Monte Grappa, a mammoth 24 kilometres in length, seemed to offer the kind of terrain required to put Sunweb's Tom Dumoulin into difficulty on the final road stage of the Giro d'Italia, but when the onslaught finally came, it arrived from an unexpected source.
Two-thirds of the way up the climb, it was the red Katusha-Alpecin guard of Ilnur Zakarin – and not Nairo Quintana's Movistar teammates or Vincenzo Nibali's Bahrain-Merida men – who took up the reins at the front of the maglia rosa group. Pace-making by Maxim Belkov, who had dropped back from the early break, and Robert Kiserlovski helped to whittle down the GC group down to its bare bones, and seemed to signal the beginning of the denouement.
Although a general regrouping followed over the summit, the show of force from Katusha-Alpecin prefigured what was to come on the final ascent of Foza, where Zakarin himself went on the offensive in the company of Domenico Pozzovivo (AG2R La Mondiale) with almost ten kilometres of climbing remaining. The Tatarstan native's distinctive climbing style is hardly the most aesthetically pleasing on this Giro, but it has been increasingly effective in the race's third week.
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His unzipped jersey flapping in the wind, Zakarin performed the bulk of the heavy lifting with Pozzovivo bobbing on his wheel, and at one point they had 30 seconds in hand on Dumoulin and almost 20 on Quintana, Nibali and Thibaut Pinot (FDJ). Having started the day just 1:21 down in fifth overall, Zakarin was too dangerous to be granted the freedom of the mountainside.
By the time Zakarin and Pozzovivo crested the summit, they had been joined by Pinot, Nibali and Quintana, though the collaboration among the leading quintet was patchy on the plateau that rippled towards the finish in Asiago, 12 kilometres away. In the ensuing sprint, Zakarin had to settle for second place behind Pinot, while the five leaders had to content themselves with a gain of just 15 seconds over Dumoulin.
"The good thing today was that the team rode very well, although we didn't get a lot of time in the finale," Zakarin said at the finish, with Katusha-Alpecin's PR agent, the former professional Serguei Ouchakov, providing the translation from Russian to Italian.
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