11 July, 2024
The mountains give you everything
The Tour arrives to the mountains, the moment most eagerly awaited by many and most feared by others. It is the natural course of life; it is like this every year: the explosive days end, and the days of introspection begin.
If the speed of the sprint is a cry of euphoria, an emotion contained until the final detonation, the mountain is a murmur, a litany repeated over and over again that evades you until you reach a state of full attention, mindfulness. In the mountains, you live and die in a few kilometers; in the mountains, you are always alone, even within a peloton.
And if you are lucky, if everything aligns and you reach that state of grace where your heart and legs are in sync, the mountains give you everything.
However, there is no inspiration without help; without the right pen, a writer only has an idea. Without the right bicycle, there is absolutely nothing.
In this second part of the grand French tour, Lotto Dstny looks back and remembers the weeks of preparation, testing both riders and equipment. They recall the first time they got on an Orca. It was normal to expect it would take some time to adapt to the new bike because, who makes a bicycle their own from the very first day?
But you and your teammates, the men of the mountain, still remember: in the first climbs, you already knew it was THE ONE.
And it’s because, while you were training this winter, while you were racing last summer, even long before, a group of men and women were already thinking of you without knowing it was actually you.
At the Orbea headquarters, when designing the new Orca OMX, we were already thinking about your work and honoring your effort. We thought about your hours of tedious gym work to build a rigid bike where needed and thus not lose all that gained strength in the transmission. We thought about every gram, not an unnecessary carbon layer, not an extra drop of paint or varnish, an obsession with lightness for that extra piece you didn’t take. We thought about all the hours you would spend on the saddle and made you a comfortable but efficient bike. We thought about your attack in the final kilometers, standing on the bike in that final climb; and thus we reduced the wheelbase to increase the reactivity, while we could see you up there, popping champagne on the top of the podium.
Finally, the moment has arrived; it is time to honor all those men and women who worked at Orbea thinking of you, it is time to pay tribute to all the effort and fun on so many different bikes in the past until you found HER. The big moment is now, that of the beautiful mountain, the time to praise the light.
