FLorencia, his fleur-de-lis, cradles the idea of the Renaissance, light, art, proportion, advancement, civilization. The Tour de France 2024 is illuminated in the city of the Medici, that of the Academy, where it nests Michelangelo’s David, the perfect sculpture. A balance of strength, balance and beauty that 176 warriors They will try to capture on the bicycle to touch the glory in A stringthe finale forced this edition by the Olympic Games in Paris.
The contest is going to be at the highest level with the best and most powerful of the peloton in contention. Tadej Pogacar, Jonas Vingegaard, Primoz Roglic, Remco Evenepoel, Wout van Aert y Mathieu Van der Poel, el Big Six of cycling will go down to the sand to fight along 3,492 kilometers and 52,230 grueling meters of accumulated elevation gaincrossing four countries: Italy, San Marino, France and Monaco. You can’t have a better participation. There are all those who should be in search of the most prestigious stage race on the calendar.
Two time trials await, the crossing of four massifs (Apennines and the Italian Alps, the French, the Central Massif and the Pyrenees) with seven mountain stages and four high finishes. Also included is a day with 14 sections of sterrato for the first time.
Los Alpes will be visited again on the nineteenth day, with Embrun and Isola 2000. The transit through the Pyrenees will be covered in two days, the first with visits to the Tourmalet, Ancizan and Saint Lary-Soulan; in the second they are promoted Peyresourde and Plateau de Beille or the mythical La Bonette which emerges as a port of passage in stage 19.
Date with the legend
Tadej Poagacar has accumulated a total of 31 days of competition in which he has won Strade Bianche, Volta a Catalunya, Lieja-Bastoña-Lieja and cannibalized his first Giro with six stage wins. Now, 33 days after Roma He has announced that he has “never” felt “so good on the bike.”
Pogacar He will have the most powerful and ambitious team of his career, the “Real Madrid of the Tour”, as Evenepoel said yesterday. Three roosters like Yates, Almeida and Juan Ayuso; and four excellent gregarious people such as Marc Soler, Nils Politt, Pavel Sivakov and Tim Wellens They will be at your command to reign in yellow again three years later.
Danish mystery
The Tour seemed over for Vingegaard since last April 4, when he was destroyed in an ugly fall on the descent of Olaeta. Admitted for 12 days (ICU included) at the Araba-Txagorritxu University Hospital after the fracture of the cright lavicle, several ribs and suffer a pneumothorax which set off alarms in his team and the doctors. “Being in the Tour is already a victory,” he said yesterday at the presentation of the race.
A month later he went up again Cervelo and arrives after completing a concentration at altitude in Tignes. Experts say that he is ruled out for almost everything, but the reality is that in the peloton no one trusts the current champion who Covid has deprived of his great support, Sepp kiss.
Spain knows the way
Fifteen Spanish cyclists are in Florence. The figure of the leader of Ineos emerges, Carlos Rodriguez, winner in Morzine and fifth overall, who wants to improve his first records, more established in a British structure that continues to look for the way forward.
Juan Ayuso makes his debut in the Tour under the orders of Pogacar and with the certainty that he will have his opportunity to fulfill his dream of winning the best race in the world. The context for the Catalan could not be better and the team’s ambition is maximum.
Movistar Team, the only Spanish team in the running, arrives encouraged with the hope of winning again and with Enrique Mas trapped in the search for a great general. Many hopes for the start of the best Tour of the millennium, an unbeatable edition from all points of view.
