Primož Roglič has won the Volta a Catalunya. The Jumbo-Visma rider held off several attacks by Remco Evenepoel on the final stage to Barcelona to finish six seconds ahead of the Belgian in the general classification. By winning the Catalan stage race, Roglič added a missing prize to his list of honours.
Primož Roglič and Tadej Pogačar during the Day for the medals: Reception of Slovenian sport heroes on 30.9.2019 on Kongresni square, Ljubljana, Slovenia.
PRIMOŽ ROGLIČ MAKES THE FLIGHT ACROSS THE SAVA RIVER
While Slovenia is a land where everything bears the name of a saint, Sava was Serbian, as was Primož’s grandfather of four times. St. Primož, or Primus, likewise, was of the gentry, this time of Mentana, a thirty-minutes drive from Rome (deathly faithful, gored and scourged—even then his little brother knew that apostasy wasn’t really his thing). This is a land of saints, other people’s saints. Črtomir knew this as his tears of heartbreak flowed into the Savica. This place is trampled on either side by other people’s virtues.
Primož Roglič has the universal sigil of suffering etched into the soft inner belly of his arm. Unlike Primus he would not say he is a man of faith, but once upon a time, he had loved to inject his sleek, starved body into updrafts, crosswinds. A ski jumper in the extreme. The University of Vienna says that doubt will ruin any otherwise good jump, but an excess of faith is fatal. Sends you head over heels in love with gravity. Primož jumped metal na glavo—headlong—
—and thus martyred himself on the hill every-other-week.
We have to slow him down, his trainer Zvone told us. I didn’t have enough fear, enough respect, Primož lamented. He now scourges himself on asphalt, a cyclist, his days of flight a dead thing, but the respect for the winds, the snow—the bright bright windwhipping—a gorgeous repentant flogging—
Zvone means bells. In these more rural lands may not be a land of swooning god-love, charismatic preachers laying hands on born-again believers with lips crusted in spit, but this is a land of church. Primož is indifferent to Adonai, but he is moved in his heart by a kind of Almighty you can hardly call any kind of idolatry. The penetrating white pupil of the Sun. Living breathing air currents.
The snow kisses his face with arterial blood. His capillaries pool open, metanoiac. The hill above. His body and scattered skis on the runoff below. Blue sky. This is the triptych of our beloved and lovely St. Primož. Once he is anointed with bacitracin and his paper robes are shed, they send him home with Zvone, and on the way they pass the blue Sava twice. To Zagorje ob Savi. Zagorje-on-the-Sava. The water in these areas was once black with dirty coal. Now you could see the fish in it. Over it passes our little blessed St. Primož.