Giulio Pellizzari, 20, distributes Haribo gummies among the pine trees of Rome, a light warm breeze stirring them. On the last day of the Giro, in the sun, the cyclists of the future are happy children, exulting in health and vigor, like Antonio Tiberi, 21, a Roman cyclist in white as the best young man. The old Lucan Domenico Pozzovivo, 42 years old, body twisted like the trunk of a century-old olive tree in his Basilicata, almost deformed, his elbows protruding, so many bones broken so many times, he walks ahead of the group, who encourages him, upon reaching the cobblestones. (sanpietrini) of the Forum and says goodbye to cycling. Those from the UAE have painted the shoulder pads of their white uniforms pink and on the asphalt they look like the T-Mobile of the old days, but they are not sent by an angry Riis or a ruddy Ullrich, but by a smiling and sweet pink Tadej Pogacar born in the years of selfies and camera phones. Discover Rome, take photos and laugh. Then, two kilometers from the finish line, he takes the lead of the UAE train for the last sprint. He is determined that his partner Molano wins. “If Molano wins, it will be a 10 out of 10 Giro,” he announces. Despite special help, the Colombian is lost. On the cobblestones Tim Merlier defeats Jonny Milan again. The final three-way tie between the princes of the volata. And no matter how much he raises the threshold of demand, no one will argue that the Giro has been 10 and more for the Slovenian. It was the perfect Giro.
They say that competing is mastering the art of the unpredictable, but by winning a perfect Giro, Tadej Pogacar has turned the sweet interpretation of extreme planning into art, into epic.
“A perfect Giro?, of course,” says Rafal Majka, the lieutenant, the last man on the team, the cyclist who, when ascending a mountain pass, put himself at the head of the peloton, let everyone know, without words, that his boss would soon be there. in getting up from the saddle, attacking and going where it had been marked beforehand, for months, six kilometers from the summit of Oropa, on the second day, for example. “A perfect turn? Maybe, although not everything has been easy. I suffered from allergies the first few weeks and sometimes I slept badly,” responds Pogacar, winner of the 2020 Tour, in his debut, and 2021, and does not cite among the problems the attacks of insidious rivals, which have not existed. No rival has put him in a bind. Geraint Thomas, Daniel Martínez, Tiberi, O’Connor, Rubio, Bardet… Those who have fought for the podium have not even tried to attack him. They have always been on the wheel. They have fought to be second without even attacking each other. They have not organized strategies, great movements. In this Giro only Pogacar has attacked. “It was, for sure, one of my best grand tours.”
Before starting, his team reviewed the road book and calculated that Pogacar could win 11 of the 21 stages, because it is puncheur, chronoman, sprinter, climber, and his attitude, what he calls “mentality”, is to always try to win. He won six, came second in two – the Lake Garda time trial won by Ganna and the climb to the Brocon by his friend Steinhauser – and third in another, the one that Jhonatan Narváez won in Turin on the first day, the one that most It bothered him not to win, which would have allowed him to wear pink from the first to the last day, like Anquetil in ’64 and Merckx in ’73. The Livigno stage, the one in which, like a vacuum cleaner, with no more desire than that of not exceeding the watts that he could maintain for half an hour – 450 watts on average, almost seven per kilo, 27.5 kilometers per hour on average in the ascent – he left the more than two minutes that Nairo gained on him in just 12 kilometers, it was perhaps not only his greatest demonstration in the Giro but one of the best days of his career, although what is difficult is to compare the data between different stages, each one with its particularity. Many days he has not reached his limits. He has won by controlling his efforts, almost stopping himself, always thinking about the Tour.
The Slovenian, who wins, at 25 years old, in his debut, with the greatest advantage over the second (Daniel Martínez, 9m 56s) recorded in the last 59 years, has not experimented, he has not improvised, he has not been Charlie Parker with the sax and the warm, stirred dream, rather Daniel Barenboin at the keyboard, giving each note of the score the brightness, the sonority, that perhaps Beethoven had imagined or, surely, the pedal strokes that the script written at home in UAE envisaged. December no less, next to the beaches of Benidorm, halfway between the directors, trainers and technicians of the team financed by emirs of the Middle East.
“A perfect turn? Yes. It was the perfect Giro. The perfection. The security of the jersey the second day. Win the time trial to convince yourself. Having the peace of mind of maintaining the lead in Prati di Tivo, without becoming obsessed. And being able to spend the last week defending it, which is always the best,” says Joxean Fernández Matxin, manager and strategist of the team. “We had a three-week plan, which has been maintained. The first week we wanted to try to win the first two stages, especially to avoid tension, to avoid dangers, to avoid falls. The most difficult to manage. Then it was about winning the time trial in Perugia to gain confidence and keep the jersey at the arrival at Prati di Tivo. The second week was the easiest, where we had to be more conservative, simply maintain the jersey, without obsessing about it. And then, the third. As in all the Giros d’Italia, there is always significant tension in the third stage, and a toughness greater than the rest of the stages.”
Matxin says that it is not his fault that neither Jonas Vingegaard nor Primoz Roglic nor Remco Evenepoel attended the Giro to put his Pogacar in difficulties, whom the Dane has already defeated in the last two Tours. “I don’t think there have been many directors who have given a big eight in December. I have the feeling that if we announced that Tadej was going to run certain races with a goal – all of them: Strade, San Remo, Volta, Liege, Giro – there are times when many rivals prefer to make another calendar. I understand it, because I do it too,” he says. “I, as a director, do not put a calendar where the events are going to run. Big Six because I know perfectly well that it is going to be difficult for him to win or that he is not a sure winner.”
The Spanish coach explains that they prepared the Giro with one eye on the Tour, but during the Italian race they did not think a single day about the Tour, which starts in five weeks minus two days. It will arrive with 31 days of competition (and 14 victories. Volta, plus four stages; Giro, plus six; Strade and Liege), more or less like other years. And he arrives in one piece, the team assures, and he assured it after winning the penultimate stage at Monte Grappa. Plans written in December will not be changed. After a week of vacation, on June 3 he will concentrate at the altitude of Isola 2000, in the French Alps near Nice, also the scene of the 19th stage of the next Tour. After seven days there acclimatizing to the altitude with Adam Yates, the next two weeks will be dedicated to specific training with the teams who will accompany him in the Tour from the Dauphiné (June 2 to 9): Ayuso, Soler, Wellens, Politt and Sivakov. The eighth, Almeida, will compete that week in Switzerland. The team, says Matxin, has rented two luxury villas and will have two cooks at their disposal. And on June 26 everyone will descend on Florence, where the Tour will begin on Saturday the 29th. Real enemies await him, and a challenge that no cyclist has managed to overcome since Marco Pantani did it in 1998, pink and yellow the same year.
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