To win the Tour you have to have a certain amount of evil. The bad boys are the ones who end up leading the classification because, among many other things, they look for the weak point of their rival, they test it, as in the most famous hill of Bologna which dozens of cycle tourists struggle with every weekend, trying to punish him, although in the end they get an unpleasant surprise when they see that their opponent resists without falling to the canvas and without having to listen to the countdown.
There have been and are many bad children on the Tour; some because they wanted to win everything and did not even leave the shells of their pipes for those who tried or only tried to confront him. The most famous is Eddy Merckx who they called ‘The Cannibal’ simply because he ate his rivals, from February to October, and especially in the Tour. Luis Ocañawho was never a saint, dared to knock him out in 1971 and ended up in the ditch, something that would surely have been avoided today thanks to the famous disc brakes that would have prevented him from falling into the cursed col de Mented.
Miguel Indurain
Nor was the rider who deserved beatification for his way of winning the Tour, the one who most often let his rivals take the small piece of the cake, simply because he, more than winning stages, What interested him was to arrive in Paris dressed in yellow. Yes, I am talking about nothing less than Miguel Indurain which, as its director baptized it José Miguel Echávarri in 1994, after the impressive lesson he gave in the time trial of Bergerac Under a heat as or more suffocating than that which punished the 2024 Tour runners on Sunday, he became a tyrant under the discipline of the time trial, who subjected the lackeys like a perverse medieval king, from whom he charged a rent that They couldn’t pay much less.
You have to have a certain amount of bad temper to win the Tour, which is not something that stars of other disciplines are not immune to. And this sporting bad temper can be applied without having to cheat and relying on doses of ‘fair play’; in other words, there is no need to attack your rival in the control of the race. provisioningwhich is now practically a decorated. The teams establish their own eating and drinking steps and communicate this to the runners so that they are alert when receiving a bag of food or a few bottles of fresh drink from the assistants.
They learned to pee on the bike
It is no longer necessary to demarcate when the opponent is peeingas it was done in the old days. Riders could not even stop to urinate for fear of being trapped and many learned to do it while riding and without getting off the bike. Or when they had a flat tire or the gear on their bike broke. It is also true that Now it is barely punctured and breakdowns only occur in an unavoidable circumstance, when the rider falls to the ground and the bicycle breaks due to the impact.
That’s why, despite his good-natured face, his extroverted character, those locks of hair that always stick out of the slot in his helmet, Tadej Pogacar is a bad boy. He already wanted to test Jonas Vingegaard on the second stage and he didn’t let him breathe in the face of the possibility that he would arrive at the Tour less fresh than expected, like an old car that needed miles of running-in for the engine to work perfectly, and without giving him time to get the bug for competition again, after months of recovery due to the fall in April in the Basque Country.
And it is not, by any means, a criticism of the Slovenian phenomenon because Vineyardwhen he sees the opportunity, he will put on the mask of a corsair to try to steal the spoils of seconds. If they are minutes, even better. That is why the Tour of the bad boys is run, those who follow the instructions of those who are considered the heroes of this race, because of the bad temper of Bernard Hinaultcycling legend, will be talked about another day, there is a lot to tell.
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2024-07-01 07:21:45
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