Then suddenly you find yourself facing a climb. Which is always a challenge and a bit like the story of life. It was the same today at Plateau of Beille on the Pyrenees for Tadej Pogačar And Jonas Vingegaardit will be tomorrow, the day after tomorrow and in the next few days to measure ourselves and play it out. But in reality it is like this for everyone, for those who ride, professionals, enthusiasts, trained, last-minute nobody, any tapascioni. The climb is the challenge of challenges, what gives meaning to cycling, to its story, to its tiring beauty. And selfies are not needed to testify, to certify: it has always been like this. The essence of sport is not stored in the memory of a smartphone. It is elsewhere, history and present. Just listen to a breath that becomes shortness of breath, just look into each other’s eyes. Tadej And Jonas today they almost never deigned to look at each other except when they were four and a half kilometers from the summit. An instant, their eyes met as if in a flash and they both understood how this endless stage in the scorching heat of the Pyrenees would end. Five, ten, twenty seconds, a minute that the Slovenian has put in the back pocket of his yellow jersey and that reassures him a lot on his journey to the French Riviera because three minutes in general are a lot even if the Alps are still there, even if Jonas will not give up, even if there is still a third week to go, even if the efforts of the Giro could count. Even if… But when suddenly you find yourself facing a climb, when you demolish the record of Mark Pantaniwhen your legs spin as if they were repeating a gesture from memory that doesn’t recall the effort, the speeches (for the others) are worthless. Because as in the Giro so in the Tour up to now there is the cycling of Tadej Pogacar and it is a cycling that leaves no room for calculations and tactics and perhaps leaves no escape and that’s it. The others watch him go and immediately realize that they will never catch him again. They accept it, they don’t even try to organize themselves: they try to defend themselves or they give up. “It was a fair race and it went well for us – explains the Slovenian champion upon arrival – I would never have imagined this type of result given how the second week started. I’m super happy with my form. It was a super hard and super hot day, and usually I have a bit of difficulty with the heat. The Visma team knew that the final climb was so steep that using someone’s slipstream was not that influential, and they probably hoped that I wouldn’t survive Jonas’s strong pace until the finish. I was a bit on the edge when he attacked for the first time, but after that I could feel that he was suffering a bit. He tried to leave me again and I saw that he didn’t have the legs to do it, so I tried too even though I was aware that I could give up…”. But the climb doesn’t lie. And above all, the Pyrenees don’t lie. Two stages won here, one after the other, are the “seal” of a Lord in Yellow who is preparing to go down in history with a double.