Chantada is a small town in the province of Lugo, with just over 8,000 inhabitants, with a soccer team that competes at the regional level, where things do not happen that have a media impact beyond the limits of the municipality, but that could never be imagined. something so great that few towns spread across Europe aspire to achieve one day. Two winners of the Tour, Jonas Vingegaard, twice, and Egan Bernal, fortunately recovered for the sport, crossed the finish line in first and second position.
Cycling runs with a magic wand. It is a sport capable of placing a town called taboadaless than 3,000 inhabitants, with another so-called chanted as a goal, and bring together a good part of the cream of the international peloton. They are the cyclists who compete for the The Great Waythe Galician round, which already on the first day of real competition after a time trial betrayed by the wind, received the scourge of Vingegaard to show that already in February he is on the right track to try to win the Tour for the third consecutive year no matter how much Tadej Pogacar insists on placing nails on its route to Nice, which this year replaces Paris as the end point of the traditional route to the French capital.
Now we have to run so that the people can enjoy themselves so that small rural villas such as Taboada and Chantada become a stage that in other disciplines is only limited to the best-known stadiums, circuits or fields, which any sports fan would recite by heart when asked, tell us the name of a famous sports venue.
The first attack
Vingegaard and Bernal place on the map roads on which they would never have cycled unless they had put on a bib and were invited to run the O Gran Camiño with a result worthy of the most famous races on the cycling planet. Attack Vingegaardwhich was not a surprise either, and in response to Bernal -the same one who broke a good part of the bones in his body in 2022- the test turns an intense red. For the first time after an accident that almost cost him his life in Colombia, the winner of the 2019 Tour and the 2021 Giro is in a position to fight for a victory since his miraculous return to competitive life.
But, of course, Vingegaard runs in another dimension and when he attacks a mountain pass, San Pedro de Líncora, he does not try to do it just to be seen on TV, he does it because he wants to win, because he wants to start increasing his record, to to score the first victory of 2024 in Lugo and to repeat the same route as last year. He won the O Gran Camiño almost without breaking a sweat, he won the Tour for the second time and if he finished the Vuelta in second position it was due to the Oviedo pact, when after overcoming the Angliru, both he and Primoz Roglicthey accepted that Sepp Kuss, teammate, gregarious and leader of the event, ended up in Madrid wearing the red jersey.
Solo victory
Vingegaard He arrived at Chantada alone, as the great geniuses of cycling do, those who want to win all year round, as Eddy Merckx always did, as the stars of the end of the last century did not know how to do, and as they have managed to recover. Vingegaard y Pogacar…to the point that when one of the two competes in a race it is already known in advance who will be the final winner.
Possibly, Pogacar, in the living room of his house in Monaco, did not miss a detail, but he certainly was not surprised. In Colombia, on the other hand, they were happy, but not because Vingegaard, but for the boy from the mountain range, because dreaming is an art allowed to any human being. Why not see him fighting again with the best when a race invites three weeks of competition? There are two stages left for the O Gran Camiño to be finished but things must be put in a very bad way. Vingegaard so that he does not win the Galician test for the second consecutive time.
2024-02-23 20:09:32
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