BarcelonaIt was March 22, 2007. Primoz Roglic was 17 years old and had spent the day greeting his people: parents, friends, neighbors. Everyone was there. Roglic was then one of the most promising snowboard jumpers in the world. Youth team champion on two occasions, he had already achieved victories in the World Cup. For him, flying was easy, as he had done all his life after growing up at the foot of the trampoline of the Gorisek brothers, one of the two largest in the world, in Planica, in the Slovenian Alps. But that day, in a warm-up jump, he lost his balance just as he took off. The fall was very hard: it rolled for more than 100 meters after hitting the snow. He broke several ribs and his nose, and suffered a severe concussion.
That fall changed the life of young Roglic. Although he continued to jump until 2012, that day changed his perception of that risky sport. “I used to jump without fear. I was not afraid of him, on the trampoline, I had no respect for him. Then he was too scared, ”he would recall a few years later, when on the advice of his doctor and friends, who saw him lost, he started cycling. “I didn’t have a good bike until I was 19 or 20”, explains the triple winner of the Vuelta a España. Initially, it was a way to do sports and get back in shape. But something woke up inside him. Surely never before had the champion of such an important race ridden a bicycle seriously until he came of age. But Roglic is different. “I had never seen a runner who could learn so quickly. We can’t forget that he started competing at the age of 21, it’s amazing,” team director Jumbo-Visma told reporters.
Relatives who cried in 2007 when they saw the accident, now follow him when they can on the roads of half of Europe. At 31, he is already a father. In fact, in 2019 he gave up the Tour so he could be with his wife when Lev, his son, was born. Now, everyone has accompanied him to the podium in Santiago de Compostela, where he has become the third cyclist capable of winning the Vuelta for the third year in a row, equaling the milestone of the Swiss Tony Rominger (champion in 1992, 1993 and 1994). and Roberto Heras (2003, 2004 and 2005). In the last stage, a new exhibition, beating the Danish Magnus Cort Nielsen, one of the other protagonists of the Vuelta, by winning three stages. Roglic, however, has won four.
On the final podium he is accompanied by Enric Mas in his second podium in the Vuelta -a milestone, as so far only two Mallorcans had climbed the podium, Mas himself in 2018 and before Bernat Capó, in 1948-. The third drawer has finally been for Australian Jack Haig. David de La Cruz from Sabadell, the only Catalan in the Vuelta, finished third in the general classification for the third time.
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Roglic is not a cyclist like the others, as he has followed a different path. Maybe that’s why it’s hard to decipher it and attack when others wouldn’t. “She is OK. When you are a leader you are often prudent, as you have a lot to lose; he doesn’t, he attacks “, explained the Colombian Egan Bernal these days. After risking jumping on the world’s largest snowmobiles, Roglic may not find anything out of this world to ride alone on the tops of half a planet. Retired from the jumps in 2012, he started competing in cycling that same year, when he was 21, with Radenska, a Slovenian amateur team where he was discovered by Andrej Hauptman – the first great Slovenian cyclist, with his gold medal in the World Cup of 2001-, in the road test, when he won the gold Oscar Freire. Hauptman understood that boy had a future and took him to some labs for testing. The result was conclusive: his heart was beating so hard and his lungs had as much capacity as the great champions in cycling history. And that sport he had come to recover from a trampoline fall became his life. In 2013 and 2014, more and more cycling experts talked about that Slovenian who appeared out of nowhere who won mountain stages on smaller laps, like the one in Azerbaijan, but also rode well in the time trial. And Jumbo-Visma decided to bet on it in 2016.
Such a success. His first year with the Dutch team already won a stage of the Giro. In 2017 he would triumph in a mountain stage at the Tour, in Serre Chevalier. Although in 2019 he was left without a victory in the Giro (he was third) and in 2020, when it looked like he would win the Tour, he was overtaken by a hurricane, his compatriot and friend Tadej Pogacar, Roglic has transported the lessons to cycling who learned to ski jump. If you suffer a fall you have to get up. And he has done so in a Vuelta that has become his comfort zone. Neither Movistar nor Egan Bernal have been able to overshadow a runner who has ridden well in the mountain stages and time trials. “It has evolved in recent years. First he was a quiet boy, going his own way. Now he is a good leader, he has learned to make pineapples, he shares his good humor “, explains his teammate Sepp Kuss. In fact, Roglic has learned later than the others that cycling, unlike ski jumping, is a team sport, even if it doesn’t seem like it. And well surrounded by the Jumbo-Visma, he has taken another victory in the Vuelta. That young man who wanted to fly and touch the sky, now climbs mountains on wheels.
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