Cycling has a special flavor, an aroma that other sports do not enjoy. It is the grace that allows us to record dates for history… to remember. And without a doubt, although Paris-Nice is only the little sister of the Tour, the March 8, 2023 will go down in history as the day on which Tadej Pogacar took Jonas Vingegaard out of the wheel, with an attack as savage as it was ambitious, to take him 43 seconds on top of a mountain that until now had no danger, the Lodge des Gardesand put on the back the same ‘jersey’ that he will want to wear on the Champs-Élysées in Paris.
It is true that there are still almost four months to go before the Tour and that what happens now has nothing to do with what happens in the summer. But is that vingegaard He came from win everything in Galicia giving the feeling that he almost had time in relation to the rest of the rivals to have a seafood platter with a sip of Ribeiro.
And it is also true that Pogacar had exhibited himself in such a way in Andalusia to think that the duel between the two in the Paris-Nice could mark that story that, precisely, took place this March 8. Two runners to power, but with the slogan that only one would reign. And this was going to be Pogacar.
Stage and lead for the Slovenian runner after an attack as ferocious as it was brutal, as brutal as it was savage, as colossal as it was magnificent, a demarcation to which he could not respond vingegaarddespite trying, despite having the Slovenian just five meters away when there was a kilometer and a half left and moments before the penultimate change of pace of pogacar to succumb and surrender to the ‘cannibalism’ of the Slovenian runner.
Was a pogacar who still had the strength to finish off David Gaudúthe fittest French cyclist in recent months, in another final sprint and uphill that became the last exhibition of the Slovenian in a March 8, 2023 which is already part of the story.
Such was the superiority of pogacar that one might think that the Paris-Nice, even with three stages of mountainous layout, is already sentenced. But the champions, and vingegaard it is, they have that special gift, like the day they Eddy Merckxon the way to Marseilles, resurfaced before Luis Ocana, in that Tour (1971) that the man from Cuenca would have won if he did not fall in the col de Menté. And so, few examples, few really, but that a superclass like vingegaard can execute despite the unquestionable and fantastic pogacar.