Fernando Gaviria dominates the sprint against Cavendish in the first stage of the Tour of Colombia | Cycling | Kinds of sports

There are victories that define, force and mark an entire career; it is impossible to escape from them. And the time that passes then accelerates and is a mirror that always answers all the questions, all the doubts, what I have done with my life. Nine years later, Fernando Gaviria, whose explosive career was marked by two victories over unbeaten Cavendish in 2015, returns to face the Englishman, now 38, with an obsession with stopping time as it slips through his fingers. As then, Gaviria wins, but, and the sadness and seriousness of his gesture surprises, he does not raise his hands. He almost drops his head between his shoulders, like those who almost regret what they did to win. He made a perfect sprint, a tightrope walker on steel: taking advantage of the Cavendish wheel, a place in the front row for which no one fought with him, the launch of the atomic train of the wise and strong Astanans, Bol and Morkov, measured space and time opened to their left and began to overflow, a Gaviria rocket takes off, they shout on their radios, simultaneously seeking shelter near the fences. He blocks the path of the young Italian Davide Persico, who wants to learn and hesitates when the gap closes. This doesn’t happen. He only complains, raising one hand, while Gaviria, the winner, lowers his head.

“The paths that needed to be opened have opened,” said Gaviria in a biblical voice, the deep bass of a Bach cantata, which, as soon as it finishes, goes to where the defeated man recovers, and when the one who refuses the hand gives him says that closed, replies that maybe, but that he didn’t do it on purpose. “But in fact, Persico may be right,” the winner adds to reporters. “I didn’t even see the video, I even talked to him and apologized.”

Cavendish finishes third

When he first won the sprint from Mark Cavendish, Fernando Gaviria was a beardless 20-year-old, a determined tracker from the Medellin velodrome who arrived with a plan for the Tour of San Luis in Argentina. I wanted to make some noise. He, who had barely left Columbia and whom few people knew, wanted to achieve high-profile victories over, perhaps, the best sprinter in history, the only Cavendish. To do this, he prepared several strategies and rehearsed with his coach John Jaime Gonzalez. He beat the unbeaten Englishman twice. Boom. Six months later, Gaviria, having won the World Championships in Athletics, signed with Quick Step, a Belgian team whose greatest pride is their current best sprinter. This is Cavendish’s team. It’s August 2015. Cavendish is not enough. He leaves at the end of the year, and Gaviria grows a wolf beard and devours sprints. This is FernanDios. It’s a proclamation of the future: Colombia is not just a land of bugs and tiny climbers. At the age of 21, he reinvented the Avenue de Grammont sprint, the cathedral of sprinting, the kilometer that all sprinters dreamed of when the Paris Tour ended there; in 22 – four stages and a cyclamen at the Giro out of 17; At 23 – two stages of the Tour 18. At 24 – a decline, at 25 – aggravated by persistent Covid, which exhausts him. At 29, a couple of weeks ago at the beginning of the year, Gaviria looked in the mirror again. He leaves his beard in a miniature bourgeois goatee in 1960s Paris. Unconvinced, perhaps by the change or the mirror’s reaction, Gaviria continues to remove hair from his face and ends the session with a mustache more like an Italian comedian’s mustache. wide, this is the valiant Alain Delon, with whom he goes to Lake Paipa to achieve victory over Cavendish, his friend. Friendship between sprinters who love and respect each other.

There is no one who would recognize Cavendish as a cheerful, smiling, obedient man who, accompanied by his wife’s first child, Peta Todd, now 18, allows himself to be hugged throughout Colombia. They care about each other. Cavendish, a rowdy boy from the Isle of Man, and Finnbar, a naive boy who closely experienced his stepfather’s moments of triumph and the difficult years of depression. Cavendish approaches the table where the kid is eating with the bearded journalists, and the first thing he does is check how much wine he has drunk, between admiration and affection, and Finnbar gets worried when Mark tells him that he had a terrible time with altitude, at an altitude of over 2500 meters over Paipa, who sometimes thought that he was drowning and that his oxygen saturation had dropped to 94. Despite everything, at altitude, on the Duitama straight, in front of the Postobon soda factory, a scene took place that was the most memorable in the memory of the frenzied sprint, the one that gave Miguel Indurainu second at the 95 World Championships, ahead of Marco Pantani, behind both runaway Olano, Mark Cavendish, 34 Tour stage wins, try the impossible.

You can follow EL PAÍS Deportes at Facebook And Xor register here to receive our weekly newsletter.