Pure cycling: Is Julian Alaphilippe back to his best?

The middle of May and the hills inland from Italy’s Adriatic coast witness a bolt from the blue, a blast from the past. Julian Alaphilippe rolls into Fano alone to raise his arms as the winner of stage 12 of the Giro d’Italia. It’s only his fifth victory in the past two-and-a-half years and comfortably the biggest in that time. But more than anything, it’s the manner of it: audacious, swashbuckling, and rippled with emotional energy that makes it so much more than the sum of the watts.

Taking flight from a large, high-calibre and only-recently-formed breakaway with 120km still to ride should have been a suicide mission, even in the company of the Italian Mirco Maestri. But Alaphilippe has taken an impossible set of chords and somehow set them to his own unique rhythm. Maestri’s reaction says it all. In some ways, he’s a willing accomplice in his own downfall, left behind on the final climb, but he knows he has been part of something special. “I want to be a bee,” he writes philosophically on Instagram. “Bees are not designed to fly, but bees do not know physics and fly anyway. Today, in my own way, I tried to be one.”