Category: Giro d’Italia
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Andre Greipel is still riding and still winning
Greipel wins! Take that, pedals! I didn’t watch it, but it sounded like a fairly generic sprint stage. Greipel is the best sprinter left in the race and the very fact that he is still in the race arguably makes a case for his being the best sprinter to have been in the race as…
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Diego Ulissi loves the rumples
You did of course commit Diego Ulissi’s name to memory after he won stage four. Just as well really being as he won stage 11 as well. The Italian has now won 16 races in his home country since 2012 and none anywhere else. Maybe the distance is finally starting to tell in this Giro.…
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Some young lad called Giulio Ciccone wins a stage of the Giro – no idea who he is
Stage 10 didn’t prove quite as messy as I’d hoped. The peloton did indeed split into small groups as predicted, but one of those small groups comprised pretty much all of the favourites. This meant that while there were a lot of meaningless time gaps, there weren’t all that many that mattered. The stage win…
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Primoz Roglic doesn’t need computers (or water)
A time trial is, hardly unsurprisingly, a story of time. Tactics and team-mates become irrelevant. The clock is all. At least that’s normally the case. In Chianti country on stage nine, the weather also played a part. Tom Dumoulin’s verdict was: “It was shit, I had no chance and I didn’t take any risks.” What…
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Gianluca Brambilla pinches everything
That might be it for Tom Dumoulin. It wasn’t so much the time he lost on the gravelly climb of Alpe di Poti, it was the way he lost it. Riders were swarming past him and he finished 38th on the stage. His downfall was triggered by Alejandro Valverde who pushed the pace and got…
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Andre Greipel’s legs and bike continue to work well
Greipel wins! Take that, pedals! Cycling is a messy sport. Given a clear run, Marcel Kittel would win every sprint in this race. Even Andre Greipel says his countryman is the quickest sprinter by some margin. Yet as things stand, Kittel has two wins and Greipel also has two wins. It wasn’t Kittel’s legs that…
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Tim Wellens avoids a compulsive attack by being ahead of everyone
Belgian rider, Tim Wellens, is what you might call a compulsive attacker. If there’s any sort of incline with a handful of kilometres to go, he can’t seem to help himself. He usually makes a fight of things, but it’s hard to win with late attacks like his when the peloton’s going full pelt. On…
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Big German guy wins sprint in 2016 Giro d’Italia
But it wasn’t Marcel Kittel. Greipel wins! Take that, pedals! Andre Greipel’s ‘thing’ is being a big, muscular, pedal-mashing ball of angry, gaping-mouthed power. It therefore seems somewhat counterintuitive that he should win stage five of the Giro through his climbing. But that’s essentially what he did. Over 233km of undulating roads, Greipel endured. When…
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Diego Ulissi can still do hills – but can he do mountains?
I tipped Diego Ulissi as a rider to watch in 2014. He won a couple of stages of the Giro, but then took three too many puffs on his inhaler and found himself banned for a bit. The stage he won today was the kind I associated him with at the start of that season.…
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Marcel Kittel corners the market on Giro road stage wins outside Italy
Marcel Kittel won stage two from Arnhem to Nijmegen. Unsurprisingly, stage three from Nijmegen to Arnhem didn’t offer radically different terrain, so he won again. The deja vu was compounded by two of yesterday’s breakaway riders – Maarten Tjallingii and Giacomo Berlato – getting in the break again. In 2014 – the only other time…