Paraphrasing the saying "even the rich cry", the feeling after the cursed eighth stage of the Vuelta, a transfer day transformed into a carnage of crashes, is that "even alien phenomena are human beings".

Reviewing Tadej Pogacar's trajectory through the Spanish Grand Tour, which was supposed to hand him the triple crown without a hitch and instead sent him home wounded, it seems almost as if the last three days have been an escalation in reverse. A return to human limitations.

A descending climax that begins on Thursday toward Castellón de la Plana. He sets off alone on the Bartolo twenty-four kilometers from the finish and you think it's the usual solo ride, instead at the summit you find Enric Mas catching up to him and even stealing the KOM points. Then the sprint duel is obviously Pogacar's domain, but what makes noise is an opponent who caught him on the day's hardest climb.

The next day, behold, on the seventh day He rested. That at a certain point the Slovenian phenomenon would have to grant a truce and allow the breakaway to go all the way was clear. But the world is full of stages "for the breakaway" or "for resistant sprinters" or "for attackers" that instead become "for Tadej or almost". So, the fact that the UAE-branded Cannibal finally managed his energy in the group and allowed the Norwegians to honor King Harald with the Uno-X double, was also news.

So: Mas catching Pogacar; Pogacar taking it easy... and finally, yesterday's disaster. Thirty kilometers from the expected sprint, in one of the few situations where it's certain that Pogacar won't be involved and won't be talked about. A banal stone, which any of us would avoid or step on without thinking, at the passage of a cycling peloton transforms into the grain of sand capable of exploding a massive gear. More prosaically, of making a bicycle stumble. Precisely Tadej's.

Even he, who by now seemed immune to certain things that happen to others (at most, when he crashed like at Strade Bianche, he got up as if made of rubber like children) went down to the ground and had to withdraw. At the tenth Grand Tour of his career, for the first time in the "final placement" column there won't be a 1st, a 2nd, or a 3rd, but a DNF. Like any other.