It's a cliché of cycling that when top riders retire, it's always low-key, or a let-down, few go out at the top. To name just a few other multiple Grand Tour winners, think of Eddy Merckx's last race in a kermesse in Belgium, Jacques Anquetil's career petering to a dead end in a criterium in Antwerp, or Miguel Indurain's still-controversial abandon from the 1996 Vuelta a España.
Not so Alberto Contador, who rampaged through the 2017 Vuelta firing off a salvo of attacks, before saving his last big day for his final mountain assault on Spain's hardest single climb, the Angliru. Even though he was on the point of winning the Vuelta himself, it was notable immediately after the Angliru that Chris Froome paid tribute to Contador going out in a blaze of glory, the Briton saying that whenever he retired, he hoped it would be in the same way.
There was another knock-on effect of the Angliru triumph, besides impressing Froome. Such an adrenaline-fuelled and unusual exit path from cycling made it harder, too, to predict Contador's life as a retiree. Put it another way: here was a rider who had made a fine art - perhaps the finest of any modern-day rider - of seemingly spontaneous, impulsive racing. How on earth was someone like that going to adapt to a more normal, planned-out existence? And was he even going to try?
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The answer was that, rather than head for far-flung climes and new sporting challenges for thirty-somethings, Contador and his wife Macarena have come back to Spain from Switzerland, where they lived in the last part of his career, to settle permanently in their home town of Pinto.
The Plaza de España in Pinto
Pinto offers what you might call normal Spanish urban existence cranked up to the power of 10. That's because it's one of the multiple semi-industrial small cities on the flatlands just south of Madrid consisting mainly of modern high rise tower blocks, broad tree-lined avenues, and busy, unpretentious bars and restaurants with none of the plush opulence you might find in Lugano, Contador's former Swiss residence.
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