Tadej Pogacar and Jonas Vingegaard don't get along either well or badly. They are treated with a respectful asepsis. But three consecutive Tours in a two-way game have already established a type of relationship between them called, with capital letters, RIVALRY. It would be equivalent in cyclocross, which Mathieu van der Poel and Wout van Aert have maintained since youth.
Rivalries… The sport has often thrived on its allure. Its protagonists have needed each other and contributed to raising their modalities to the highest levels of popularity and passion. Perhaps Leo Messi would not have been so Messi without Cristiano Ronaldo; and perhaps Cristiano would not have been so Cristiano without Messi.
A kind of inverse symbiosis that also goes for Alain Prost and Ayrton Senna, at the top of Formula 1 between 1988 and 1993. They measured their engines first as ill-matched partners at McLaren and then, separately, one at Ferrari and the other at Williams.
On two wheels, riders of a roaring metallic mare, Dani Pedrosa and Jorge Lorenzo staged a personal antipathy since 2003 with both in 125 cc They didn't even look at each other, even if it was out of the corner of their eyes. They didn't even greet each other, even if it was out of commitment. In 2005, already in 250 cc, they reached the zenith of mutual hostility. “I was dominating the category and he came to take my place” (Pedrosa). “I was motivated by rivalry, and people liked it.” (Lawrence).
ethics and aesthetics
Cycling rivalry -we return to it- brings us back to Jacques Anquetil and Raymond Poulidor climbing, shoulder to shoulder, the Puy de Dôme in the 1964 Tour. It rescues Fausto Coppi and Gino Bartali from the immediate pre-war and post-war periods. Two men symbolizing two Italys. One secular and leftist and another Catholic and traditional.
The three fights between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, of a ferocity that bespoke mutual animosity, pitted two disparate powers in the ring. To a handsome, provocative, eccentric, tongue-in-cheek genius (a black guy from Kentucky converted to Islam?), and a rude native of racist South Carolina with no rebellious streaks. In Ali's sharp words, an “Uncle Tom”.
Neither could Carl Lewis, elegant, exhibitionist, from a wealthy middle-class cradle, and Ben Johnson, rough, stuttering, withdrawn, an emigrant from Jamaica to Canada, be seen in painting either.. A matter of aesthetics and, given Johnson's bad habits, of ethics, although Lewis was never free from all suspicion.
Between the late 1970s and the first half of the 1980s, the middle-distance racing rivalry between the aristocratic and aloof Sebastian Coe and the plebeian and grim Steve Ovett was something like the reproduction of the class struggle in stadiums.. A very British and literary social dialectic.
ruling party and dissidence
The rivalry in the 1990s between the suave Haile Gebrselassie and Paul Tergat was instead a national as well as a personal feud.. They embodied the bloodless but intense fight between Ethiopia and Kenya for universal dominance in the long-distance events.
That was high politics from Africa to the world. But, in the 1980s and 1990s, Anatoli Karpov, a Russian of the immobilist old guard, and Garry Kasparov, an Azerbaijani supporter of perestroika and glasnost, waged an ideological war between the ruling party on a chessboard. and dissent. Kasparov contributed his own to checkmate the USSR.
Perhaps no rivalry as deep-rooted and long as the one starring, at the height of excellence, by Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal. Also perhaps none so fraternal and respectful of the most exquisite rules of the most exemplary face of the sport. Novak Djokovic, younger than both, was a third in agreement; an equal guest at the most gentlemanly tennis party within the most fierce competition.
In collective sports, the rivalry, in the NBA, between the Celtics and the Lakers led basketball, at the beginning of the 1980s, to a global dimension not surpassed; to an unknown expectation not only in the United States, where, until then, the competition was broadcast on a delayed basis.
The scene was commercially perfect. The East Coast (Boston) vs. the West (Los Angeles). And two men personifying in each team the best of basketball. Larry Bird, white and soberly accurate, in the Celtics. Magic Johnson, black and endowed with the gift of fantasy, in the Lakers. The formula forever opened the NBA to the world.
