Rather you than me

Wind, mud, rain, and how to stop Tadej Pogačar

Tadej Pogačar on his way to winning the Giro dell’Emilia. Photo by jackph15 via Shutterstock.

Settling down to watch the racing over the last few days, I wasn’t harbouring any lingering regrets that I had not tried to become a professional cyclist. I do like exercising but I like exercising for about an hour every few days. An hour playing football or maybe the odd run. I do not like the idea of riding my bike for hundreds of kilometres every day. That sounds hard and tiring. There’s also the small but important matter of me having the balance of an elephant on roller-skates. This makes me patently unsuited to being a professional cyclist.

This last week’s racing has not added any regret, then, but instead has almost entirely wiped it away.

We’ll start with Paris-Tours, the ancient one-day race frequently labelled the sprinter’s classic. Now in it’s 118th year, and still for reasons best known to the cycling overlords taking place in October. Occasionally we get nice Octobers but not this year. The race was marked by good, hard racing, particularly from the eventual winner Christophe Laporte and the unlucky runner-up, Mathias Vacek, but also by horrendous mud and rain.

Laporte on crossing the finish line looked like he’d spent the day swimming in a muddy ditch rather than racing his bike. Paris-Tours is quite prestigious, but unlike the Italian races we’re about to talk about, sits out on its own at the end of the season. It’s not there to help riders build form for bigger prizes or provide a career-defining victory. Only the hardiest riders come to test themselves and to win one of the sport’s oldest races. These guys clearly really love riding their bike.

If I had been a professional cyclist, I have no doubt I would not have been the kind to ride Paris-Tours. Too cold and muddy for me.

No, if I had been a professional cyclist and absolutely forced to race in October, I’d have pushed for the Italian programme. Normally you’d have a better chance to get some nice weather down in Italy than in the middle of France in October, but that wasn’t the case this week.

The riders taking part in the Giro dell’Emilia looked absolutely soaking. It wasn’t raining cats and dogs so much as cows and sheep. And to make matters worse all but one of the riders probably thought they had no chance of winning. That’s because the one rider who did was Tadej Pogačar.

Fresh from dominating the world championships he looked ready to dominate here, and so it proved. He attacked with thirty seven kilometres still to go (a pittance compared to the 101 in the worlds) and that was that.

That wasn’t that for him, obviously, it was still hard, or as hard as bike racing seems to be for Tadej. To the rest of us it looks like he’s playing a computer game on easy, but I’m sure to him it’s still at least a bit tricky.

At Tre Valli Varesine however the world of professional cycling found a way to stop Tadej Pogačar winning. They cancelled the race. That was only after a few laps of the course in rain that made that which had fallen on the Giro dell’Emilia look like a light drizzle, though. The riders eventually paused in Varese and agreed with the race organisers that they should stop. This was sensible given, as Pogačar would later state, they “couldn’t see.”

But there are still races left this season, and a big one too in Il Lombardia. It may be October but professional cycling lumbers on through the wind, the mud and the rain. Not me. I’ll be watching from the comfort of my sofa.

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