On the bad days, and there have been several on this Giro d'Italia, Tejay van Garderen's eyes seem only to see the ground beneath his feet. After a fruitless day in the break on the road to Canazei on Wednesday, for instance, he drifted through the finish area without so much as a word.
On the good days, van Garderen sees the world in sharper colours. When he sat down for his press conference after beating Mikel Landa (Sky) to win stage 18 in Ortisei, he immediately spotted a man in a Denver Broncos cap and broke into a broad smile, a rarity during this most trying Giro.
"Broncos! Broncos!" van Garderen called out, before inquiring where his fellow devotee of the American football team hailed from. "From Italy? And you have a Denver Broncos hat," van Garderen marvelled, as though this, and not winning a stage of the Giro, had been the highlight of his day in the Dolomites. It will, in any case, be an anecdote to tell his friend Eric Studesville, the Broncos running backs coach, who will visit the Giro d'Italia on its final day in Milan.
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Up to this point, it had appeared a conclusive sort of a Giro for van Garderen, who was deployed to ride the corsa rosa as means of rediscovering himself after his past two tilts at the Tour de France had ended in disappointment. When disappointment on the Blockaus on stage 9 was followed by disaster in the Montefalco time trial two days later, it seemed van Garderen's days as a Grand Tour leader were numbered.
Nothing illustrated his torment better than the account BMC directeur sportif Max Sciandri gave to Il Corriere della Sera of the long drive back to the team hotel after that time trial stage. "For an hour he didn't say a word, and then he asked me to stop the car at an Autogrill," Sciandri said. "He drank a beer. He looked at me and he said: 'And now what do I tell the team?'"
Victory in Ortisei appears, temporarily at least, to have lightened van Garderen's dark night of the soul. Though van Garderen is now three seasons removed from his last consistent performance over an entire three weeks – his 5th place at the 2014 Tour – the American is still more than a year shy of his 30th birthday.
Dolomite drifter
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