Either we change or we charge ourselves to cycling. So clear. Neither the Tour nor the teams can allow themselves stages like Sunday’s, in which nothing happens for almost 200 kilometers. Although it is true that since the invention of this sport, or at least since the entry of structured teams, there have always been days when nothing happened and it was only worth keeping an eye on the final sprint, in this 2022 we have had many, too many, episodes of this nature. And when not, a well-formed breakaway that everyone knows they will capture in the last kilometers or that they will reach the finish line with minutes and the blessing of the peloton.
In the Tour you cannot give yourself another day like this. The race passed through Denmark and headed for France; some by plane, directly to Lille, and others by road, sleeping in different German cities. And they left Denmark almost at the same time that an individual sowed chaos in a Copenhagen that he bid farewell to the race with joy and fervor. Well, of Denmark, Except for the initial time trial, you can only count the feats of the spectators, hundreds of thousands, together with figures of millions, which filled towns, cities, streets and highways while the runners circulated in platoons. Sporting exploits? Not one, because something always happens. The Tour had prepared an 18-kilometer bridge, destined to cause madness and it was crossed with sorrow and without glory, because when the headwind does not punish something always happens that hinders the show. And of the graces of Sunday, which did not exist, it is better not even to speak.
But it is that we have reached this situation after experiencing the worst Giro in history, a lot of wasted stages, in which absolutely nothing happened, hundreds of kilometers lost. What is remembered of the Italian round? A magnificent stage, on the way to Turin, with Jai Hindley’s Bora destroying the race 40 kilometers from the finish and the attack precisely by the Australian rider to certify his victory in the general classification three kilometers from the top of the Marmolada. Nothing more, except the rockets, welcome, that Mathieu van der Poel was launching for three weeks.
cycling health
This situation cannot happen again on the Tour because we are charging cycling. People do not go to the road, much less sit in front of a television, to watch a compact platoon for four hours and only entertain themselves when the television production shows monuments and landscapes. And it’s already happening too much. From this season, at least in gold letters, only Tadej Pogacar’s long-distance attacks on Strade Bianche and Remco Evenepoel’s on Liège-Bastogne-Liège are remembered.
Can it be saved? Of course, and more in this tour full of madness. Hope is written with the letters on the cobblestones of Paris-Roubaix and the slopes of the Board of Beautiful Girls. But we will do poorly if the Tour is only accelerated in the last section of boulders or in the fence area of the Vosges summit. The drawing of this first week is magnificent, a call to fun without physically destroying the runners. But cyclists, and especially those who direct them, must do something on their part. Or is it that everyone will arrive in yellow to Paris? Don’t let the situation of the Giro repeat itself. For the health of cycling.
