Ryder Hesjedal sat upright with his hands on his hips as he freewheeled through the finish area and towards his Trek-Segafredo team bus after conceding 43 seconds in the finale of stage 4 of the Giro d’Italia to Praia a Mare.
For the equable Canadian, the stance effectively amounted to a statement of the deepest frustration, though by the time he reports for duty again on stage 5, Hesjedal will probably have reconciled himself to the fact that it could have been a whole lot worse.
Indeed, on a strikingly similar stage further up the Tyrrhenian coast a year ago, it was precisely that, when Hesjedal conceded five minutes and all hopes of a podium finish on the road to La Spezia.
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On that occasion, Hesjedal was caught out when Astana upped the ante more than two hours from the finish, and he was doubtless alert to a similar danger on Monday’s stage, which saw the peloton spend 200 kilometres weaving among the headlands and outcrops of the Calabrian coast beneath sunshine that was more persistent than pleasant.
"It was fast all day, and definitely in the last 80k or so it was full-on with shorter, complicated climbs," Hesjedal said in a statement later released by his Trek-Segafredo team.
When the peloton fragmented more definitively on the final, uncategorised climb of the Fortino, which featured gradients that touched 18% persistent, Hesjedal was caught on the wrong side of the split.
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