Alarcón is more than just Portugal though, although that was the capping grace.
At the age of 31, he has never scored more than 100 CQ points in a season before. This year he scored 573. He achieved nothing as a youngster with Saunier Duval and spent two years as an amateur again in Spain before being picked up by Loulé in Portugal. It's not like he dominated the Spanish amateur calendar like Arkaitz Durán did on his return either. He then spent five years bouncing around teams in Portugal not achieving too much, save for a stage win in the Volta in 2013 which was from the breakaway after Efapel miscalculated and pulled a rider back who was with him. Last year he stepped up in the Volta, for sure, but he was still enough of a minor player that his own team's website described him as a rouleur helper, with César Veloso, Antunes and Ricardo Mestre the team's expected leaders. He rode quietly and fairly insignificantly as a helper in Mallorca, Valencia and Algarve where Antunes was the team's major player, and rode anonymously at the small one-dayers during the Catalunya-País Vasco Spanish WT mini-season.
Then, the second Spanish mini-season, post-Ardennes and pre-Dauphiné, began, and Balarcón was reborn.
At Asturias, he escaped from an elite selection on the short, steep Alto del Carabanzo to come in 2nd behind solo escapee Weimar Roldán. He assumed the lead on day two by riding to the summit with Nairo freaking Quintana as the duo demolished the chasing pack. And on day three, on the Alto del Violeo he took everything Quintana could give him, before attacking solo to drop the Colombian and take the stage win on the descent into Oviedo. At Madrid, he made the decisive move on the Puerto de la Morcuera that made the selection of 9 that set the GC, before outsprinting them all in Las Rozas. In the undulating Valdemoro stage, he was outsprinted by Barbero and Sevilla but put time into everybody else, only to lose the GC to El Niño on the final day due to countback.
He then returned to Portugal, dismantling everybody on the queen stage of the GP Beiras e Serra da Estrela, putting over a minute into the field on the Alto da Torre, and only losing the GC because W52 had put Ricardo Mestre in the break that was allowed to go on stage 1 (in the end, Mestre was dropped after Alarcón's monster attack shattered the field, and W52 lost the GC to Jesús del Pino of the Efapel team). And then came the Volta. On the first road stage, he set down a marker, attacking on the flat and downhill to the line and just riding away from everybody, including his own teammates chasing him. He won atop Monte Farinha at Senhora da Graça with the same kind of final kilometre hyperspeed sprint that Gustavo César did a couple of years ago that caused people to shy away, as W52 put 4 in the top 8, the kind of mountain achievement usually reserved only for Team Sky (yes, Moscon doing an even better impression of Hincapie than Thomas can is probably similar ridiculousness in level, but at least the guy is a young talent, not a 31-year-old with no results to speak of who came into the season in almost Benjamin Noval shape). The one weakness in his armour was that he lost a few seconds in a slightly uphill sprint into a headwind at Oliveira de Azeméis on stage 8. But he bounced back in stage 9 in style. August 14th, 2017 is the date that will send shivers down the spine of all that dare to tread through the valley of the shadow of A Volta. Antunes attacked and annihilated 83km from the finish to join Mestre at the head of the race. César Veloso dropped and let his domestique, Carvalho, ride up to the camisola amarela group to support Balarcón. But before he could get there, Balarcón decided he wanted none of this domestique nonsense, so attacked the heads of state group himself, and rode across solo to Antunes and Mestre. Remember, this is a rouleur helper, in his own team's description, chasing the best climber Portugal has produced in years. They had a minute with 75km remaining. 1'15 at the summit. They went hell for leather on the descent, and dropped a couple of their number, only Alarcón, Antunes and Neilands (for Israel Cycling Academy, had been in the original break) left with 30km to go, and 2 minutes. And the gap just kept growing no matter what the chasers did. It climbed up to 4, to 4 and a half minutes. It was like watching Tabriz Petrochemical Team in their heyday at the Asia Tour. They finally dropped Neilands on the final climb and he came in a minute and a half back, but everybody else was nearly 5 mins back when Alarcón finally gifted his teammate the win. It was a bloodbath.
Feast your eyes on hours of hilarity here.
Then after 80km at the head of the race, charging like a MFer, riding five minutes into everybody, he was 2nd in the ITT the next day. Even David Blanco never stamped this much authority on the Volta, and he was a guy who'd been top 10 of Grand Tours before being dispatched to Portugal in the Puerto aftermath, not somebody who'd been riding for a decade with next to nothing to show for it.
Moscon has been absolutely absurd. Hard to take coming from anybody, let alone someone who's cut such a difficult figure to have any sympathy for. His performances in the late season have been difficult to suspend disbelief for. But Raúl Alarcón has been so unapologetic, so transparent about it and so unwilling to even consider for a second what it looks like from the outside, that he makes Jonathan Tiernan-Locke's breakthrough spring look unremarkable. It's been so blatant that it's almost endearing.
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