The great cycling, launched towards spring, is gaining strength, and the Slovenians are entering the game. This Thursday blesses you. Primoz Roglic (Jumbo) has won the fourth stage of Tirreno-Adriatico and Tadej Pogacar (UAE) maintains the lead in Paris-Nice.
Roglic is 33 years old and has as many lives as a cat.
What a year his was, 2022. He had fallen on the Tour, dislocating his shoulder, and had finished off in the Vuelta -he was defending the title that he had won in 2019, 2020 and 2021-, after a disconcerting accident in the sprint of the stage in Tomares, when everything had broken. His shoulder that was battered was getting more battered. A broken vertebra, a bruised body, a wrist, a hand, a face…
The sinister had sent him to the operating room. The surgery left him weighed down, and dwarfs grew on top of him, even within his own team: in his absence, Jonas Vingegaard (26) had grown up and had rounded off a sorpasso in the Tour and had taken Pogacar ahead.
What was Jumbo to do then?
Enthrone Vingegaard and rule out Roglic? Compromise with both? Was it worth compromising? Was Roglic really coming back?
The Jumbo decided to temporize, and the result of the plan is proving him right.
On his return to the stage, these days in Italy, Primoz Roglic is once again a dazzling cyclist, as tidy as he is ambitious, and also efficient in the decisive stages. This Thursday, in the three ascents to Tortoreto, he has been among the greats of the race, he has moved along with Julien Alaphilippe, Enric Mas, Tao Geoghegan Hart and Adam Yates, and he has finished wonderfully to win the stage, the fourth of seven, and around the lead to Lennard Kämna (Bora-Hansgrohe), who barely leads him by six seconds.
Different, calmer, the Paris-Nice ran. After the storm on Wednesday, when Tadej Pogacar tormented Vingegaard and scored everything for him, the stage and the lead, this time the race passed at half throttle, without revs, or breakaways, or scares or crashes in the final stretch, to resolved to sprint.
The Dutchman Olav Kooij, a precocious 21-year-old cyclist, a Jumbo cyclist, like Roglic and Vingegaard, has won, while Pogacar, comfortable all day, remains the leader, with a six-second margin over David Gaudu.
On Friday the race will be tense. A medium-mountain stage is expected, pending the outcome on Saturday at the Col de la Couillole, in the Maritime Alps, of 15 kilometers at an average of 7.1%.