Any given Sunday can end in tragedy. They, like so many other cyclists, had stayed with the group, with the club, as Alejandro Valverde stayed in July with his gang of friends. He was luckier. He can tell, although when he is asked in the Vuelta about the accident he prefers not to answer, something to forget, something that he should never have happened. Like the accident in Barcelona because they will no longer see their families. They went to enjoy the bike one Sunday morning, to return at lunchtime and be the butt of jokes at home. “Do you like him that much? cycling that you fall asleep watching the peloton of the Vuelta?
What damage do cyclists do on the road? Because they have not been the first and unfortunately they will not be the last as long as a few believe that they bother them, that by overtaking them they lose five seconds into their ‘busy’ lives. Professional runners always count the scares that they get over and over again when they go to the ‘office’ as they call the road they train on. And they risk their lives because there is always a driver who crosses the wires. And what is worse. If on top of that they run over them then they don’t even stop to help them, as happened to Valverde a month and a half ago. He could tell.
From laughter to tragedy
When the Vuelta is held, like now, or the Tour last month, the group of friends who leave on Sunday morning try to make the shortest route, adjust it to the television schedules of the stage. and what happens in the competition is their topic of conversation. When you push a little harder than the others, you immediately earn the nickname of the fashionable cyclist. There are laughs. Anecdotes are told… but what they do not expect is to stay on the road because an unconscious person has rammed them in the face when they were in their lane, between the laughter and the desire to get home to tell anything happy except the death of a colleague .
Anna González lost her husband a few years ago. He got hit by a truck and fled. He started a campaign to collect signatures that reached Congress to toughen the law for the abuses. He succeeded and for once the majority of political groups put aside their differences to approve the initiative.
Why don’t more professional cyclists come out?
A fellow journalist lost his niece who was going out on a bike, another damn Sunday, with another hit-and-run motorist, like the one who hit Valverde and theirs in Murcia. What do they think about when they leave bodies lying in the gutter? Do they think the police won’t catch them?
Many times we wonder why they don’t go out more professional cyclists. For tragedies like this. Parents are calmer if their children learn to be athletes on a closed court, regardless of whether it is grass, wood or cement. Because going out on the road, with savages on the loose, is a non-living, a parental suffering until the boy or girl who wants to be a cyclist returns home safe and sound.
A tour of the Netherlands
those who insult cycliststhose who believe that they are annoying, that they are suspicious packages that circulate on the roads, should take a back to the netherlands. Even if you are a pedestrian, you think that cities like Utrecht are more prepared for the cyclist than for the pedestrian. But the respect is immense to the point of thinking that if one day a Dutch motorist commits a savagery like the one in Barcelona, the last thing he will do is flee the scene of the accident to lose the last essence as a human being.
That’s why, the return Like any other competition that moves cyclists and projects cycling, today it is in mourning and professional cyclists feel anger, impotence and only think, will it ever be the last?
