To coincide with the Giro d’Italia, an Italian telecommunications company has organised a competition asking fans to vote for the most aggressive rider on each stage. They perhaps should have foreseen the obvious catch in their strategy: for Italians, there can only be one winner of this Giro.
Four stages in, Vincenzo Nibali (Astana) had been voted as Ciclista del Cuore (favourite rider, or literally: ‘rider of the heart’) four times out of a possible four. And so before the start each morning, the Sicilian sheepishly accepts his prize – a new smartphone – on the signing-on podium, to tumultuous cheers from the gathered tifosi.
There have been fewer gifts on offer out on the road, mind, as Nibali found when he lost four seconds at Benevento on stage 5 after the peloton broke up on the finishing circuit, where only 12 riders – including Alejandro Valverde (Movistar) and dark horse Ilnur Zakarin (Katusha) – were awarded the same time as winner André Greipel (Lotto-Soudal).
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“It was quite nervous in the finale but nothing special,” Nibali said as he sat on the steps of the Astana bus afterwards. “I was together with [Mikel] Landa. I didn’t see where the gap was formed and I didn’t see how it opened up, because four seconds are really a lot. The peloton was lined out but from what I could make out, I didn’t see gaps.”
At that point, barely half an hour after the stage, the official results had not yet been published and – with the afternoon schedule’s polemica quotient doubtless in mind – one television reporter wondered if Nibali had grounds to appeal the lost time and restore the small buffer he built up over Valverde in Friday’s opening time trial.
“If it’s confirmed, then so be it,” said Nibali, who had little desire for a melodrama at this early juncture. “But there was a crash in the finale too and normally when there’s a crash they neutralise the times. We didn’t sit up [after the crash], we continued right to the finish as normal, and it was only right to do that. But if the rules are respected, they’d give us all the same time. If not, then 4 seconds aren’t a lot and that’s ok too.”
Roccaraso
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