Allez Bardet, one last time. Another retirement for the older generation, the generation that was young when I started watching. Hard to imagine that within a couple years there will be none left. The level passion that we attach to riders like this is only reached by the connection with our own riding. There is no way to recreate being a young man, climbing and descending carried along by imaginative and fanciful recollection of the pros going through the very same motions. In this way we become more attached to their successes and failures than is possible in other sports, we can better imagine the pain in the legs, the burning in the lungs, the satisfaction of a corner taken with perfection. The spectacle may be greater today, but the riders of yesterday were always and still remain inimitably close to the heart