Thibaut Pinot did not win on Saturday. He did not win this Tour de France either, which he will finish in an almost anonymous 11th place that no one will remember in a few years, or even a few days from now. It would have been nice, of course, but as he himself blew on arrival, “the important thing for me was elsewhere“.
This sentence has probably always been true for him, but it was more so than ever in this 20th stage. Let’s be honest, who cares, he didn’t win. Everyone will forgive him for not having had the legs since he had the heart. That was what he was being asked, if it was fair or reasonable to claim anything from any athlete. What he won on Saturday was to be fully himself in an open-air communion. The ultimate fellowship. A victory is almost trivial. One more in the long collection of Tadej Pogacar. But how many runners can claim to have experienced what the Frenchman experienced at the Petit Ballon? The perfect point to a career like no other.
What will remain of Thibaut Pinot? Much more than a prize list, even if we underestimate his. We are talking here about a guy who still slammed a Monument (the Tour of Lombardy), won stages on the three Grand Tours, finished 3rd in the Tour, 4th and 5th in the Giro and 6th in the Vuelta. If it were only that, Pinot, it would already be significant, at least on the scale of current French cycling.
Pinot: “The best stage of my career with the best supporters in the world”
But, it’s true, he was not a winning machine. In all that Marc Madiot was able to say on Saturday in the midst of his whirlwind of emotions, these words are perhaps the most beautiful, and above all the most accurate: “The charts are lines on a piece of paper. There aren’t dozens of lines on his, but he’ll leave us something else.”
It is this “something else” that gives the Groupama – FDJ climber this special status, which he has never claimed. It will have been, in the absence of a winning machine, a factory of emotions, all the stronger as they were often of an opposite nature, between extreme joys and equally great disillusions, sometimes a few days apart. Pinot is a maelstrom. He enjoys a popularity that escapes him and that he certainly did not claim, he the wild child, happier hidden in his village with his goats than in the middle of the crowd.
Thibaut Pinot carried a part of romanticism in him to the end, an elusive idea but so precious in this sport which constantly claims its own history while sometimes moving away from it in its race for modernity. Pinot, he, by some miracle, continues to embody a certain idea of his discipline, as well as a reminder of the great figures of the French past, from Eugène Christophe to Raymond Poulidor, with whom the crowd liked to cry.
Madiot in tears talking about Pinot: “I didn’t try to make him become someone else”
Basically, what does the popularity of Pinot say? It certainly says a lot more about us than about him. What is our quest, we, sport lovers that a lack of talent, ability or desire has left in our place, condemned to live by proxy? The emotion. Nothing else. She can go through victory, but not only. The ending, happy or unhappy, influences the nature of an emotion, not necessarily its strength. The kid who lived Seville 82 or France-Brazil 98 will keep an indelible mark. Indelible sorrow for one, incomparable joy for the other. But both will remain. As in life.
Pinot is us, with its ups and downs, its joys and its “dramas”. We are all Thibaut Pinot. His career is a slice of life in which everyone can easily identify, step by step. Life is not a Formula 1. It is flesh, blood, laughter and tears. It is to believe, to hope, to collapse, to rise again. There are champions that we respect, that we admire, without necessarily identifying with them.
“People love the emotions that are conveyed to them on TV. I am a runner who gives it away, without meaning to“, he confided last year in an interview with AFP, almost sketching a self-portrait. Madiot is right, he will leave us something else. Something more precious than his victories in Lombardy, the Alpe or the Tourmalet which magnify his moments of loss, and vice versa. A champion can be defined by his titles, his statistics, but also through the link he weaves, almost miraculously, with others.
To some, when they retire, we want to say bravo. You have to tell “TiboPino” because once again, his career is not that of everyone. But above all, we must say thank you. For what he did, at least as much for what he was unable or unable to accomplish, but above all for what he gave. More than thank you and bravo, for Pinot, it will be bravo, and thank you. For everything.
Pure madness: Pinot encouraged like never before in the Petit Ballon