For André Greipel (Lotto-Soudal), the 2015 Giro d’Italia may be something of a voyage in the dark. But then he likes his Grand Tours that way.
The 32-year-old sprinter, with victories in all three Grand Tours to his name, says he has no idea of how many flat stages there are in the race that he can target, “because I never read the route book. You never can change the parcours. All you need is good condition. I know Saturday is a team time trial, Sunday is flat and then we will see.”
Greipel, the highest profile sprinter in the Giro this year, is not trotting this line out as a way of having to avoid journalists’ questions about how many stages he thinks will end in a bunch sprint – and therefore should think about winning. In fact, the Lotto-Soudal rider turns a little pale when asked what he thinks of “the Alpine stage with 5,000 metres of vertical climbing on stage four,” only relaxing when it’s pointed out this is a joke.
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For Greipel, with or without a route book in his suitcase, this Giro, where he is co-leader with Jurgen Van Den Broeck, is something of a novelty. Increasingly focused on the Tour de France, he has never ridden the Giro d’Italia for his current employer, his last participation coming with HTC in 2010, when he abandoned on stage 19 to Aprica, the day after he won the second stage of his career in the Italian Grand Tour.
He will also be racing with a somewhat different line-up for the sprints, with no Jürgen Roelandts or Marcel Sieberg, both of whom have been key parts of Greipel’s leadout-train in the Tour. “Greg Henderson will be my last man, as always, and then I think Adam Hansen will be the next,” Greipel says. “But we will decide it on the day. With some of our usual riders not here, we’ll have to rely on our own experience more to get in the right position in the sprints.”
“I think we have a balance, a group around Greipel, another round Jurgen, and let’s be honest, a guy like Hansen or Lars [Bak] can do both,” says Lotto-Soudal manager Marc Sergeant, “Also for the team time trial, a top ten can be possible, instead of seventeenth like in Romandie, which was not good.”
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