Going up to Leysin, a small Alpine postcard town north of Montreux, the sun shines that the tuberculosis patients always sought, who spent the afternoons lying on the galleries until sunset breathing pure air from the mountains, drying their diseased bronchi, and along the road that rises and twists, ascends agilely, almost happily, Egan Bernal, standing on the pedals, like someone dancing the cumbia on a spring afternoon, 18 degrees at 1,300 meters, full lungs, and Carlos Rodríguez, 23, is whistling at his wheel, cold, pale, almost serene, concentrated, analytical and fierce, his gaze always fixed on the road. Behind, Juan Ayuso, 21, puffs. He asks for the earpiece, but he could do it not with alarmed shouts, with just whispers, he is so close, to his partner Pawel Sivakov to slow down, since she cannot follow him, to wait for him. There are less than five kilometers to the top. The race is decided. Rodríguez accelerates at the wheel of Egan, a Tour winner at his service; Sivakov opens up and so does Ayuso. Enric Mas, always on the wheel, at his own pace, waits, watches the kids take his place, stays in between. The stage is won by the Ecuadorian Richard Carapaz, skilled and fast, who takes advantage of the fact that he does not count towards the general classification and accelerates hard two kilometers from the finish line. The Olympic champion knows the climb. He knows that it is the hardest place, and that the road flattens out in the town, 500 meters from the finish line, and although the surprising young German Florian Lipowitz – “not even I knew he could be with the best climbers in the world” , he said then—he approaches him, and he can almost hear his rapid breathing, he still has time to raise his arms.

The great duel for the final victory in the Tour de Romandie between the young Spanish phenomena is decided in favor of the Granada climber, from Almuñécar, who on Sunday, after a last stage for mountebanks (150 kilometers, four laps of a seesaw circuit in the surroundings of Vernier, the outskirts of Geneva), has everything in his favor to become the third Spanish cyclist to win the week-long race that runs through French-speaking Switzerland. The first was Paco Galdos from Vitoria, in 1976, a year after losing the Giro d’Italia in the snowy Stelvio to Fausto Bertoglio; 20 years later, in 1996, Abraham Olano won it, wearing the world champion’s rainbow jersey. Rodríguez leads Alexander Vlasov by 7s in the general standings and Lipowitz, teammates in Bora and rivals on the road, by 9s, by 21s by Belgian Ilan van Wilder, who always pushes the limit, by 27s and by 38s by Mas. The first three in the stage receive bonuses of 10s, 6s and 4s, first, second and third, respectively.

As if fate had condemned them (there are worse sentences, of course) to always see each other side by side, as if each one’s progress always had to come at the expense of the other, Carlos Rodríguez and Juan Ayuso dispute the leadership of the Spanish cycling, so needed, since youth, although one is from 2001 and another from 2002. More sparkling, more impulsive, more explosive, the cyclist born in Barcelona and raised in Xàbia; more patient, more traditional, more climber, the Granada native, both took power in Itzulia (Rodríguez won the last stage after helping Ayuso to make Mattias Skjelmose desperate on the way to Eibar and win the overall) and both will meet again in July in the Tour, where Ayuso will debut, ambitious in the shadow of Tadej Pogacar, where Rodríguez, winner of the Joux Plane stage in Morzine in 2023, will continue to progress at the head of an Ineos that adores him and that has a strategic operation for him, almost surgical, on the climb to Leysin, with Castroviejo marking the train, Arensman provoking a first wave of panic and Bernal, finally, ending the resistance of the UAE, so proud the day before with his exhibition in the time trial (victory of McNulty, third Grossschartner post, missing in Leysin). And at the finish line, Mauro Gianetti, the head of the UAE, talks to journalists in a circle. “You already know, right?, Juan Ayuso has been sick for a few days,” he tells them. “And we already knew that today he was not going to resist. From the beginning of the stage he already felt bad.”

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