There are submerged and creeping topics, by their nature boring and convoluted, which are regularly ignored. Enormous mistake. Because more than many chats, they explain how modern cycling is changing, or how it has already inexorably changed.

There's nothing like a flat stage with a sprint finish to bring back to the surface the most important of these epochal changes (which unfortunately rhymes with fatal). In the late afternoon, post-race zone, super experts of the sector reinvented as commentators explain to themselves and to us the why and how of the sprint. The drama: they use technical canons and linguistic terms from another geological era. Obsolete oldness. There's no train, these two companions each went their own way instead of one sacrificing for the other, where is that other one who only wastes energy for such a placement so tomorrow he won't have any left to help the captain...

Canonical and predictable things that were valid fifty years ago, maybe even ten, but now sound like archaeology. Or like Chinese in a Bolivian conference.

Just take a morning walk among the buses at the starting lineup to hear today's words, much clearer and simpler, which perfectly represent what we have become in good and bad. End of team play, end of all for one, end of logic and ultimately of the true sporting sense, that is, the pursuit of victory. It's no longer valid, it no longer matters. Now we race with another objective, for another purpose: to make points.

This is, gentlemen who still stubbornly love and follow cycling, the new password to enter true understanding. Today's teams, today's riders, thanks to (raving: my definition, ed) regulations have only one mantra: make points, make points. In any way, at any cost. Even at the cost of racing like this, all there in the final sprint, each for their own account, each for their own interests. The new philosophy of competition: better to have three or four in the top ten than one alone in first place. Better many placements than a single victory.

Obviously, this is not a problem for squads with thirty/forty million euro budgets, with Pogacar and Van Der Poel on the roster: they make more points than surgeons. The problem, haunting, even anguishing, is for medium-small teams, always on the edge in international rankings between inside-outside the elite circle, for whom certainly a victory makes curriculum, sponsorship contracts, prestige, but maybe it's worth nothing in terms of international ranking.

Moving at the start in Alberobello, I hear Fortunato explain that with Velasco and Scaroni they've set up a half social race of who makes more points in Astana, to keep a team position within the eighteenth, basically to not be relegated like Lecce or Empoli in Serie B, which here means grand tours only by invitation. A little further I hear Basso and Zanatta clearly explaining how their Polti now proceeds with divergent eyes, one eye to keep Piganzoli in the ranking (who anyway next year will be taken by Visma at heavy figures) and maybe win a stage, but at the same time the other eye always turned to making points, so far only 6 out of 14 they've made and that's not enough, Basso wants them all in points, more or less, because without points you don't go anywhere anymore. Same speeches from uncle Bruno Reverberi, who confirms and subscribes, adding in his own way a frank and direct judgment, "if they don't invent another system to rank teams we'll all end up in trouble"...

One can continue long with the litany. But the most surprising thing is this: such an enormous problem, capable of overturning and distorting cycling, is silenced or anyway ignored at the highest levels, where rules are decided, made, canceled, changed. Everyone agrees, it's becoming a points cycling like an Esselunga card, a cycling where you fight for promotions and relegations on the edge of a point, only to realize that victory is no longer the number one objective, at least not for the majority of riders and teams. Then you believe that Fiorelli and Marcellusi, in Albania, go to make two single sprints for Bardiani instead of making one as a team. Eighth and ninth (barring Marcellusi's relegation) are worth much more than a sixth/seventh and an eighty-fifth. Unfortunately. But as Totò used to say, it's the sum that makes the total. Too bad that in today's cycling, it's the rules that make you laugh.