Category: Giro d’Italia
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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…
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Steven Kruijswijk fastest uphill – handy when you’re already first and there are only mountains to come
Well that was a bit weird. Alexander Foliforov of the Gazprom-Rusvelo team won the cronoscalata. In cycling, weird is usually bad, but let’s not jump the gun. Foliforov, essentially an unknown, does have a certain amount of pedigree. In 2014, he came fourth in the Tour de l’Avenir, a Tour de France for under-23s which…
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Steven Kruijswijk still infuriatingly insistent that I keep typing out his name
For the second day in a row, race leader Andrey Amador was dropped on a climb only to scorch down the descent and catch the men who left him. It would have been an exceptional recovery if that had been the end of the stage. Sadly for Amador, it wasn’t. By the end of the…
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Mikel Nieve should probably have found himself racing for more than mere stage wins
Apparently there’s an area called the Julian Alps and that’s where the Giro was today. They should knock on Julian’s door more often. He’s fun. The stage win Mikel Nieve adopted the increasingly common ‘strongest man in the day’s break’ approach to win this particular stage. It was some rare good news for Team Sky,…