The Tour descends from the mountains to the plain of the Rhône and the sprint is won by Mark Cavendish, who beats a record set by Merckx, and puts so much force into the attempt that his pedal strokes cause the chain of his bike to break just as he crosses the finish line. He raises his arms and says: “Winning is my job.”
Tadej Pogacar, in bright yellow and well-ironed, and with a smile to match, generously lets the spotlight fall on the old sprinter alone, and elegantly, like the new Merckx that he is, he praises his feat. “It’s a historic moment,” says the Slovenian, who remembers that when he was a child – he was born in 1998 and was nine years old when Cavendish began winning stages – he used to watch him on TV and see him with such class that he was his hero. “And then I raced with him for six years and we are even friends… And on the podium he told me, please, don’t break his record too soon… I couldn’t promise him anything.” In five Tours, Pogacar has won 12 stages. At that average, he would need 15 Tours to do so.
Half an hour before they set off, the cyclists get off the bus and enter a trance. Ghosts, they slide noiselessly, deaf and you might say blind if it weren’t for the fact that they slide smoothly, oblivious, among the masses that harass them as they head towards the signing podium like star actors on stage or like condemned men on the gallows. It all depends, more than on whether the sun shines or not or the winds that stir their spirits, on the profile of the day’s stage, and at Saint Jean de Maurienne, a crossroads next to a granite wall from which spring the Galibier, the Glandon, the Croix de Fer, the Télégraphe, there also appears the mouth of a tunnel eternally under construction for a high-speed train that will link Lyon and Turin from Susa under the massifs that are now crossed going up and down Sestriere, Montgenèvre, Galibier, the mountains that tormented their sleep on Monday and on Tuesday magnified the figures of Pogacar, Ayuso, Vingegaard, Carlos Rodríguez.
Even though they were necessarily so in their bubble, the cyclists might have appreciated the pollution of the place, and would surely have slapped themselves on the forehead, saying how stupid we are, when they could have gone through the tunnel, as united as the intelligent ants that amputate each other’s injured limbs by biting to avoid infection. And Cavendish suffered more than anyone else, his allergy to heat and mountains, vomiting in the Apennines, condemned to run, closely watched by cameras and stewards, among cars. The idea would surely not have pleased the climbers at all, and even more so on the starting line of one of the days they hate the most, a plain for the enjoyment of fat asses, crazy sprinters, rain, wind, roads full of traps, islands that spring up out of nowhere so that they stumble on them and break at 60 km/h. And some, like the elegant Colombian Tejada, a slave in Astana, condemned to pull along the flat so that his Mark Cavendish can reach the Bugey nuclear power station with strength, a kilometre from the finish line, an ugly town with an industrial estate, smoking chimneys from the Simpsons, atomic energy that seems to inhabit the Manx missile, a projectile again, restless and skilful, that comes out of its mousetrap, so trapped it was 200 metres from the finish line, following the trail of the German Ackerman, and surprises the favourite Philipsen, who is off balance. He doesn’t even need his excellent launchers, Morkov, Bol, to let their hair down.
The Tour is a fiction. A cultural construction that fills summer siestas with dreams. As always, legend is better than reality, it is more exciting, it touches the heart more. As when he won the last stage of his last Giro in 2023 with the help of his rivals, who positioned him, launched him and slowed him down so as not to hinder his farewell, all the sprinters in Saint Vulbas performed perfectly. Van der Poel, a relentless launcher at other times, stops at 500m; on a wide, safe straight, the trains disappear, Gaviria and a few others push and brake. Mads Pedersen falls. Everything works, at 70 per hour, as if it had been rehearsed thousands of times, gears well greased. Even the weather, cool for a day, cloudy, is on board so that the cyclist who made the Tour de France fashionable in the United Kingdom before the arrival of Sky, Wiggins and Froome, can achieve at the age of 39, in his 15th participation, the 35th victory of his career in the Tour de France (the first, in 2008, ahead of Óscar Freire in the autumn), more than anyone else in history, one more than Eddy Merckx, who has always thought that nobody could beat him in anything.
A relentless and angry sprinter when he was young, emotional and friendly when he was old, the favourite friend of all young cyclists, having overcome depression, sadness, retirements, Cavendish climbs onto the podium like a family man who is honoured on reaching a certain age by a company that has exploited him all his life. He is accompanied by his wife, Peta Todd, and the four children they have in common. The fifth is missing, Todd’s son from a previous relationship. In the 2021 Tour he won four stages. He tied with Merckx at 34th. He had a curious contract with Deceuninck, who lent him the jersey but his salary was paid by a private sponsor, and when he began to demand respect, the team boss deprived him of the Tour of 22 and fired him. He signed for Astana, who gave their body and soul to his wishes. Two years later, with his objective accomplished, with so much determination, so much confidence, so much strength invested in him, Cavendish, now apocalyptic, will surely make a final bow and leave behind him a more boring, more predictable peloton. But first, he promises, he will win another stage. “I will celebrate this victory and then I will come back,” he says. “I love the Tour.”
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