While Vincenzo Nibali slouched over his top tube behind the stage 20 podium, members of his Astana entourage watched a small television screen with widening smiles as maglia rosa Esteban Chaves (Orica-GreenEdge) laboured up the final ramps of the climb to Sant'Anna di Vinadio.
Time moves slowly at 2,000 metres above sea level, but even after those 44 long seconds had passed, Nibali seemed to struggle to believe it. Perhaps it was only when Chaves' parents, who had travelled from Colombia for the occasion, graciously approached Nibali to offer their congratulations, did he realise that all was true. The Giro d'Italia was his.
"I only believed it after the finish," Nibali said. "I was there, listening to the speaker counting down the seconds. It was only when I understood I'd pulled it off that I could start to celebrate."
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The bulk of the heavy lifting came in Nibali's startling solo victory at Risoul on Friday. That morning, he lay fourth overall and the bones of five minutes off the overall lead, and seemed to be racing with only the dimmest hopes of salvaging a podium berth from a Giro that oscillated between the subdued and the troubled.
By the beginning of the Giro's mammoth penultimate stage, which had 4,100 metres of vertical climbing crammed into 134 kilometres, Nibali was up to second, just 44 seconds off Chaves, and his remarkable reanimation the previous afternoon suggested strongly that the balance of the race was tipping towards him.
So it proved on the Colle della Lombarda, the penultimate climb of the Giro. Nibali delegated teammates Jakob Fuglsang and Michele Scarponi to lay down a brisk tempo from the lower slopes of the 18-kilometre ascent. The inevitable attack came five kilometres from the finish, as a seated Nibali forged clear spinning at a notably high cadence.
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