Beyond the thousand battles that portend Pogacar y Vingegaard or the displays of talent of men like Van der Poel or Van Aert for the gala orography, this Tour de France that begins this Saturday in Bilbao has an irrefutable feeling: it returns Egan Bernal to the race that made him imperishable.
This is not the classic sports story where the protagonist overcomes endless physical or psychological problems to return to his Ithaca; this reality, too often ruthless, goes one step further. On January 24, 2022, in a training session on the highway that connects Bogotá with Tunja, the Colombian, at a speed of 60 kilometers per hour, collided with a bus stopped on the shoulder. The then reigning winner of the Tour of ItalyAt barely 25 years old, he knew disaster in an instant. The femur and patella of her right leg were destroyed, 20 bones in her body were broken, her two lungs were punctured… Her chain of displeasures was extensive. Bernal saved his life in the ICU, but the possibility of being weighed down in a wheelchair until the end of his days was high. “I had a 95% probability of being paraplegic,” acknowledged the one from Ineos months after the coup.
The terror was followed by a tedious rehabilitation where a return to his profession was, if anything, the last and least important rung on a steep ladder of goals. the one of zipaquirá he learned again to eat, to walk; to be, ultimately, a self-sufficient being. But, 60 days later and progressively, Bernal began to shoot again. Last season, he obviously spent it away from the competition; although, in this 2023, Bernal is once again one of the visible faces of the old Sky.
hopeful dauphine
As a logical consequence of the undoubted sequels, the Colombian’s campaign had a complex beginning. However, after the gray ones derived from the abandonments in the Vuelta de San Juan and in the Volta a Catalunya (in addition to a step without any prominence through the Basque Country), he managed to smile in Romandie and Hungary, with two eighth places in the classification general. The level of the Bogotá climber, without great or miraculous sports news, increased slowly; although the road to that corridor that one day was was still long.
Meanwhile, the twilight of spring brought with it the best glimpses of Bernal so far this year. It happened in the recent Dauphine, a preparatory race for the Tour par excellence, where with a twelfth place full of good feelings, the 26-year-old proved to be in tune for the three weeks with the most legendary cycling. He even signed a better role than But y Landa that, with the permission of the Granada carlos rodriguezthey continue to be the Spanish options for the French general.
«I am not one hundred percent, I am not ready to win a Tour de France, but I am really looking forward to it. This is the Tour that makes me most excited », he declared on Thursday at the presentation of the 110th edition of the Grande Boucle at the foot of the Guggenheim. Together with Rodríguez himself, the talented Pidcockhis compatriot Daniel Felipe Martinez or the recent champion of Spain (time trial) Jonathan Castroviejothe boy who dressed in yellow in Paris at just 22 years old leads an Ineos whose road and the passage of stages will decide who is their leader.
2023-06-30 17:51:16
#return #wounded #champion
