If football exalts identity, cycling exalts humanity. If football idealises colours, group emotions, cycling idealises the human condition. Football groups us into exclusive factions, gives us an ID card and invites us to congratulate ourselves on the opponents’ defeats; cycling promotes identification with the best, even if it is not “ours”. Cycling teams have no sentimental significance. Nor does it have the nationality of the runners (although nationalism would always want to put it down). Wherever he is from, we applaud the one who crowns the summits, beats the stopwatch, is more regular in his effort, more resistant in the difficulties, more intelligent in the dosage of his energies, more collaborative with his teammates and, even, more lucid in the alliances he weaves with his rivals, all the while doing kilometers.
Football is the great substitute religion. Cycling, on the other hand, is pure admiration for the effort that some humans make to overcome the limits of our condition and become heroes. The legend of football is only built on victories, on the other hand cycling can turn a loser into a myth: Poulidor. The beauty of football can never be separated from success. The beauty of a climb does not cease to be when the cyclist, exhausted, squeezed, collapses, like Pogacar the other day. Cycling glorifies struggle. A football team is said to have failed if, despite fighting with beauty and determination, it loses by a goal in the last second. Cycling celebrates effort: it glorifies victories, yes, but it is moved by defeats.
It had been years since I had been so excited about cycling as in this last Tour de France. In my childhood, which is now remote, the announcers used to describe the passing of cyclists with the delicious cliché of the “multi-colored snake”. Sometimes the snake crossed the road in my village. First the motorbikes and the propaganda cars, then the leader, like a rocket, and, all the way behind, the ragged pilot. All of us kids knew how to ride a bike and understood the difficulty of running so fast. We applauded the most latecomers. We were also delighted by the cardboard visors that the advertising caravan threw away after the runners had passed. We hadn’t seen Bahamontes run, but he was a legendary climber, like Bartali and Coppi, the first Italian surnames our grandparents taught us. The sleepless battle between Anquetil and Poulidor raised a first moral lesson: the most strenuous and combative always lost; cold and calculating won. When Merckx, the cannibal, arrived, we came to believe that Alexander the Great was coming back riding a bicycle. We never despised the other names, less showy, but formidable: the fearless Gimondi, the brave Julio Jiménez, Ocaña, the tragic hero…
There were moments of great enthusiasm: Hinault, Indurain, Delgado, Lemond. Moments of great lies, such as the victories of Armstrong, the great forger. The doping trap denatured cycling. Fraudulent heroism anticipated the time of post-truth. Although mistrust is the solvent of our time, I want to think that the fight between Vingegaard and Pogacar does not hide any traps. It’s anthological what we’ve experienced all these days, when Pogacar attacked on the hardest climbs, and the yellow jersey, tireless, portentous, stuck to his wheel. He looked like Hector against Achilles, the invincible. A fight worthy of the Trojan War.
