On the fourth day, Tadej Pogacar stopped playing with the Giro, dressed in pink, changed the culotte matching the jersey to put on the black color of his team, he blended in with the landscape, adopted a discreet profile, let very little of his head be seen and rested, if doing 190 kilometers at an average of 44.3 per hour can be taken as a day off. As Miguel de Unamuno wrote in The tragic sense of life, “let them invent it”, which is what the leader must have thought about his colleagues in the peloton, and yes, it was others who for once took the responsibility on their backs, but cycling, almost always, is a playful and not tragic. Even if it rains.
Because it seemed that the weather report, which is sometimes carried by the devil, was going to be surpassed by harsh reality, as the clouds were unleashed at the Andora finish line, a few kilometers from San Remo, the usual passage of the spring Clasicissima, barely an hour before arrival, but in the end the satellites and those who interpret them at ground level were right, and the weather changed to the southeast wind, which tempered the steep Tyrrhenian coasts, and made the task easier for the arrivals, which is what they expected at first.
The weather had been a determining factor for two thirds of the race, when the peloton traveled through small towns, narrow roads, dangerous uphills and downhills with wet ground. There were falls, not too serious, so the main group did not get involved in the adventure, except for the one they decided to share with the Frenchman Lilian Calmejane, who would later give up; the South African Stefan De Bod and the Asturian based in Mataró, Fran Muñoz, Polti runner, legs and head. He graduated in Industrial Engineering from the Polytechnic of Barcelona and specialized in Industrial Electronics and Automatic Engineering at the Tecnocampus of the Pompeu Fabra University.
The others preferred the shelter of the platoon, although it is not always enough, as the Eritrean Biniam Girmay, who was in the main group, saw firsthand, and who suffered a fall uphill, and then another downhill, with the wet asphalt, when His Cube bike slid and rolled him onto the guardrail. He decided to leave after so much misfortune, although he did not seem to have any wounds other than the moral ones after a fateful day.
The runners circulated under the sirimiri and the fog banks, but when the last quarter of the stage arrived, the clouds dissipated, the sun appeared, the temperature rose and all the cyclists took off their warm clothing to take themselves more seriously. fits, the resolution of the day.
They ate up the minutes of advantage of Muñoz and De Bod, because the voracity of the finishers appeared, and already on the coast, between deserted and narrow beaches with their heather umbrellas and delightful towns on the left, with the Tyrrhenian calm. To the right, the steep walls, eaten away by human action to cut a few meters of road and tunnels under the mountains that go into the sea, spectacular views that cyclists do not enjoy because they are doing their own thing. When the peloton crosses Alassio or Laigueglia, the speed is already considerable; The tamarind trees of the promenades, the tourist hotels and the beach clubs are left behind when the teams of arrivals take control and Pogacar takes a discreet background.
Along the Via Aurelia, ascending towards the sanctuary of Nostra Signora delle Penne and the Capo Mele lighthouse, crossing galleries that support the mountain, it is Filippo Ganna who tries to surprise; He passes the highest point in the lead and tries to maintain the difference on the descent. Surprise, the leader restrains himself. For a kilometer, the Italian from Ineos maintains the illusion of winning at the Andora finish line, but he surrenders to the evidence of the sprinters, and among them, is a compatriot, Jonathan Milan, from Lidl, who, in an agonizing effort, based on brutal pedaling in the last hundred meters, he is the one who wins and dresses in the maglia ciclamino. Pogacar is still in pink.
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