It's becoming a new global discipline, but I confess it doesn't attract me at all: counting Pogacar's victories. This good man hasn't yet managed to be accepted as extraordinary - yes, I confirm ad nauseam, to the point of stoning: the idea closest to a second Merckx - that he already has to undergo a new examination before the merciless court of supreme priests. The starting idea: before saying he's the new Merckx, let's see how many victories he puts together, then we'll talk about it. It's a materialistic, cynical, arithmetic view of reality. It has nothing romantic or artistic about it. It's what we're dealing with these days, where taste has reached rock-bottom levels, with so many people who can no longer distinguish War and Peace from a TV news bulletin, a Giotto from a house painter, a Battisti from a rapper, Pansa's article from an Ansa agency release. We must resist, but it's getting harder: the people's tribunals show no mercy and take no prisoners. What does this Pogacar want, let's see how many races he wins, then we'll talk...

A somewhat sensible, critical, aware taste can obviously go beyond numbers. Without much theory, I'll make it very practical: from my point of view, a champion's victories are like a company's stocks, they are not counted but weighed. Returning to Pogacar: now that he has passed the hundred mark, it means nothing to me. Fifty or two hundred would be the same. Scrolling through the list of (first) Hundred, it's rare to find minor stages in the Tour of Malaysia or similar stuff. But this is rarely discussed. Now Teddy's victories are counted, not weighed. Yet, at the risk of tilting at windmills, I want to make a clear point about this trend: the victories of this modern prodigy are always substantial, true, valuable. At worst, Teddy wins at Tirreno-Adriatico or Dauphiné, but no one can deny that even these are not minor victories nowadays, given the hunger and participants in the race. In any case, it's not up to me to make a shopping list: exploring Teddy's Hundred is an incredible journey into the great hunting ground of cycling.

Yamal hasn't even scored or won as much as Messi yet: and yet everyone is justifiably talking about the new Messi, or even better. Those in football don't count, because they're notoriously exalted and narrow-minded? Fine. But there could be another explanation: those in football still know how to distinguish a super dribble, a super shot, super intelligence, in short, a super show compared to the normality of a good player. I don't think it's the same in cycling: here there's an entire movement of true militant resistance to suffocate any recognition of exceptionality, like an unconscious envy in front of the unreachable, to keep him here on earth, close to us, close to our normality, when it's not mediocrity. We are still those who define and headline a "feat" as a 40-kilometer breakaway by a half-rate rider with an hour's gap in the standings, without much distinction from a 70-80 kilometer breakaway by a man fighting for the leader's jersey. We are still those who would get equally excited and headline in nine columns for Visconti's or Nibali's victories, with no offense to anyone, just to say that victories are all beautiful, but this way they all become the same and then you don't understand what a Monument race is.

Looking at the numbers, at 26 years old Pogacar has an impressive Hundred, enough to make one jump out of their seat. Yet it doesn't make me hot or cold, because without being his father or even just his cousin, but neither a friend nor a courtier, I'm already jumping out of my seat for where and how, for the name of these trophies and the way he goes to get them, in line and in stages, in the mountains and downhill, in February and October, against any opponent. This is Pogacar's new myth, not his number. This is the show that this era has incredibly gifted us: a masterpiece of quality, not quantity. Whether he wins or loses a Tour, it really doesn't change anything for me. A defeat won't diminish and shrink the giant (for the record, as he himself remembered in the beautiful interviews for his 80th birthday, even Eddy used to lose, just ask Maertens, at random).

I'll close by returning to my basket, leaving out the sickening discussion that renews itself every time in front of Teddy's victory or defeat. Like in the game of goose, we always go back to square one. How boring. I prefer to enjoy the fortune of this Slovenian Epiphany, in an era where the prodigious and phenomenal no longer seemed possible, overwhelmed and annihilated by sciences and technologies. Obviously, I wish everyone could one day calm down, without partisan fury, and enjoy the show. Every opportunity left is lost. Of this kind, they don't come often. Every fifty years.

from tuttoBICI of July