In 1997, the last time the Giro d’Italia featured a time trial to San Marino, defending champion Pavel Tonkov won the stage to move into the maglia rosa. Marco Pantani, his most touted challenger, could only manage a distant 11th and even then, just three stages in, it seemed difficult to imagine anyone other than Tonkov in pink in Milan.
Ten years earlier, another defending champion, Roberto Visentini, claimed an emphatic victory in the time trial from Rimini to San Marino. That sparkling performance saw him inherit the pink jersey from his teammate Stephen Roche and – so it seemed – settle the thorny issue of leadership of the Carrera squad once and for all.
The San Marino time trial, once a staple of the Giro route, made its return after 21 years on Sunday and, by the end, it felt as though the sea-to-sky test had never been away. A steady grind rather than a full-blown mountain time trial, it has historically rewarded the strongest rider at that point in the race, and so it proved once again.
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Primoz Roglic (Jumbo-Visma) is the man of the moment – a stunningly long moment that has now endured since the UAE Tour in February – and, as expected, the Slovenian was a dominant victor of the 34km test. It may have required a mechanical mishap from Victor Campenaerts to ensure he claimed the stage, but his superiority over his general classification rivals brooked no argument.
The pink jersey contenders set out in dismally wet conditions (Campenaerts, an early starter, enjoyed dry roads), and Roglic was the best of them in all three phases of the stage. He was already 26 seconds quicker than Vincenzo Nibali (Bahrain-Merida) on the early run along the coast and then tacked on another 12 seconds in the second third. Tellingly, he was all of 27 seconds faster than Nibali on the 12km climb to towards the finish.
It is a measure of Roglic’s strength that Nibali evinced such satisfaction at having limited his deficit to 1:04 on the stage. Nibali’s upbeat view was informed in part, of course, by the sheer scale of the losses incurred by two other rivals. After impressing in the short Bologna time trial last weekend, Simon Yates (Mitchelton-Scott) endured what he labelled “a stinker” here, losing 3:10 to Roglic, while Miguel Angel Lopez (Astana) coughed up 3:44.
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via Cyclingnews Latest Interviews and Features http://www.cyclingnews.com/features/not-over-yet-roglic-takes-command-but-giro-ditalia-still-in-opening-phase
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