Merci, Loulou
Julian Alaphilippe's nearly-perfect goodbye
I’ve been watching too much of the Olympics. I know this because when I heard on Saturday morning that Julian Alaphilippe has decided after ten years to leave Soudal-Quickstep, and that he would be riding the Clásica de San Sebastián later that day, I thought, well, this is perfect.
Obviously, Alaphilippe would win the race and give his team the perfect early goodbye present. It’s the sort of story that’s almost a dime-a-dozen during the fortnight of the Olympic Games. An athlete signs off a sparkling career with a final Olympic gold. An athlete says goodbye with one last Olympic record for the books. An athlete wins yet another gold medal, this time on their birthday. You get the idea.
It would be perfect content for The Musette, too. What a gracious thing for Alaphilippe to do, to create content for Substack’s newest cycling publication.
It looks like it’s going to plan. Breakaways go, as they do in one-day races and, as they usually do in one-day races, they come back. Pavel Sivakov of UAE Team Emirates goes on the attack and looks good for a while, but, crucially, hasn’t just announced some big career news so obviously isn’t going to win.
He’s reeled back in by a group that contains - yes, he’s there - Julian Alaphilippe. He attacks and the group splinters further. There are other riders involved such as Marc Hirschi, Lennert Van Eetvelt, Andreas Kron and Patrick Konrad, but surely they’ve read the script.
Jonas Vingegaard certainly has. Visma-Lease a Bike are pacing for this year’s Tour de France runner-up early in the race but as the race heats up he cools down and dropps away. An underwhelming return to racing from the perspective of the Dane but the perfect return from the perspective of me, poised and ready to write about Alaphilippe’s goodbye gift.
The final short, sharp climb sees Alaphilippe and Hirschi attack the front of the race. Over the top it is them, alone, with Van Eetvelt giving chase.
Everyone knows the winner will be Alaphilippe or Hirschi, and, given his news, it will be Alaphilippe. Van Eetvelt gives a spirited chase but he surely won’t catch them. The time gap to him grows but the two leaders don’t know this. They twitch, look behind them, tighten their shoes ready for the final sprint. They ask each other for the time gap, they both don’t know. Alaphilippe asks the motorbike for the gap, who presumably does.
Meanwhile the residents of San Sebastian stroll by in the background. They lounge on the beach. After watching the Tour de France and then the Olympics, seeing people close to a bike race who aren’t bothered about the bike race is jarring.
But close to the finish the crowd is healthy. They are ready to cheer home the winner and the winner will be Alaphilippe. Surely.
The two men sprint. They choose different lines and from afar they look level, neck-and-neck, impossible to separate. But as the camera zooms in and the finish line looms one man is clearly ahead. His wheel nudges in front and on the line the winner is clear. It’s Marc Hirschi.
Hirschi has not read the script. He is not Julian Alaphilippe and so should not be winning the race.
But once the dust settles and I’m finished mourning my copy, it’s not hugely surprising that a rider like Hirschi has won the race. He’s classy. He’s won a stage of the Tour de France, La Fleche Wallonne, he’s just won the four-stage long Czech Tour.
But he hasn’t announced big career news this weekend. And so, according to my Olympics-addled brain, used to perfect stories and wonderful endings, he isn’t supposed to win.
What Marc Hirschi is, though, is out of contract at the end of the season. When that new contract comes it is now sure to be a little bit bigger than before. So maybe Hirschi has read the script, after all. It’s just the one he’s written.
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