Tour de France 2019: The victorious thesis of Elia Viviani in Nancy | sports

Bordering the hex on the north, the Tour arrives in Nancy, where Viviani signs her thesis on the perfect sprint.

The Italian printed it with his arms raised and his nose breaking the air in a book illustrated with multiple colors, those of his colleagues, so multinational: the yellow of Alaphilippe, the Tour leader, worker, who burned under the red flame of the last kilometer to place the train of your Viviani ahead of everyone; the red of the champion of Denmark, Morkov, who located Viviani pegadito to the fences, protected from the wind that his own speed raised against him in the tremendous avenue on the bank of the Meurthe, and the target of the champion of Argentina, Max Richeze, his last pitcher, who propelled him progressively up to his top speed (65 kilometers per hour) and, at 125 meters, completed his mission, turned to his right just enough to slow down and sufficiently the progression of the great rival, Kristoff, who had tried to anticipate his movements.

The thesis, a splendid demonstration that in cycling also science imitates man and his guts, he titled Viviani, 30, How I won my first stage in the Tour and I was able to join the five achieved in my Giro and the three of the Vuelta. A practical example After getting his doctorate in sprints, he threw up on the asphalt. With the bile they left their relief, their anxiety and the vanquished fear. Cipollini can already shut up.

Viviani is the most human of the sprinters, a race of runners who need to believe themselves untouchable to survive. When it comes to that conviction, and to repeated victories, it is also unbearable; if not, he sinks into misery and dark thoughts, cries and rages, as when in the Giro the VAR took away a victory. Two days later he came to confess that he had forgotten to sprint. The crisis lasted a month. Now write thesis.

The studies of physicists and mathematicians proliferate, who, fascinated by cycling and by the tools provided by wind tunnels and supercomputers, research and publish gogó. They do not enter to look for the veracity of the Poincaré conjecture, the mathematician who put Nancy on the map and the topology in the world, but something perhaps more complicated: can we make mathematical models of the infinite movements of the squad during the Tour? Clearing such apogee of the algorithm and artificial intelligence, it is concluded that all that has been achieved is that it can be scientifically stated that the cyclist's instinct is insurmountable. Win always. Science says that it is less difficult for a fugue to triumph if the fugitives ration their efforts and manage to increase their advantage, whose value will depend on the relief of the terrain, in the last kilometers: what everyone tries and the peloton, which acts as the owner of a dog that regulates the length of the belt according to the impulses of the dog in the walk, prevents. Physicists also venture that one like Caleb Ewan, Lotto's pocket sprinter, should always win by his aerodynamic superiority, so low he places his head, with his tongue brushing the front tubular. Ewan finished third: he could not go back to Viviani, whom the wind did not steal his position on the bike, but his teammates and the fences that he stuck to.

Alaphilippe is a little boy in his yellow pajamas, happiness made cyclist, and everything seems possible, until the journalists ask him if he is in cycling to mark history. He evades. Sylvain Chavanel sees him on TV and says: "he will be crazy with joy". For Chavanel, French, the yellow jersey that he wore a couple of days nine years ago is a memory. "I remember feeling that I had achieved my childhood dream and how popular it made me to be Tour leader, and there are still people who remember me for that, but it is a memory, life is something else", says Chavanel , who is 40 years old, is, by hobby, in the Tour de chauffeur de journalists of L'Équipe and trains Poitiers trotting horses. "They reach 55 kilometers per hour, but disqualify them if they gallop."

His equids could not be cyclists, who always go galloping and live in the next day. Imanol Erviti, the route captain of Movistar, is looking forward to the time to get ahead of the peloton and pull with the intention of doing damage, not purely defending. "If you hurt one day, you motivate yourself and the next day you come out to attack with more force", says the runner two days before the first good mountain stage. And he smiles with the evil smile of a murderer. There, in the Planche des Belles Filles, Enric Mas thinks he can be a leader; Egan Bernal says he plans to win.

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