Barcelona sounds, and loud, to start the Tour de France in 2026
I cherish the two days that the 2009 Tour de France visited the city of Barcelona, in fact, I have a ton of photos from those days.
What a tour that was, remembered for the domestic rivalry between Lance Armstrong and Alberto Contadora clash more in the media than anything else, since in practice the second was much superior to the American and the rest, as was seen in Verbier.
That year Contador even won a time trial against Fabian Cancellara.
Given the context, the crux of the matter remains, the Tour leaving Barcelona.
Already then, In 2009, they worked on that hypothesis that came to nothingI believe, due to the laziness of the municipal leaders.
From the moment the Vuelta a España left Barcelona last year I knew that the Grand Départ option of the Tour was going to be activated.
I don’t know, intuition, as if the mother house, ASO, asked for a show of loyalty from the city before giving it the jackpot.
I also knew that by 2025 it was impossible, there were too many departures outside of France,
Lille will be the start of next yearfour years after the Breton opening and with Copenhagen, Bilbao and Florence in between.
That Barcelona would leave the Tour in 2026 would put the foreign starts of this race in this decade at four
They are not few.
I believe in that when the river sounds, and I see the start of Tour 2026 from my citysomething that I would love for all the succession of things that an event like this entails and that luckily I was able to experience this year in Emilia Romagna.
However, I reaffirm something that I already wrote when the start of the Vuelta last year left a lot to be desired…
In Barcelona there is something very obvious missing, there is a lack of cycling atmosphere, not tradition or culture, since one of the oldest races in the world, the Volta, ends here every year, a couple of cycling world championships have been held and great Tour afternoons have been experienced and return.
The present is something else, far removed from the good times.
Barcelona is a city that lives with its back turned to this sportbut not to the bicycle, an element of transportation that we see more and more on the street.
We saw it in the presentation, with insufficient attendance and in an environment that did not convey anything.
To this we add the size of the city, so large, so dispersed, that anything, no matter how big, passes through people’s lives on tiptoe.
Few people would know, for example, to locate on the map where the Copa América de Vela sheds are located, this being a huge international competition.
The fact that the Tour arrived would surely be more noticeable than the Vuelta we saw in 2009, but because of the cachet of the event and what it means, but not because of that affection for cycling that other sites of the grand départ do demonstrate.
I don’t see the city paralyzed such as Brussels, Nice -in times of Covid-, Brest, Copenhagen and Bilbao, the last venues for the Tour’s departure.
I understand that if the city meets the ASO requirements logistically and economically, it can qualify for startup, but I understand that the Tour mentors are looking for other things, like an understanding and loving audience..
Barcelona, I’m sorry, is not on that same page and the Vuelta has corroborated it, beyond the obvious failures in the organization and it saddens me to say it, but we are talking about a city with so many events, with so much calendar, that the Tour could fall into anonymity, first, and the anger of citizens fed up with popular races, concerts and various things that would surely be better received anywhere else.
2024-05-08 04:22:36
#Vingegaard #start #sight #Tour
