I wrote a few days ago that the Tour de France is often a mirror of itself. In this case, it was more of a trick mirror, or one of those mirrors in the old Disney cartoons where you step into another disorienting version of the place from which you came. I remember last year’s Stage 19 vividly. I was on the motorbike for the first time. There was a large breakaway and within it was Matej Mohorič, who I was profiling for ProCycling. And Matej Mohorič broke free in the final 15 kilometers or so, won the stage with his zipped-lips gesture, scandalized fans and sparked a whole lot of discourse, which I had to wade through in my quest to find answers. (I am not sure if I ever found them.)
Many elements of the two Stage 19s were the same but ended up differently: Mohorič in the break post-raid-scandal, me on the motorbike, the parcours that was hilly but mostly flat, the sunflowers everywhere. But this time nothing turned out right. This Tour has been a better Tour, narratively, than last year — but I would give anything for last year, when I wasn’t so cynical, when the world was big and I was small in it. When my eyes were wider. And Matej Mohorič, (guilty or innocent) in his disappointment would perhaps prefer strife from which he could draw strength rather than strife that’s utterly demoralizing. I suppose it’s like the difference between crashing once and riding high on adrenaline and crashing multiple times and just wanting to finish.
I probably know Mohorič better than any other cyclist. The total number of words I’ve written about him has to be in the thousands and thousands. I once spent six hours at his house in Šenčur for Rouleur. Sometimes talking to him now feels like two people trading fatigue or old war stories about the most thrilling yet harrowing year of our lives, because regardless of whether you think Mohorič or Bahrain Victorious are guilty of doping, both of us had to figure out how to navigate a first and unexpected doping raid, albeit in vastly different, yet ultimately similar ways, for the relationship between rider and journalist is an inherently oppositional yet ultimately necessary one. Parasitic and symbiotic.
In short, last year, Mohorič chose anger, and he used his anger to win, and I also chose anger and used it to write. I was very into the wretched depths of human empathy back then, and now I’m more into doing my job as painlessly as possible. I suppose, to use another mirror analogy, we were on either side of a two-way mirror, the person behind the glass and the reflection-haver watching one another and ourselves simultaneously, trying to see one another’s truth through the opaque yet reflective surface. That’s often what writing about other people is like — sometimes you end up saying more about yourself.
Now, after all of the second wave of raids and discourse and what was for both of us an exhausting Tour bearing little fruit (as I was only here for the depart and the final week due to financial and logistical issues), we found ourselves on Stage 19 like two grown adults at a high school reunion. I knew Mohorič would try to go in the break because usually there’s a Stage 19 syndrome where the sprinter’s jersey is all tied up and everyone is tired from the last 19 stages — many riders would rather save themselves for the time trial, or Paris, or just in general.
But this year was different, a trick mirror of last year’s.
There was no gap big enough for the motorbike to slot itself into except for one brief period after the sprint. Hence, most of what I saw on the motorbike was the French countryside — all dried out from lack of rain, the trees beginning to kill off their own leaves in desperate self-preservation, the result a kind of false autumn in July. I found myself drifting off into random thoughts like what kind of novelty egg timer I should buy for when I get back because I’m into soft-boiled eggs now. This strange dissociation served to prevent me from thinking too much about climate change.
And then for fifteen precious minutes we followed the breakaway, watching their fragile bodies sheltering each other from the wind, race radio updating us every minute on the time gap that shrunk further and further until it became unsustainable and we had to be ejected from the gap between break and peloton. My driver refused to pass through the bunch — perhaps because of the echelon risk, perhaps because doing so is simply a pain in the ass for him. I never saw another rider after that, only the roasting countryside. Only the Tour coming to an end.
Mohorič called me when I was in the car on the way to my hotel.
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