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A black cyclist makes history in the Giro

For yearsBlack Africa dominates the great long-distance races of world athletics. There are huge footballers and one of the best black drivers of all time. But cycling, and never for racist reasons, by no means, he had just opened his doors to black cyclists. Africans won, of course, but white South African runners.

No black European or American cyclists are counted, until this Tuesday Biniam Girmay in the Giro, who would have raised his arms as the winner in one of the big three. Cycling, this Tuesday in Italy, lived a historic day.

The accident

And it could have been one day of complete happinessto laugh, to applaud and for any lover of this sport to feel happy about what had happened in the tenth stage of the Giro, always with Juanpe López as leader, if Girmay does not get to have an accident, of those who are called domestic , on the podium when celebrating his victory, exaggerated after getting out of the wheel no more and no less than Mathieu van der Poel, in the final sprint.

Runners open a bottle of prosseco, Italy’s quintessential sparkling wine. Girmay he had the misfortune that the plug hit his left eye, he got quite hurt and had to be taken to a hospital. He could not even attend the obligatory press conference as the winner of the stage.

Triumph in Belgium

Girmayjust 22 years old, began to become famous this year when he became the first black cyclist to win a classic, the Gant Wevelgemwhich is not up to par with a Paris-Roubaix or a Tour de Flanders, although it enjoys great prestige and fame, especially in Belgium.

He is an Eritrean, a country dominated for many years by Italy, who always loved and excelled in cycling, although in this edition of the Giro they have not yet won a stage and even the goal seems complicated with the empire of quality foreign runners who avoid any local display. And, among them, this so-called Eritrean phenomenon Girmay.

Already in February he won a stage of the Mallorca Challenge and at a young age he stood out so much that the International Cycling Union (UCI) incorporated him into his school of promises that he has in Switzerland to give him a chance to country would have been more complicated. She is now the big star of theIntermarché, a top-notch Belgian team, although it does not have the budget of the big ones, Ineos, Jumbo or Emirates, to name three examples. The Intermarché is a block that hunts stages and for that it has Girmaya little more than a sprinter, a more runner in the style for example of Peter Saganwhen Sagan was Sagan and dominated and won wherever he wanted.

Sagan style

Unlike pure and hard sprinters, those who go by the nickname cyclist ‘big ass’, because they are unable to face the slightest Pujada, Girmay it surpasses them and for that reason its name already begins to sound when there is a classic one or a stage, like the one of this Tuesday in the Giro, loaded of walls and repetitions. The Cavendish, Ewan (last of the stage) or startsthe best of the three in this aspect, stay and suffer, while he arranges his gregarious to control the stage and avoid the offensives, of the ‘beast’, of Van der Poelthe same one who raises his thumb at the finish line after the Eritrean cyclist had neutralized his last start, in a sprint of two, and overtook him to enter the history of cycling, although then what seemed like a tale with happy ending ended up in a hospital.

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