EGAN BERNAL A WINNER REBORN

A hard rain was falling over the Passo Giau when Egan Bernal seemed to end the Giro d’Italia as a contest. Three kilometres from the summit of the pass, at the end of a shortened stage, the Colombian launched a long, seated acceleration that his few remaining rivals could not follow.

Ten metres quickly became 50, and Bernal was alone on the mountainside. The live television images cut out almost immediately after his attack, but that was but a minor detail. We had already seen enough. It was easy to imagine Bernal’s progress from here. The image of ‘un uomo solo al comando’ is stitched into the fabric of the Giro, after all. Bernal was alone, in charge of the race. On the frigid descent into Cortina d’Ampezzo, the race radio provided sporadic updates of the whereabouts of Bernal’s rivals, but even here, five stages from Milan, the time gaps already felt an irrelevance. Bernal’s actions in the final kilometre, in any case, said rather more about his advantage than the clock.

Bike races are measured in seconds won and lost, but it’s the grand gestures that endure. Rather than fight for every available second, Bernal now slowed, unhurriedly divesting himself of his black jacket and tucking it away inside his maglia rosa. He frittered away 10 seconds or more in doing so, and yet it scarcely appeared to matter. Creating an image for posterity seemed to trump the urgency of gaining time in the here and now. Bernal had entered the Giro nursing a nagging back injury, but quickly eased