carlos Rodríguez pass, for whom everyone sighs.

The Remco revolution ends all philosophies.

An old one is Fernando Gaviria, a high-level Colombian sprinter from La Ceja.

He is only 28 years old, but he has been fighting with the best for eight years, and, sometimes, winning them, and of him, that this year, with the UAE, he has only won twice, two stages in the Tour of Oman, in the world cyclist is spoken almost only in the past tense, especially as a result of the start of the pandemic, March 2020. Hospital in Dubai.

Slow recovery.

Endless.

He hasn't been the same since.

The consideration is unanimous.

It is maintained, more than anyone else, by all those who took away their hiccups watching, over and over again, a video on loop, how he defeated the Cavendish of his best times, in a sprint in Argentina almost eight years ago, and those who remember how he reinvented the sprint to win the Paris-Tours of 17, and his four stages with the cyclamen jersey of the Giro of 18, and how in the Tour of 19 he was

A track with advanced courses in Flanders.

All this in Patrick Lefévère's Quick Step in the company of his beloved pitcher Richeze.

In Matxin's UAE, in which Richeze accompanied him and was joined by the other Colombian sprinter of his generation, Juan Sebastián Molano, none of that.

Nothing to remember if not illness and disappointments.

The head of Movistar, Eusebio Unzue, with a reputation for resuscitating lost causes, awaits the sprinter from Antioquia, if not some victory in the Giro or Tour or a San Remo, the monument for which Gaviria seemed predestined, yes at least wins in races the ones that give more points for the classification than their little fame seems to predict.

"In this way we will solve one of the problems that led us to suffer to get points for permanence in the WorldTour", says Unzue.

“We need to win races like that.

Fernando will be accompanied by Max Kanter, our German sprinter, who is still learning, and Iván García Cortina, more mature every day”.

One of the bullies is Rubén Guerreiro, a Portuguese from Montijo who, although he is also 28 years old, like Gaviria, also has his entire career ahead of him.

Two years ago, in the most Portuguese Giro, that of João Almeida long days in pink, Guerreiro, of the EF team, achieved his best victories, a stage in Abruzzo and the final green jersey of King of the Mountain.

He found a meaning in his career there, a gap in the bunch of good guys.

A breakaway cyclist, climber, fighter, a nuisance.

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