Everything that was talked about in the last Tour of Carlos Rodríguez, all the dreams and plans of the future leader of Ineos, abstractions, became concrete on Saturday, a reality that excites, in the queen stage of the Tour of Romandie, in the not so Alps wild, urbanized areas of French-speaking Switzerland north of Geneva. The British team, one of the greats of the peloton, put all its runners at their feet, the wise Castroviejo, the Tour winner Egan Bernal, the promising Arensman… And as if it were a veteran and very expert runner, the Granada native , 23 years old, the calm climber, led them with patience and peace of mind as they finished, one by one, port by port, kilometer by kilometer, with almost all of Juan Ayuso’s assistants in the great UAE. When the time comes, on the way to the sunny Leysin anti-tuberculosis sanatoriums, and accelerated by Egan, Carlos Rodríguez, serious, introverted, determined, perfectly executes the last move of the plan. He ends the resistance of Ayuso, leader from the time trial, and of all those fighting for the general classification and ends the day dressed in yellow. The methodical and clear triumph of a cyclist with an engineer’s mind and studies. On Sunday, at noon, the magnificent Ineos defends from all attacks the very introverted young man from Almuñécar, so quiet, so polite, who, after a stage won by Dorian Godon (Decathlon) in Vernier, on the outskirts of Geneva, is proclaimed under the storm and the frozen deluge champion of the last race of a week of the cycling spring. He wins the overall standings with 7s over Aleksandr Vlasov and 9s over Florian Lipowitz, both from Bora, and fifth is Juan Ayuso, at 27s.
Afterwards, he speaks in the press room and his magnificent French, just a little bit of an accent, surprises the Swiss journalists, who do not hesitate to immediately consider him one of their own, well, hasn’t it been in his career, three weeks after be second in Itzulia, where he has reached magnificent maturity? “I am very happy to finally achieve a general classification. And, of course, I am very grateful to the team for all the work, for going out of their way for me. It is a satisfaction that brings joy and gives meaning to all the work behind it. This victory gives confidence that things can be achieved by working hard and gives us motivation for what is to come,” proclaims the winner; “Now it’s time to rest a little and prepare for the Tour as best as possible. The next competition will be the Dauphiné. Later, in the Tour, I will try to feel better than last year. I don’t know the result, how it’s going to be, but hey, I hope to come out of there with the satisfaction of having done the best possible and of having left everything at every stage.”
It is the first major victory for Ineos in a WorldTour race since the 2022 Tour of Poland. He is the third Spanish winner of the Swiss race after Paco Galdos in 1975 (weeks before finishing second in the Giro d’Italia) and Abraham Olano , world champion, in 1996.
It happened like this, you could say, so that what was written was fulfilled, what Dave Brailsford, the top executive of Ineos, read on the forehead of Carlos Rodríguez last Tour de France when he decided that he would be the leader of a team that in the Last decade he had been invincible in the Tour (Wiggins, 2012; Froome, 2013, 2015, 2016, 2017; Thomas, 2018; Egan, 2019) and in the current one he had been left on the sidelines, with Froome destroyed after a fall; Thomas, aged, and Egan Bernal slowly recovering after a terrible accident. To Brailsford’s offer, Rodríguez responded without hesitation with a yes, breaking the pre-contract that he had signed months before with Movistar, which also saw him as its undoubted leader, and two days after winning one of the great stages of the Tour, in Morzine, after attacking Pogacar and Vingegaard in the descent of the Joux Plane who were neutralized, and a week before finishing fifth in his debut Tour, signs a new four-year contract with Ineos, until December 2027. He will have then only 26 years old.
Thus, he assumes, as if it were a light task that is one of the heaviest burdens that cycling can entail, leading a team steeped in history and forced to maintain its prestige in times of phenomena called Jonas Vingegaard and Tadej Pogacar, Visma and UAE.
He entered the Ineos house at the age of 18, in 2020, two months before the pandemic, and while he grows and responds early to expectations – he won a stage in Itzulia as soon as he turned 21, and four months later he finished seventh in his first Vuelta—a work team is organized around him, a very Spanish nucleus with his coach Xabier Artetxe, the directors Xabier Zandio and Imanol Erviti, the head of nutrition Aitor Viribay, mechanics, masseuses, physiologists… Andalusian is an example. After a concentration in January on Teide, he had a complicated start to the year for family reasons (the early death of his father, to whom he dedicated the Itzulia stage) and suffered the cold and bad weather in O Gran Camiño and the Paris-Nice. Despite this, he maintained confidence and faith in the team’s training system, in its nutrition plan, in everyone’s work, and perseverance and work led him to turn around the situation in the Basque Country and to the triumph in Romandie. And everyone, even if they don’t speak French as well as him, trusts him, dedicates themselves to him and shares the same goal with him. Next station, Tour de France.
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