As the leading group trundled onto the dirt road on the Alpe di Poti on stage 8 of the Giro d'Italia, and Matteo Montaguti (AG2R La Mondiale) surged off the front, Gianluca Brambilla (Etixx-QuickStep) wondered if he knew something that the rest of them didn't.
"When I saw Montaguti attacking, I thought to myself: ‘Either he knows this dirt road or he's gone too hard," said Brambilla, who initially opted to follow his own rhythm even when Alessandro De Marchi (BMC) set off in pursuit, before eventually catching, passing and dropping his fellow countrymen.
Hurtling down the sinuous descent back into Arezzo, Brambilla had only the vaguest of concrete information about the time gaps to his erstwhile companions – "I heard something about 20 seconds" – yet he had a sense, too, that he was about to pull off an unlikely double heist of stage win and pink jersey.
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By the time the road flattened out, whether Brambilla realised it or not, stage victory was effectively assured, and he crossed the line 1:06 clear of Cannondale's Moreno Moser. After wheeling to a halt past the finish line, he didn't have long to wait before the timekeepers could confirm that he had dispossessed Tom Dumoulin (Giant-Alpecin) of the maglia rosa for good measure.
"The pink jersey was always my dream but to find myself wearing it, well it feels strange," Brambilla said in the post-stage press conference, where a request to provide a "blow by blow" account of his victory was met with an answer almost four minutes in length.
A third place finisher in Strade Bianche in March after a similarly pugnacious showing, Brambilla set out on stage 8 with the knowledge that he had an aptitude for the terrain in the finale, but harbouring doubts that he would be given the kind of latitude he needed given his relative proximity to Dumoulin on the general classification.
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