After winning the Spanish road championship last June, everything has gone quite smoothly for Marcel Camprubí (Barcelona, 2001). The triumph was a final duel with fellow Catalan cyclist Joel Nicolau on the tough Sabiñánigo climb. “Joel is a rival and a friend,” Camprubí explains to ARA. “He rushed a bit at the final sprint and I was able to finish him off and win. I also have the sadness of seeing him cry as he crossed the finish line. It was a bit bittersweet,” Camprubí concludes. His sports director at the Pinarello Q36.5 team is also Catalan, Àlex Sans, who he highlights was key to his victory and how he helped him through the earpiece with key phrases he received at the right moment: “He told me to come in third in the sprint.” And Marcel did. Also that “it would be a long sprint,” and so it was. And at certain moments Àlex made Camprubí understand that he was the strongest cyclist in the group and to trust himself. “It was brutal,” Àlex Sans recalls via message to ARA. Ambition shines in Marcel with his broad smile as he waits to see how his body will react when the action kicks off at La Vuelta on Saturday when the cat is let out of the bag.

Considering that we are part of a sleeping society, it is gratifying to see how there are still people who mobilize for a cause and successfully torpedoes a top-level sporting competition like the Vuelta. Not all is lost. Using critical thinking, protesting, and demonstrating have become concepts vintage, because we have been reduced to what the system wants: to be instruments of consumption of products and ideas at its service. That's why we can sit in a crowded cove while we do scroll between a possible Barça signing, a discounted shirt, and a cadaverous child dying of hunger in the Gaza Strip. Unperturbed, we raised our gaze and asked the couple: "What would you rather eat? Fideuá or paella?" We have the capacity for indignation of a tender Jewish woman.

It won't be easy getting on the UAE team bus these days at the Vuelta a Espana. The fragile relationship between the team's stars exploded in the middle of the competition, prompting team management to publicly punish Spaniard Juan Ayuso. The young rider from Alicante, currently the biggest star of Spanish cycling, has counterattacked, stating that he lives in "a dictatorship" where "they want to damage" his "image." The final days of competition could be complicated within the Emirates-based team.