Tour, Vuelta, and Falls: Roglic Like Zulle?

Roglic including ZulleThe comparison is gaining more and more ground in the cycling world and the Slovenian is not only linked to the Swiss champion of the late 90s by the two Return won in sequence after as many failures at the Tour (where he twice achieved second place), but above all an increasingly evident predisposition to falls, but it would be better to say to bad luckA career built on great expectations. Victories in the run-up to the races. Then misfortunes as punctual as curses when the time came to put all that hard work into practice.

Whether the comparison holds up will be up to the reader to decide at the end of the story, but a premise is necessary: ​​in defining the rider Zulle we have chosen to ignore his involvement in the Festina affair, in an era necessarily different from the current one, on which the judgment of history hangs.

Who was Alex Zulle? A racer almost by chance. Born to a passionate Swiss man and a mother from Brabant, Alex never even thought about cycling as a child. As a good Swiss, he was passionate about winter sports and especially alpine skiing, but as a boy a descent cost him a serious fracture.During his re-education program, they put him in the saddle and from there his story began, which at a competitive level began at the age of 18.

Shortsighted, but without lenses

The story of Zulle, who in ten years has won a lot, proving himself a great specialist in stage races, cannot ignore one factor: his shortsightedness. Alex was missing 4,5 diopters in both eyes and was therefore forced to wear glassesThis has always made him a distinctive trait because in the history of sports, there haven't been many champions who wore glasses, and even fewer since the development of contact lenses. Zulle, however, never used them, so he wore glasses in every situation, and this often represented a handicap.

A great rouleur (he was also a world time trial champion, just as Roglic is an Olympic champion in the discipline), Zulle was capable of climbing and often achieved notable results when he managed to maintain his own pace. Like many rouleur riders then and still today, as the image of the pure climber has gradually faded. His duel with Pantani in the first part of the 1998 Giro was unforgettable., when he put the Romagnola rider against the ropes, dropping him at Lago Laceno and then humiliating him in the Trieste time trial. Before suffering his revenge in the stage of Selva di Val Gardena which made the history of that Giro.

But the problem came downhill. Zulle he wasn't very familiar with it, having started riding a bike when he was already grown up, let alone on rough terrain or, worse, in the rain and wetAt that point, the descent became an adventure, not to maintain the gap, but simply to complete it without damage. Which wasn't always possible.

Many victories and… many falls

That's why his career, more than from victories (not even a few, as many as 71 (including the two Vueltas in '96 and '97 and the World Time Trial Championships in '96, not to mention Romandie, Paris-Nice, Tour of the Basque Country, and many other general classifications) is marked by slip-ups. Starting with the 1993 Vuelta, Alto del Naranco stage: Zulle is fighting for the yellow jersey with his compatriot RomingerIt's raining in the Asturian mountains and the descent is tough. The glasses fog up, the droplets make it difficult to follow the trajectories, the bike swerves and ends up in a ditchZulle gets up, but where is his bike? His search costs him a good minute. He gets back on his bike, but the gap is too great. He'll try to catch up with a final time trial as prodigious as it is useless.

1996 Tour de France, Les Arcs stage. It wasn't a stage like any other, because for the first time, Miguel rode. Indurain He's on the ropes, so much so that he ends up losing over four minutes. Zulle loses even more, with two consecutive falls. In the second, the photographers are the ones to get him out of trouble., but not before having immortalized the unfortunate Swiss man in the bushes.

1997, the year of redemption

That Zulle is also a capable rider and not just the "Mr. Magoo of the bike" as he was somewhat ungenerously labelled across the Channel, he proved it in 1997. A year that continued with a series of crashes, at the Dauphiné, the Tour de Suisse (which resulted in a broken collarbone), and the Tour de France, which required him to retire because the bone hadn't healed properly. Yet he recovered and worked hard, eventually winning the Vuelta a España at the end of the season.

Two years later, at the Tour, Zulle took second place behind Armstrong (The first of seven Tours won by the American and subsequently erased from the roll of honor). A feat considering that the second stage passes through the Passage du Gois, a two-mile road that is subject to rising tides and is therefore always covered in water and mud. The fact remains that a slew of riders fell, and in the chaos Zulle is forced to leave again… without glasses, lost in that chaos of riders and mudThe gap he built up was significant, but the Swiss rider still managed to build a strong Tour, finishing second, 7'37" behind the American.

The Swiss's career ended in 2004, on the path to a slow decline, ending with a huge party to celebrate his successes rather than his misfortunes. Then he lost track of himself a bit, he no longer frequents the world of cycling which lived in truly difficult and controversial years.

Every now and then he makes a trip to cycle touring events, especially in Spain, where he spent much of his cycling career. You can see him pedaling in the middle of the pack, a fifty-year-old still in good physical shape. And, of course, with his glasses perched on his nose...