Spanish cyclist Iván Romeo claims the lead in the Dauphiné after winning the third stage.

There are unexpected winners who, when they begin an era on the grand stage, no one seems prepared for their arrival. They are phenomena. They occur very rarely.

Iván Romeo is very tall, so tall that Thierry Gouvenou, the race director, has to stand on tiptoe to try to zip up the broken neck of his yellow jersey. He can’t manage it. The Dauphiné doesn’t have jerseys in his size that fit his 1.93m and 75kg as an unbelievable champion after winning the toughest stage of his life, and many others’ lives as well.

The same goes for Mathieu van der Poel. “It was one of the hardest days I’ve ever spent on a bike in my life,” says the cyclist admired worldwide for his beauty on the bike dominating wild territories, rain, mud, cold, snow, through Roubaix, San Remo, Flanders. Then there’s Tadej Pogacar, who arrives more than a minute later, with his jersey stamped with circles of salt from his sweat, from his warmth: “Tour heat, a true Tour stage, tough all day,” says the Slovenian. And also a Tour route, a stage from the past, one that forged Romain Bardet, who is emotional in Brioude, his hometown, as he sets out for a 207-kilometer journey through the Central Massif towards the sources of the Loire on narrow roads, not a flat meter, half mountains, sticky asphalt that makes cyclists feel like they aren’t advancing and spectators feel like they’re moving in slow motion, so painfully, but they check the data at the end and think it can’t be: four and a half hours on the road for an average of 45 km/h on a course with 3,000m of elevation. “Days like this are impossible to recreate in training, which is why I like them in my preparation for the Tour,” says Van der Poel, the best rider of the moment alongside Pogacar, who turns necessity into virtue, as he was part of the breakaway of 10 that made it to the end, but didn’t win. “The break was a poker game. Of course, there were many riders watching me, but in the end, you also have to watch the other riders if you want to win the stage,” he laments. “It doesn’t depend on me to react to every single attack. I responded to several, but not all.”

Everyone was watching Iván Romeo, but only to see him from afar, impossible to catch. A few attacked—Lipowitz, Dunbar, two young riders with good standings already, Tejada, Julian Bernard, Jeff’s son—some were closed down by Van der Poel. Not Romeo. He tried, but he couldn’t. Lipowitz, the strongest, also tried. He couldn’t either. No one could pursue the giant from Valladolid when he attacked with only six kilometers to go. “I told the team car that I needed to take risks and not be too active. So I waited until the last moment,” explains Romeo, describing his successful attack, the second he made, in a finish very similar to that of the Valencia Tour, where he resisted for seconds against the crazy chase of Almeida, Pello, Buitrago, and other big names in the peloton. “I know that in this type of flat finishes, in a small group, I have a good instinct and, if they give me a few seconds, I can make it, so the moment they stopped chasing me for a minute, I thought: ‘Okay, I need to go full speed to the line.’ It was a time trial. I knew the finish, and I had been thinking about this stage for, I don’t know, a month…”

Elbows squared, hands on the top of the handlebars, the image of a classic time trialist, a youthful Roger de Vlaeminck without threatening sideburns, rhythmic shoulder movement to propel himself. The true image of a time trialist that Romeo is, the cyclist from Valladolid who will turn 22 on August 16, San Roque in Peñafiel, and a few months ago was crowned under-23 world champion in the discipline. He goes so fast that it disheartens everyone, so consistent that not even the peloton, led entirely by Pogacar’s UAE team, can get close. He arrives 1m8s ahead. Jonathan Milan, the previous leader, loses 5m 46s.

In the end, clumsily, with a few safety pins, they half-close the zipper of the jersey, yellow Tour, of course, the same color, the same advertising, the same plush: the Dauphiné is a mini Tour that Luis Ocaña won three times before winning the big one, who would have turned 80 on Monday, just like Merckx. Romeo steps onto the podium with one hand holding it from behind so that it doesn’t open. The gesture wouldn’t look good in the image for posterity of the first Spanish cyclist to wear that yellow since Alberto Contador did it for five days in 2016. The Movistar giant will have a yellow jersey made to measure for the time trial on Wednesday, 17.4 kilometers in Saint Péray. There, Evenepoel, Pogacar, Vingegaard, those who are already bigger than him as cyclists, will test and challenge themselves, trying to amaze and worry the rivals. Among them, Romeo won’t be one of the crowd, but another favorite. He will likely keep the yellow jersey, but he won’t win the Dauphiné this year, which will be decided in the Alps this weekend, too much mountain left for his diet. The kid from Las Mercedes will suffer there, but they won’t steal his happiness, the joy he felt when, a plush lion in his right hand, a bouquet of flowers in his left, and wearing the yellow jersey, summarizing his day said: “This means everything. A whole lifetime, you could say. 21 years for this.”