Sentimental stories, so beautiful when the imagination gives them shape, are melancholy when the magical reality – the climb to the Alto del Vino, so often praised, steep at times, is not a narrow and twisty path and horseshoe curves, but a highway. , the one that leads to Medellín from Bogotá – or the imagination of others, deforms them, when the logic of Richard Carapaz, the last man of the EF, the leader of the team in pink, the strongest, lets everyone, dreamers and realists, know, that he pink party that his team mounted the last 10 kilometers of the tough climb to Alto del Vino, and the oxygen penalty to reach the blood at more than 2,800 meters, was nothing but a collective effort so that he, the Olympic champion, the Expreso del Carchi, on the other side of the river that separates Colombia from Ecuador, will win the stage and reach the leadership of the Tour Colombia, fourth edition, so Andean.
Carapaz won the stage, but his attack did not exhaust the resistance of the leader, Rodrigo Contreras, from Villapinzón, the one who returned to Colombia from Astana, nor that of his compatriot Jonathan Caicedo, another returnee from the WorldTour to continental asylum, from EF, precisely, the one whose teeth had come out in the other years of the Colombia Tour. Contreras, enormous waste of energy, one of the purples of Nu, the team of the son of the historic paisa Raúl Mesa, continues to lead with 17s over Carapaz; Caicedo, from the Mexican Petrolike team led in Colombia by David Plaza from Madrid, Olympic cyclist in Barcelona 92, class time trialist, is dangerously third, 7s behind his compatriot.
“Chaves is the favorite here and he knew the climb very well. He was very excited about today. But, in the end we were the four climbers, the four Latinos, who were doing very well. Rigo, Chaves, Cepeda and I, and, well, facing the end, I had also spoken with the boys at the beginning of the climb and I had told them that we were doing well,” explained the winner of the stage, who also had his little corner sentimental. “I have also run a lot here when I was a youth and under 23 and I knew every meter of the climb and I knew how hard it was.”
The EF did not prepare a tribute to Esteban Chaves, sadly those who had thought how nice it would be a triumph for the local boy who, as a child, would take him up and down before going to school, and his heart would beat so fast all week. who in 2016 had reached the podium of the Vuelta a España and the Giro d’Italia and had won a Giro de Lombardia, excitedly thinking about his return, at 34 years old, to the neighborhoods of his childhood. It was Chaves who opened the dance, like the best man does with the bride in wedding waltzes, attacking halfway up the climb, 14 kilometers from the finish line.
Since then the race did not stop accelerating and braking, moving with an alternately tachycardic or bradycardic heart rhythm that further discouraged the participants. sentimentaloides who expected that Egan, the wonder child of Zipaquirá, so close by, would resurrect definitively as a victor at the top of Alto del Vino just two years after his accident or that Nairo, still from Boyacá always cheered throughout Colombia, would ring the bell in his return to great cycling after the year of ostracism. Egan, regular and wise, with little change of pace, fought and was not far away. He came fourth, 33s behind Carapaz. Nairo, his desire betrayed by the lack of rhythm that his stoppage brought with it, soon disengaged from the fight. Accompanied by some Movistar, quickly, Nairoman lost more than six minutes.
Sentimental people always find comfort, hope even in the smallest details. They close the page with the day’s classification and open the profile page for the next day, Sunday, which brings the Tour Colombia to its end before the National Museum, in the center of Bogotá. Ah, but they climb Patios, to more than 3,000m, they discover. Oh, and if then… And they are moved by seeing in the gutter, among the fans, with his purple Nu jersey, another Chaves, Jhonathan Chaves, who only shares a last name with the beloved Esteban, but with him, whom they see so joyfully pedaling towards the finish line among the fans, they share their sorrow, remembering how the micro-dream of a truck driver who lost control of his monster for a few seconds, ended the lives of his brother Germán and his father, who were training on the highway. Oh, what would cycling be without sentimentality, a cynic’s game.