In the centuries-old history of the Tour it has also happened that a Carneade won it, as it was in 1956 with the almost unknown Roger Walkowiak or in 1966 with an Anquetil follower, Lucien Aimar. But in the roll of honor of the Grande Boucle, there is certainly the best of cycling from every era. But not all the champions who have won it have done it like Vincenzo Nibali, with absolute domination and with a confidence that never wavered, from Leeds to Paris: three weeks to be framed in the pages of great cycling with numbers that for to find similar ones you have to go back over the years: a Tour winner hadn't won at least four stages since 1984, the year of grace for Laurent Fignon, who hit his second Grande Boucle; 19 days in the yellow jersey – worn on the second stage and then handed it over to Tony Gallopin on the ninth for 24 hours before wearing it in the next stage and keeping it until Paris – places Nibali close to the unrivaled Merck of the 1969 Tour, when the Cannibal conquered the jersey yellow in the second timed half-stage of the first day of racing and he never gave up until the end.
But behind the numbers there is the substance of the performances exhibited by the Shark in France: Nibali immediately showed who he was by winning on the Sheffield floor with a final solo that gave him the first yellow jersey; on the pavé, where Froome fell and gave up, Nibali – who had always avoided Roubaix due to the dangers of the black and broken stones of the pavement – caused a sensation by putting more than two minutes between himself and Contador; on the first major climb of the Tour, on the Planche des Belles Filles, the Italian champion – Contador also died due to his crash – put on a show; an exploit that he punctually repeated in the Alps at Chamrousse and in the Pyrenees at Hautacam. Implacable, never upset, always master of the race: he won in the rain and in the cold of the North; he triumphed in the suffocating heat of the first Alpine stage. And he did all the feats with the air of someone who does the most normal things in this world, always available to everyone, sober in his statements, so far from that competitive trance, a sort of emotional "sturm und drag" which characterized the victories of Pantani, the last Italian to win the Tour before him, never a Martian human like last year's Froome who looked like a demigod dropped to the ground among the convicts of the pedal. This is Nibali, symbol of a cycling of champions but not of mutants, false heroes of the out-of-the-ordinary Watts and the crazy Vams: Nibali's exploit on the Hautacam proves it, made with times far removed from those of Rijs or Armstrong, emblems of a time in which “epo – as the former Texan superman confessed – was normal to assume as inflating the tubulars”.
Those who want to belittle a success of this magnitude appeal to the absences of Froome and Contador, the two super favorites of the eve, knocked out of the game prematurely due to two crashes. Since there is no counter-proof, it is an exercise for its own sake: certainly a fight between three big names of this size would have ignited the battle in the Alps and the Pyrenees. A stellar and epic fight that had long been anticipated knowing that Froome, Contador and Nibali himself had the Tour as the central objective of their entire season. Less certain is that the Nibali seen in this Tour would not have won anyway, even regardless of the advantage of over 2 and a half minutes that the Shark had over Contador at the time of retirement. It is only to be hoped that as soon as possible, in the Giro or the Tour, the three big names in cycling will find themselves, at the top of their form, perhaps with a fourth contender of the caliber of Nairo Quintana, a four of aces who has long world cycling did not number and that promises sparks. A multi-ethnic elite at the top of the planetary pedal which Nibali entered by right after his fabulous yellow ride in the Tour.
