When Vincenzo Nibali laboured in the Dolomites on the Giro d’Italia’s penultimate weekend amid rumours of his imminent departure at season’s end for the new Bahrain-backed project, one wondered whether Astana would even see fit to select the Sicilian in their Tour de France line-up.
What a difference a week makes. After somehow recovering to win the Giro he simply couldn’t afford to lose, Nibali’s status in the Astana team – regardless of his decision vis à vis 2017 – has been buttressed. The Olympic Games road race is the next major landmark on Nibali’s horizon, and there is now no doubt that Astana will facilitate his passage to Rio by including him in the Tour team, which is due to be led by Fabio Aru.
“It will be important to recover energy first,” Nibali said on Sunday, explaining that he would take the bones of ten days off training before beginning his build-up to the Tour, which gets underway in just under four weeks. “The objective is to ride the Tour with a view to the Olympics. They Olympics are a very important event for me and the Tour would definitely be a decisive part of the build-up.”
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Astana have carefully kept their two stage race leaders at arm’s length for the past two and a half seasons by creating two distinct groups, with Nibali and Aru served by a different core of domestiques, as well as separate coaches, soigneurs and even press officers. The only stage race they have ridden together since the 2013 Giro was last year’s Vuelta a España, where any potential leadership contest ended when Nibali was excluded from the race for taking a tow from a team car on stage 2.
Nibali and Aru’s co-existence at the Tour will inevitably draw comparisons with Fausto Coppi and Gino Bartali’s ‘Patto di Chiavari’ ahead of the 1949 race, though as Alberto Contador’s ill-starred attempt to complete the Giro-Tour double last year demonstrated, it seems unlikely that Nibali will have the freshness necessary to compete for the win in July.
Rio 2016
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