Life is a metaphor for cycling, which in Peonis, a flying goal, is death, the poor Friuli, where a fascist owner killed in 1927 with a stone the bricklayer and champion Ottavio Bottecchia, who was stealing his grapes and courting his daughter, and, following the Tagliamento, its great bed of stone, towards the Carnic Alps, in Sappada it is also betrayal and crying, where a proletarian, sarcastic and disbelieving Irishman killed for cycling a young man from a good family who, he tells him in La Gazzetta dello Sport Alessandra Giardini, who knows how to listen and ask, felt like a huge asshole, alone, abandoned, ridiculed. Roberto Visentini never forgave, will never forgive, he promises, neither Stephen Roche, the Carrera Jeans teammate who stole the Giro of ’87 with a leak in the stage that ends in Sappada, nor the owners of his team, who, eager to sell your jeans made in Italy in the green Erin they preferred that an exotic Irishman win the pink corsa, and not a petty bourgeois from Salò, heir to an undertaker’s company, how little the dead bother him, and with a villa on the shores of Lake Garda. “The next day, when we were going through a tunnel, I kicked him, but I had a commissioner on the hump and I couldn’t give him much,” Visentini laments. “I haven’t spoken to him again, but if he comes closer now I still want to hit him.”
Oblivious to his pain, the Giro returns to Sappada from time to time, and justifies the year, or life, to another cyclist. Or he cheats on you. Six years ago, the summit, at the end of a long and staggered ascent, mistakenly made exhibitionist Simon Yates believe that he had finished off Chris Froome, this 2024, however, rewarded a breakaway specialist, a baroudeur (adventurous), as the French say, the Italian Andrea Vendrame, 29, solo winner, in his own style, just like when he won another stage of the Giro, in Romagna, in 2021, with calculation and wisdom. Second, at 54s, came Pelayo Sánchez, and a sigh later, Georg Steinhauser. Usual suspects this Giro, too, and winners, each, of a stage.
For Bach, life, and death, was a flight, and a passion, constant as the Giro is for Alaphilippe, Pelayo, Plapp, Narváez, Vendrame or Steinhauser, who combine and organize themselves with another dozen cyclists to reach the final summit far from the reach of Tadej Pogacar, his UAE and the Ineos and Bora of those who aspire to the podium, who leave room for one day. Those who escape in the rain do not seek, like Bach, to revolutionize the baroque or anything similar but, on the contrary, to fill the days with nothingness and memory, and to perpetuate the traditional laws of cycling, which guarantee the adventurers consolation prizes, and the fans, reasons to discover talents and admire bravery. Pogacar, who thinks of Monte Grappa, so symbolic, and of an arrival alone to the Bassano Alpine Bridge, so beautiful, he commissions a sprinter from his team, the Colombian Molano, to set the pace on the ascents, Duron to the purr, Serra Valcalda, so that no one suffers, and all that remains is to complete the scene, formation of five in the head, Cipollini’s loud voice shouting, bolt! Damn, for those who are on the inside in the curves, do not accelerate. The Slovenian fans, so close to their border, begin to arrive on the highways and exchange among themselves on the networks, until the photograph of the information panels with the message in English with which the Slovenian DGT asks them to be careful while driving goes viral. : “Leave the racing to Pogacar” (leave the races to Pogacar), the advice that 175 of the 176 runners who started in Turin happily followed from the first day of the Giro.
There are no longer fights or jealousy for being the boss in the team, cycling is also subject to the business laws of adaptive leadership, and there is no poison in the peloton, which, a quarter of an hour after Vendrame has won the stage, calmly finishes ascending Sappada. On the false flat towards the finish line, Geraint Thomas, third overall, is distracted by looking behind him and falls stupidly. Nobody attacks. There is no fang. Everyone calmly waits for him to return. Pogacar asks him if anything hurts him and they all walk home hand in hand.
Following the old law of survival of cycling, and of life, before eating from your plate try to eat from your neighbor’s, Vendrame was carried away by the intensity and ardor of Alaphilippe, always so generous in his effort, and of the younger escape companions. When he saw his moment arrive, and, always, the old laws of cycling, knowing that the first to attack at the last moment is the one who wins in the escapes, 28 kilometers from the finish line, in Corneglians, having just finished the descent of the Valcalda , Vendrame countered his colleagues and left. Goodbye, crying, helplessness and gnashing of teeth behind his back, and mutual reproaches, and 22nd victory of the year (second in the Giro) for his Decathlon, unsurpassed the year that its founder and factotum Vincent Lavenu retires, he leaves the brown shorts, buy Van Rysel bikes and stop being Ag2r.
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