As he rode away from the finish line on Sunday, still in pink but no longer the leader of the Giro d’Italia, Tom Dumoulin (Giant-Alpecin) said although he would have liked to have kept the pink jersey for another day, he felt deeply satisfied with what he had achieved.
With Marcel Kittel (Etixx-QuickStep) blasting his way with impressive ease to a second straight bunch sprint and into the race lead, as Dumoulin saw it, there was a limit to what he and his team could do under such circumstances.
“I would have liked to have been on the winner’s podium one more time for a Dutch crowd, but it wasn’t possible,” Dumoulin told a small group of reporters before pedaling away.
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“It will be a bit easier now getting to the team bus straight away after the finishes and so on, a bit more relaxed, but even though I was sure Marcel was going to do very well in the bunch sprints, I thought at one point we might have kept the jersey.
“That was because at one point in the stage I couldn’t see Marcel anywhere and we thought he might have crashed. However, he came back into the group with his team-mates so that didn’t happen.”
Giant-Alpecin management argued that it might well be possible for Dumoulin, now nine seconds down on the Etixx-QuickStep sprinter, to fight back for the pink jersey as soon as Tuesday when racing re-commences in Italy. But Dumoulin was not so sure.
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