When Diego Maradona scored the goal of the century against England at the 1986 World Cup, the dizzying magic of the moment was happily encased forever in the immortal words of radio commentator Victor Hugo Morales, who cried out: “Cosmic kite, what planet did you come from?!”
To evoke the extraterrestrial in football is to offer the sincerest form of praise, but at the Tour de France, the same metaphor carries a very different connotation. The headline on the front page of L’Équipe on Wednesday morning hardly read like a ringing endorsement of Jonas Vingegaard’s probity: “From another planet.”
