Category: Giro d’Italia
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Andre Greipel doesn’t even feel the need to hit peak pedal-mash
Greipel wins! Take that, pedals. The man they call The Gorilla (but who I call The Basking Shark on account of his gigantic mouth) didn’t even seem to need to hit full pedal-mashing fury to take stage two. He dedicated the victory to his mum. It was the seventh Giro d’Italia stage win of the…
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Lukas Postlberger inaugurates Quest’s free-to-air highlights show
Reading this sentence back, I’m seeing the name Lukas Postlberger for about the fifth time in my life. It’s safe to say that the winner of the first stage of the Giro d’Italia was something of an outsider. This is the first Grand Tour the 25-year-old Austrian has ever ridden. After one stage, he has…
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Riders to watch at the 2017 Giro d’Italia
The Giro d’Italia starts this week. Who are the contenders? In no particular order (largely because I wanted to separate the two pictures)… Nairo Quintana Going by who tends to get closest to Chris Froome on one of his good days, Quintana’s the class of the field. He’s racing both the Giro and the Tour…
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Freeview Giro d’Italia highlights will be available on Quest
Good news everyone, while ITV4 aren’t showing the Giro d’Italia, you can still watch highlights without spending an arm and a leg on access to some cable TV channel or other. Freeview channel Quest will be broadcasting a one-hour highlights package each night at 10pm. Hit ‘series record’ now! Unlike the Tour de France coverage…
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Giacomo Nizzolo can’t even win a stage of the Giro when he crosses the line first
Quite a neat trick, really. After nine second places and four third places, Giacomo Nizzolo finally crossed the line before everyone else in a stage of the Giro d’Italia. Shortly afterwards the race judges concluded that he’d veered across while sprinting and in so doing had blocked off his rival, Sacha Modolo. They demoted him…
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Vincenzo Nibali’s horrific and shameful Giro d’Italia somehow ends in victory
After Vincenzo Nibali won stage 19, Esteban Chaves said: “It’s not easy to follow Nibali downhill. He’s crazy to do that, but I must be crazy too to follow him.” Descending is perhaps an underrated aspect of cycling. Grand Tour winners are always among the strongest climbers, but you don’t see the impact of a descent…
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Nibali or Kruijswijk – choose your story
Remember those Choose Your Own Adventure books where you’d have a choice to make at the end of every passage? “If you choose to drink the potion, turn to page 110. If you choose to throw the potion in the angry hippopotamus’s face, turn to page 83.” This is nothing like that. There are only…
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Matteo Trentin as if from nowhere
Matteo Trentin won another for the breakaway. It was an odd one though. Worth watching. For the last quite-a-few kilometres, stage 18 seemed certain to be a mano-e-mano duel between two Italians (mano nella mano?) – Moreno Moser and Trentin’s team-mate, Gianluca Brambilla (who we already know from earlier in the race). The day’s break…
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Roger Kluge didn’t sprint
Previewing stage 17, I did ask whether there were any sprinters left in the race. There are a handful, but flatter stages no longer see a significant number of teams hammering away at the front of the bunch in the closing kilometres, trying to set things up. Shorn of their fastest finishers, a lot are…
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Alejandro Valverde is still in the Giro d’Italia
Alejandro doesn’t always sprint for fourth place. Sometimes there aren’t three riders ahead of him and he has to settle for sprinting for the win. That’s what happened at the end of a short but gruelling stage 16. The attacks started early and continued throughout. Without wishing to walk you through who attacked when, the…