‘The result is an imposter’. So said the footballer Xavi Hernandez in an iconic 2011 interview with the Guardian newspaper. The diminutive playmaker, describing himself as a ‘romantic’, was talking about Barcelona’s commitment to their aesthetically pleasing brand of possession-based football, in the season after they’d been knocked out of the Champions League by Jose Mourinho’s rugged and pragmatic Inter Milan side. “Other teams win and they're happy, but it's not the same,” he said. "The identity is lacking.”
Alberto Contador may hail from Madrid rather than Xavi’s Catalonia, but he is cut from very much the same cloth. The way he rides – the constant need to attack, to make things happen, to dare – matters more, he says, than the result or trophy it may or may not yield.
“It’s true there are times people think there’s only one option but it’s possible to look for other possibilities. I’m not giving myself any credit but that’s how it is. There are times when you have to roll the dice,” the Spaniard says in a sit-down interview with Cyclingnews and a couple of Spanish journalists at the Abu Dhabi Tour.
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He looks back on three memorable days when he did just that. There was the stage to Alpe d’Huez in 2011 when he blew the race open from inside 20km, then the long-range tactical coup to Fuente De that won him the 2012 Vuelta a Espana, and the famous stage to Formigal stage at last year’s Vuelta, where he ripped the race up in the opening kilometres and Chris Froome’s hopes of winning the race took a terminal blow.
“At Fuente De, I rolled the dice, because they could have caught me five kilometres from the top, passed me, and I’d have lost second place,” says Contador. “The day of Alpe d’Huez, maybe on a normal day I could have won that stage but the effort I made at the start, I paid for that attack and at the end, well, [Pierre] Rolland passed me and he took the stage from me.”
“But it’s true, of those three days, only one of them had a reward in the form of a victory, but the other two, although there was no victory, there was certainly a reward in terms of recognition. A reward that, genuinely, I prefer, and that people remember better, and value more – more than having a trophy in the cabinet.
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