You could hear it before you could see it. A few hundred metres past the finish line, Jonas Abrahamsen slowed to a stop, surrounded by a pack of Uno-X Mobility staffers who were surrounded by Continental-sponsored crowd control guys who were surrounded by TV cameras and photographers who were surrounded by hacks like me. From the centre came guttural Nordic yells of “JAAAA”, with Abrahamsen and his colleagues in a state of shock and delight as the moment began to sink in.
A soigneur poured a bottle of water on the rider’s neck as his head slumped to the handlebars and his breath heaved against his jersey. Uno-X’s team boss, Thor Hushovd, stood beside Abrahamsen with his glacier blue eyes welling up. After three years and countless attempts, Uno-X – and Abrahamsen, their talismanic bastion of the breakaway – had finally gotten the win.
Mathieu van der Poel rolled up for a handshake. Wout van Aert, too. If things had gone a little differently, this stage could have gone their way. But today it didn’t. Maybe you could call it fate, or – as Abrahamsen suggested in a post-finish interview – maybe it was a miracle. But no matter what divine intervention you might care to project onto this stage, there were more human realities: a hard, hot, and scintillating day’s racing, from start to end.
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