Every year we try to put racing into words. Every year the road makes fools of us. This year more than most.
Kristof Ramon
There is a game we can play, best started somewhere around the second espresso of a race morning, where we bid to identify in advance the moment that will define a bike race. The attack that changes everything, or the puncture that doesn’t. The look between two riders that contains a whole negotiation, that lays out the stakes and the terms and has winners and losers all compressed into a second. We will be wrong, almost always. The sport is too fast and too complicated and too beautiful, and the moments that matter most tend to arrive sliding sideways, from directions nobody was watching.
I have spent this spring being wrong in new and interesting ways. I did not think Paul Seixas would be this good. I didn’t think Wout van Aert would do it. I thought Tadej Pogačar would, but not the way or when he did. When races are over, the guesses flip into attempts to understand. I felt something; you did too. What was it about this sport that did that to us? My job forces me to attempt the impossible, which is to write down in words what races and the athletes in them mean, despite the reality that cycling defeats language more completely than almost any other sport, making every sentence here a simplification of something that is fundamentally hostile to being simplified.
Here’s a simple thing too complicated to fully explain, though I’m about to try: This has been the best spring of bike racing I have watched.
It all started, as it usually does these days, in Siena.
Did we do a good job with this story?