An interesting first week of the Giro is about to come to a conclusion.
GC| Click to see full-size image. |
| Click to see full-size image. |
Kittel has suddenly become an old fashioned sprinter again. Absolutely crushing these sprint/rouleur hybrids that have sprung up in recent years. As soon as the road heads upwards he is dropped like a particularly ugly one night stand's phone number the moment you leave her house.
Fantastic stuff.
Griepel won a non event uphill drag that nobody else seemed to care about.
Yesterday stage 6 was the first real test of the GC contenders and it ended like this...
A scarcely believeable quintet of Fuglsang, Zakarin, Dumoulin, Pozzovivo and Sioutsou finished clear of the 'main' contenders.
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Ante post favs Nibali and Landa finished a few seconds further behind.
So does all this mean we have a changing of the guard and a new race on our hands? Probably, possibly, maybe and who knows.
Of the five that broke clear yesterday
Dumoulin - Apparently no altitude training this year
Zakarin - Untested over three weeks
Fuglsang - Working for Nibali
Sioutsou - Not good enough and allowed to go by the peloton yesterday
Pozzovivo - Perennial loser, weakened team.
In my opinion Nibali and Landa don't have it at the moment. Nobali's weird attack yesterday stunk of over confidence or desperation and judging how quickly he was brought back it seems like the latter.
Landa has looked awful, hanging on for dear life with barely a teammate around him.
Obviously both of these guys can and probably will grow into the race but their prices will almost certainly increase before they shrink.
| Click to see full-size image. |
| Click to see full-size image. |
A flat stage today followed by a big ITT.
Any ideas on who wins the bloody thing?
I'm desperate to back Fuglsang. Looks amazingly strong but would take a lot for him to take over leadership.
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