Tour de France. The dart is Philipsen, the sling is van der Poel

Loneliness is a secondary, almost elitist dimension of pedaling if you are a professional runner by trade. It’s an ambition, something you aim for. It’s tiring to look for it, difficult to find, it always pays off, as long as you’re followed. When it appears in everyone’s queue, it’s usually a torture, a bestial effort and that’s it, in which even hope is stronger, we find ourselves detached from it too. It is not always possible to achieve solitude, it rarely materializes, for some it is simpler, in any case never easy. Sometimes it is beyond complicated. Especially when there are no hills. The plain is community, it considers being alone weird if not heresy. The will of the many always bends that of the few, the law of the group is valid and the law of the group always leads to the same conclusion: the sprint.

Between Dax and Nogaro, according to the almost never linear geography of the Tour de France, there were 181 kilometres, there was a long up and down the plain, which plain never really is – or at least according to the conception of the Po valley, in the sense of plain, of the term –, French: this is what France offers. There was a will from the sprinters’ teams to give them a chance and the sprinters are many and determined, also because it’s still the fourth stage. And then off all together, not too quickly, until the finish. A community procession with the exception of Benoît Cosnefroy and Anthony Delaplace, to get some air for about sixty kilometers with very little chance of reaching the finish line and, to tell the truth, even little conviction of succeeding.

It’s true that you pedal better in a group, if you’re not in front of pulling it’s much less effort, but it’s a sometimes illusory truth. Especially in the last kilometres, when the speed increases and as this increases, the spaces seem to get tighter. If you want to have any chance of making a good sprint, you have to stay in front, but everyone wants to be in front and the risk of ending up on the ground increases exponentially. More than someone on the ground ended up there, many possible protagonists. You can’t help but stay in the top positions though, so you have to take risks, starting too far behind means you have less chance of winning. This is how it works, always and always like this. Provided you don’t have a slingshot capable of launching you twice as fast as the others.

Jasper Philipsen he doesn’t have a slingshot, but he’s lucky to have Mathieu van der Poel in the team, who isn’t a slingshot, he’s much better. He is a rare kind of wizard who has the ability to shorten space and accelerate time.

In that game of high-speed shoulders and dancing trajectories that took place on the Nogaro circuit, Jasper Philipsen looked doomed in the last five hundred meters. He was behind, too far behind. Victory seemed to be destined for others, for all those, and they were not few, who were in front of him. Then Mathieu van der Poel entered the scene. The Dutchman found a good space to pass, recovered about ten positions and increased his speed. When he moved – it all happened within a few hundred meters – Jasper Philipsen found himself almost in the lead. It was only up to him. He had to do what he does best: pedal very fast. He did. He took the lead of the group and never let go. He did his utmost in a kick that was not even perfect, but good enough to keep Caleb Ewan’s perfect one behind him. First to cross the finish line, second success in the Tour de France, and in a row. He wasn’t taken for granted, it could have gone differently, for a few moments it seemed impossible. It happened.