Tadej Pogacar evokes cycling, but high altitude cycling and writing pages in the best book on this sport. It already marks an era, that of the boys who want to succeed and succeed when they still have a child’s face, almost no beard to shave, with pimples that still describe a recent stage of adolescence not yet forgotten. But the legs, those of Pogacar above all, are capable of performing feats like the one this Saturday, when the two-time winner of the Tour, the cyclist who sums up the races he has run in 2022 by victories, the one who has no limits and the best among the best, puts land in between, and never better said in a test like the Strade Bianche that falls in love with its unpaved sections, 49 kilometers from the finish line to win alone a classic young man like him but who dazzles and becomes the ‘Hell of the South’. Pogacar win what you want, when you want and on the ground you want. In the cycling XXI century The champions who protected themselves all year long, who forgot about all one-day races, and who spent half the season thinking about the Tour, half a year training, hiding to wait for the first key moment of the French round to emerge from the peloton and greet the rivals announcing that they wanted to arrive in yellow to Paris.
Instead, he 23 years, It’s from the school of Eddy Merckx, of those who win at the beginning, in the middle and at the end of the season. He already did it last year. He started, like now, winning the Tour of the Emirates. He then gave a cycling lesson in the Tirreno Adriatico, which starts on Monday, won Liège-Bastogne-Liège before the break before the French round and finished the year with victory in October in Lombardy. In between, he could only hang the bronze medal at the Tokyo Games because he went to Japan from Paris still not recovered from the effort for the Tour.
Fall of Alaphilippe
The White roads It is a race that is growing, that seeks recognition, still as an aspirant, of being named one day as the cycling ‘monument’ of which, among others, the Tour of Flanders or the Paris-Roubaix are part, but that dazzles seeing the effort of the runners in the toughest sections of the sectors with the beautiful white land of Tuscany, the so-called ‘sterrato’ and that configures the essence of this race.
And in one of those stretches, when Julian Alaphilippe accelerated, who had taken a hard spin kilometers before, Pogacar He attacked to say “very good here I am” and with 49 kilometers to go seek contact with the historic Campo de Siena square where the race ended.
Valverde and Pello Bilbao
Pogacar He already looked like a winner without anyone being able to answer him. If anything, a promising and exciting Carlos Rodriguez, 21 years old, the jewel from Almuñécar who runs in the Ineos, tried it with a courage worthy of recognition and with pedaling that looks to the future. Solving that procedure, the Slovenian runner already had before him a stage to triumph again and to demonstrate that nobody, absolutely nobody, can with his fury worthy of the last century, the same one that inspired Merckx and the one that drives him to win the Tour and everything that arises.
Special mention, as always, a fireproof Alexander Valverdewho attacked the group in the final phase of the race to chase Pogacar and score, at almost 42 years old, a meritorious second place, one more podium in his sports career, in the wake of a cyclist 18 years younger than him. Pello Bilbao it was fifth.
