So both Boku no Hero Academia and Yowamushi Pedal are back this season, and this week Yamashita Daiki never even had to get off the couch.  Go figure, huh?  It’s a testament, I suppose, to the fact that both series are much more than their main characters – even if they were the ones that really put Yamashita on the map.  And in a grand tour, riders are going to scatter across many miles of road, which means a writer has to choose which ones to focus on at any given time.  It’s not like most sports, where all the players are gathered in the same place at the same time.

That’s rather the theme of this episode, in fact.  It’s sometimes fancifully said of baseball that it’s “an individual sport played on teams”.  But grand tour cycling really is that – no fancy is required.  Only one rider “wins” the Tour de France or the Giro d’Italia, but it’s their team that really wins the race.  In long haul cycling there truly is strength in numbers, for reasons both of physics and psychology.  The role of a team leader (and a manager if a team has one, which all the pro teams do) is to balance the welfare of the many and the welfare of the few – or the one.  In the end, everyone is there to sacrifice themselves to get the leader across the line first.

In the case of Kyoto Fushimi Midousuji Akira is both the leader and the manager (and the dictator).  As good a cyclist as he is, it’s obvious that he enjoys the strategy of the sport more than the actual riding.  Chimera-kun always has a plan, and this day was never going to be different.  He may have won the second day, but he did so with only Mizuta-kun at his side – the rest of the team finishing well behind the body of Hakone and Souhoku’s.  That places him at a significant disadvantage against those two teams, and waiting for the rest of his riders to catch him would leave him with too large a deficit to make up.

Chimera-kun already has a plan when Isa Shinya of Kumamoto Daiichi – who he used up and left for dead on day two – comes to him begging for strategic scraps.  He’s discussed his plan with the soft-spoken Yamaguchi Noriyuki (Tokuishi Katsuhiro), but Ise’s willingness to be used again is too good an opportunity to pass up.  The main peloton here consists of the bulk of the riders, and a group that large can move much faster than a pack of six or eight – but only if properly marshalled.  If that group of zaku could be turned into piranhas, their individual weakness could actually become something deadly.

The idea is very simple (apart from the head-shaving thing, which I’m not sure why he was so insistent about).  It would slow Midousuji down too much to wait for his three trailers to catch up.  But if the peloton could pull those riders back to him at warp speed, Midousuji could ride them like a surfer on a wave, all the way back to the front pack.  For this to work, he needs Ise to organize and motivate the peloton.  But he doesn’t fully trust him to do that, so it’s Yamaguchi’s job to assume command once he’s been swallowed up.  Once Yamagucghi drags the pack up to where Midousuji and Mizuta are, all of that power can be expended getting him back to the front.

The flaw in this plan, of course, is that once the peloton reels in Souhoku and Hakone, Midousuji-kun will just jettison them again.  Ise surely knows this, but as he says himself – what does he have to lose?  This way Kumamoto is at least relevant, and maybe has a chance at a higher finish than would otherwise be the case.  In point of fact the main SouHako pack passes by Midousuji and Mizuta on the road, and while shit for brains Kaburagi can only cackle, Naruko is unnerved enough to hang back for a chat.  I thought it was because he suspected a trap – I certainly would – but it seems more a case of his genuinely being dismayed at the idea Midousuji might not be there to challenge him at the end.  Be careful what you wish for, little Red Bean…