The stone houses, imposing mansions, of Zurich were built with shameful fortunes and the best collection of paintings in its magnificent museum, cézannes, manets and renoirsgigantic water lilies and delicate portraits in abundance, was amassed, sometimes with dark arts, by Emil Bührle, a weapons manufacturer from the Oerlikon neighborhood who became the richest man in Switzerland by selling cannons and tanks to Hitler and Mussolini in the Second World War. World War. Next to the lake, murky, dark, the beauty hides the horror and the black clouds hide the rainbow, and the flood, for which the women fight hard in a race of pure survival and mistakes. The strongest cyclist, the Dutch Demi Vollering, finished fifth in a finish of six in which her close enemy, and teammate, the Belgian Lotte Kopecky, the most intelligent tactically, and the fastest, won, pure power in her legs. Second was the American Chloe Dygert and third, the stainless and leathery Italian Elisa Longo Borghini.
It is the second consecutive World Cup for the 28-year-old Belgian, a great specialist in the toughest classics, with victories in Roubaix, Flanders and Strade Bianche. Harder than any known classic was, perhaps, the Zurich World Championship, a circuit already insidious in itself, a continuous succession of slopes linked by descents and false plains that the rain, the danger of the soaked road, the fear, the cold that did not The clothes were warm and wet, preventing them from being converted into recovery and rest areas. This is how Usoa Ostolaza, the best-ranked Spaniard (48th, 11m away), analyzed it, still shaking, and also excited, and proud to have survived in a race in which Mavi García, 40, the leader of the Spanish team, who had already warned of her allergy to rain and cold, she abandoned, and in which the Biscayan Eneritz Vadillo (49th), 19, was sixth among the sub-23s (the winner in the category, who ran mixed with the absolute , was the Dutch Puck Pieterse, 13th in the absolute classification).
After more than four hours of racing (154.1 kilometers), only 81 of the 194 that took the start finished, but the game was quickly limited to the fight between the two most powerful teams, Belgium and the Netherlands, between Vollering, who She has never been a world champion but she had the hard work of three-time champion Marianne Vos and Kopecky. In a finale of pure passion and spectacle, and each slope was a reason to let go, and perhaps guided by anxiety and excessive confidence in her legs, Vollering attacked madly, ending the resistance of her teammates but leaving intact Kopecky.
