Re: Re:
Heh, had a look through the Volta palmarés and realized I'd completely forgotten about Xavi Tondò . Indeed I had the likes of Ribeiro, Mestre, Bernabeu and Blanco in mind - even if that's a bit unfair on Blanco as he was former Comunitat Valenciana (?) before turning into the king of the Volta. It's a race that does get a lot of past-its at international level TBH.
Also forgot about Vladimir Efimkin which I did get to see race GTs (whatever happened to him anyways? He retired a while back for no apparent reason).
Regarding the Volta being an institution, I guess it just means that it's something that is as much part of a Portuguese summer as much as our French diaspora coming back home to their ancestral villages - You could never swap it with Algarve on the calendar (as much as I'd like to see it raced in a better slot!). It's just a cultural thing that unites the oft-forgotten interior of the country in a manner that no other event does. A sort of celebration of every local culture it touches. It's not like it gets very talked about for the remainder of the year, or that people know many of the riders like in France, but the whole concept of the Volta is really ingrained in our minds somehow.
So in terms of the national cycling calendar, nothing comes close to the prestige of winning the big Volta stages or the whole shebang. Especially these days after a lot of other races seem to have died somehow. Almost too young to remember them even existing.
Heh, had a look through the Volta palmarés and realized I'd completely forgotten about Xavi Tondò . Indeed I had the likes of Ribeiro, Mestre, Bernabeu and Blanco in mind - even if that's a bit unfair on Blanco as he was former Comunitat Valenciana (?) before turning into the king of the Volta. It's a race that does get a lot of past-its at international level TBH.
Also forgot about Vladimir Efimkin which I did get to see race GTs (whatever happened to him anyways? He retired a while back for no apparent reason).
Regarding the Volta being an institution, I guess it just means that it's something that is as much part of a Portuguese summer as much as our French diaspora coming back home to their ancestral villages - You could never swap it with Algarve on the calendar (as much as I'd like to see it raced in a better slot!). It's just a cultural thing that unites the oft-forgotten interior of the country in a manner that no other event does. A sort of celebration of every local culture it touches. It's not like it gets very talked about for the remainder of the year, or that people know many of the riders like in France, but the whole concept of the Volta is really ingrained in our minds somehow.
So in terms of the national cycling calendar, nothing comes close to the prestige of winning the big Volta stages or the whole shebang. Especially these days after a lot of other races seem to have died somehow. Almost too young to remember them even existing.