You are, for the purposes of this article, a Spanish woman called Maria or a Spanish man called Juan. In fact, choose whatever name and gender you like, as long as you allow for one simple fact: on this, August 22 2024, you are a resident of Jerez de la Frontera in the Spanish province of Cadiz, and you have woken in a state of hunger.
You forgot to do the shopping after dinner last night – that’s easy enough to do, seeing as that dinner finished at about midnight – and you have a tummy rumbling for jamon and a throat parched for espresso. You walk out of your apartment block, admire the handsome Moorish architecture of the downtown area, and begin the steady trek to the Centro Commercial, south of the city. This, you know, is where it is possible for a hungry resident of Jerez to pick up all the basics and a little bit more at the city’s enormous branch of Carrefour supermarket.
But as you near the building, something feels wrong. Helicopters buzz overhead. Pop music blasts loudly. Colourful vehicles festooned with bicycles whoosh by. This is no ordinary day in Andalucia.
You elbow your way through the crowd, swinging your string bag at any policia that stand in your way. “But sir/madam!”, they yell, “the Vuelta!” But you are deaf to their cries. You have a great hunger and the only cure is inside the Carrefour and finally, after clumsily cresting a metal barrier, you are inside it. But what have they done to your special place?
If you’d only read the press release issued to the world’s cycling media in late July, you’d have learned that Carrefour – the major sponsor of the Vuelta a España – had planned a bold (/bonkers) stage start in one of their supermarkets. If you had read that press release, you might, understandably, have had questions about this fact. Questions like: is this where bike races normally start? Questions like: is this day not going to be absolutely riddled with shoplifters, from within the peloton and without, shovelling processed meats into their pockets and whooshing down the aisles? Questions like: what do you mean, 400 employees will be providing day-long fan activities in this supermarket?
But you, dear Maria or Juan or [insert name here], did not get the memo, and so you find yourself in the cereal aisle staring down Sepp Kuss, who stares back like a startled deer. Flushed with embarrassment, you run to the deli section, finding there a Primož Roglič coolly regarding the Serrano ham, his breath steaming the glass. Increasingly frenzied, you scurry to the confectionary aisle where David Gaudu is in the midst of a torrid makeout.
Everywhere you turn, there are bicyclists – Quintanas, Yateses, maybe (but probably not) even Pogačars – and they are all there to ride bikes and you are there to buy breakfast and you don’t really know how to reconcile these two competing realities, because, quite frankly, it doesn’t seem like something this silly is something that you should need to be emotionally equipped to handle on a Thursday morning.
You retreat to the bakery, carefully dodging an entire Euskaltel-Euskadi team theatrically flicking grapes into each other’s mouths in the fruit and vegetables section. Finally, you find some respite: peace at last, among the big crusty loaves of bread and weird little egg-tarty thingies. You tuck an armful of each into your bosom, and powerwalk the length of the store toward the checkout.
Maybe this nightmare is over, you think, as you wander past Victor Lafay staring vacantly at a chopping board and turn a corner into the cosmetics aisle. There, Enric Mas is opening the bottles of Nivea roll-on deodorant, spinning the little plastic ball to see whether he likes the smell of the Active or the Sport variety better. You wait to wake up from the bad dream, but you never do, and finally – two hours later, after all the bicyclists have left and you have completed your transaction – you return to your apartment, wake your rumpled lover, and say “you would not believe the day I have just had.”
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