There are victories that define and compel, and mark an entire career, impossible to escape from them.
And the time that passes then accelerates, and is a mirror that always answers all the questions, all the doubts, what I have done with my life.
Nine years later, Fernando Gaviria, an explosive career marked by two victories over the invincible Cavendish of 2015, returns to face the Englishman, now 38 years old, and with an obsession, making time stop, which slips through his fingers.
As then, Gaviria wins, but, and surprising the sadness, the seriousness of his gesture, he does not raise his arms.
He almost sinks his head between his shoulders, as do those who almost regret doing what they have done to win.
He has done a perfect sprint, a tightrope walker on steel: after taking advantage of Cavendish's wheel, a front row seat for which no one fought him, the launch of the atomic train of the wise and strong Astanas, Bol and Morkov, measured the space and time, opened to their left and began to overflow, the Gaviria rocket takes off, they shout on the radios, at the same time seeking the refuge of the fences.
He blocks the way for a young Italian, Davide Persico, who wants to learn and hesitates when the gap narrows.
It doesn't happen.
He only complains, raising one arm while Gaviria, the winner, sinks his head.
“The paths that had to be opened were opened,” said Gaviria, in a biblical voice, deep bass from a Bach cantata, who as soon as he finished goes to where the defeated person recovers, and when he, who refuses his hand, gives him He says that he closed it, he answers that maybe, but that he didn't do it on purpose.
“But in reality Persico may be right,” adds the winner to journalists.
“I haven't even seen the video, I've even spoken to him and apologized.”
Cavendish arrives third
When he won a sprint for the first time against Mark Cavendish, Fernando Gaviria was a beardless 20-year-old kid, a determined tracker from the Medellín velodrome who had arrived with a plan at the Tour of San Luis, in Argentina.
He wanted to make noise.
He, who had barely left Colombia and whom very few knew, wanted to achieve resounding victories against perhaps the best sprinter in history, the only Cavendish.
To do this, he prepared several strategies with his coach, Jhon Jaime González, and rehearsed them.
He beat the invincible Englishman twice.
Boom.
Six months later, Gaviria, after winning a track World Championship, signed for Quick Step, the Belgian team whose greatest pride is always having the best sprinter of the moment.
It's Cavendish's team.
It's August 2015. Cavendish is not enough.
He leaves at the end of the year and Gaviria grows a wolf beard and devours sprints.
It's FernanDios.
It is a proclamation of the future: Colombia is not only a land of beetles, of tiny climbers.
At 21 years old he reinvented the sprint on the avenue de Grammont, the cathedral of the sprint, the kilometer that all sprinters dreamed of when the Paris-Tours ended there;
at 22, four stages and maglia cyclamen in the Giro of 17;
At 23, two stages of the Tour of 18. At 24, the decline, accelerated at 25 by a persistent covid that grinds him down.
At 29, a couple of weeks ago, just beginning the year, Gaviria looked in the mirror again.
He leaves his beard in a petite bourgeois goatee in 1960s Paris. Unconvinced by the change, perhaps, or by the mirror's response, Gaviria continues removing hair from his face and ends the session with a mustache more like an Italian comedian. , so thick and wide, that of a gallant Alain Delon, with whom he goes out next to Lake Paipa to seek the defeat of Cavendish, his friend.
Friendship of sprinters who love and respect each other.
There is no one who recognizes the Cavendish as funny, smiling, docile, who, accompanied by his wife's first child, Peta Todd, who is now 18 years old, allows himself to be embraced throughout Colombia.
They take care of each other.
Cavendish, the hooligan boy from the Isle of Man, and Finnbar, the naive boy who has closely experienced his stepfather's moments of triumph and the hard years of depression.
Cavendish approaches the table where the kid is eating with bearded journalists and the first thing he does is check how much wine he has drunk, between admiration and affection, and Finnbar worries when Mark tells him that he had a terrible time with the height, the more than 2,500 meters of altitude of Paipa, who sometimes thought he was drowning, and that his oxygen saturation dropped to 94. Despite everything, at the height, on the Duitama straight, in front of the soda factory of Postobón, scene of the most furious sprint in memory, the one that gave Miguel Indurain second place in the 95 World Championship ahead of Marco Pantani, behind both of the escaped Olano, Mark Cavendish, 34 stage victories in the Tour, try the impossible.
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