VAN AERT'S FALLS

It took me a few hours to translate this article properly, and I'm sorry I can't fully convey Marco Bucciantini's whimsical way of writing. It will definitely get lost in translation.

Also, Bucciantini is a journalist who loves Wout and who tends to see poetry in everything – he talks about cycling, football, tennis. He's always very poetic and dreamy in his way of seeing sports and analysing them.

Quick mention: there's a small section where he talks about a cyclist's body – the second paragraph after the big one in bold – so be careful if that's a sensitive topic for you.

I've linked the article in Italian in the source, but it's behind paywall.

VAN AERT'S FALLS

MAGNIFICENT LOSER AND THE MEANING OF CYCLING

When twenty riders fall, there's Wout van Aert among them.

Even when two riders fall, one of them is van Aert.

When everyone gets up, wounded but with the incorruptible thought of going back and pedal again, there's one who needs to surrender to pain: that one is van Aert.

In the Vuelta, we count the hours that O'Connor has left before Roglič ends his meticulous work, but van Aert isn't there and that's a bruise we feel on our body; it's the regret of a lost emotion.

The Belgian is cycling personified, and pure.

His scheme is that of an amateur cyclist who seeks images in order to keep pushing in his interest-free bike rides; it's the dream of the boy who fantasizes about his future as he consumes his age hunched over his top tube; it's the ambition of all those who leave as they search on the horizon for that ghost city towards where they'll push with all their energy.

It's a ritual: if Wout is there, something magnificent will happen, a very strong thought, a limitless one.

He leaves the peloton behind and he doesn't consider the distance, maybe he doesn't even consider the strength he has left.

His cycling is one of wishes. He wasn't content with being fast, with organising a team for his sprints.

In the 2021 Tour de France (when he helped Vingegaard reach the podium), he found three days in which he explored his creativity: he won the most irrational stage, with the double Mont Ventoux, and in the second climb he left everyone behind and faced the hypoxia of the naked and feral summit for 11 km, alone.

Then he won the time-trial, and also the coveted sprint on the Champs-Élyseés.

He's a complete cyclist: too heavy to dream of winning stage races, he's chosen to ride to win every possible stage, fully conscious that this has cemented his integral role in the collective imagination, and has deprived him of joys.

For years he's been the beacon of every road race and consequently the light to put out.

They've raced against him, and he's almost always lost – enormous losses.

And yet, the fact that he's a losing dominator, a living oxymoron thrown with an open heart, rewards him with a place that is only his.

Wout celebrates the essence of cycling and reminds us of what being a cyclist is: skin, and bones, and muscles only where they're needed in order to spin the chain – a defleshed body on the edge between glory and tragedy because when a cyclist falls, he gets hurt, he loses his skin, he breaks his bones, and he sometimes loses his life.

A cyclist is bravery and fragility combined; he throws himself into a descent, trusting only 25 millimeters of tyre tread, on frameworks that weigh 600 grams: this is the structure that supports those who rummage into themselves until they break down, with desperation born out of necessity.

Those who don't dig into themselves and who don't fall because of a gamble can't really be a cyclist. It's the indestructible honesty of a sport that was scarred by lies, but remains intact in the recondite part of us, and in everyone's memory: the bike is part of everyone's story, as individuals and as a society.

So, van Aert fell, like a worn-out bull in an arena – but the bull always has it worse.

He fell twice: at the beginning of the stage when he hit his elbow, but he resumed quickly, as to prevent fear from entering his thoughts, and he carried the bold ones of that day through Spain, almost as an older brother.

Then the descent towards the Lagos that the Belgian can control, also thinking about the Worlds Championships, the last true remaining goal of the season.

But those aren't the clothes that make a cyclist.

Two riders fall, the other resumes the race immediately.

Wout leaves on the road the fine skin of the knee, the certain green jersey, the likely KOM jersey – but skin grows back, and he collects jerseys anyway.

We've got a bruise left, but it will fade away as long as there's someone like van Aert in the world.