A mountain stage? Yes, and Mads Pedersen has his work cut out if he wants the maglia rosa back.
Primož inter pares: the stage win for Josh Tarling, the overall for Primož Roglič who fared the best of the GC contenders and was only a second away from the stage win. It seemed to surprise him and he had to jog to the podium truck to get changed back into his cycling clothing in order to receive the maglia rosa.
The Route: 160km and 2,800m of vertical gain thanks a visit to the Ceraunian mountains. There’s an uphill start to be exploited by anyone wanting to get away at KM0. After 60km the first climb is steeper than it looks on paper.
After Himarë’s intermediate sprint there’s the sneaky unmarked climb of the Qafa a Vishës which is 7% for 5km and if it includes a mini descent that’s followed by a sustained 14% section, all on rattling roads too.
The Qafa e Llogarasë is the main climb and 10km at 7.5%. There is a 12% section but it’s a small ramp, for the most part the climb is very even. Over the top there’s 40km which can allow dropped riders to get back and it’s all flat to the finish with one or two bumps along the way which can be exploited but they’re more than 10km out.
The Finish: after a dash a long the coast, a turn into town and a flat finish on a wide road.
The Contenders: Mads Pedersen (Lidl-Trek) has been climbing so well this season but 10km at 7.5% is beyond even what he was doing at Paris-Nice, but it depends on which teams push the pace. The long descent and flat roads to the finish don’t rewards attacks on the pass and normally UAE and Red Bull should want to avoid hostilities today so Pedersen and others have a chance to stay in contact or get back on if circumstances allow. Indeed Red Bull might only too happy to have Pedersen back in the lead in order to spare Roglič from the daily rigmarole of the race leader.
Tom Pidcock (Q36.5) is an easy pick for his versatility but he won’t like the pure flat finish. Orluis Aular (Movistar) was a surprise in third place but won’t be any more if he pops up in the finish, he’s fast and light.
The breakaway has a good chance today with over half the field five minutes down but Lidl-Trek are likely to want to try and control the stage. Spin the wheel of fortune to make picks… Pello Bilbao (Bahrain) is down on GC but this is probably because he’s struggling; Filippo Zana (Jayco) to try and salvage something for a team that’s struggling already, likewise Ethan Hayter and Gianmarco Garofoli (Soudal-Quickstep). XDS Astana can easily supply someone, think Christian Scaroni. But it’s complicated because we need a climber for the big mountain pass but the flat finish is for the opposite morphology.
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Pedersen, Pidcock |
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Aular, Zana, Houle, Scaroni |
Weather: 20°C and mainly cloudy with the chance of rain.
TV: KM0 is at 13.25, the Himare sprint around 3.20pm and the finish is forecast for 17.15 CEST.
Postcard from Vlorë
Why is the Giro going to Vlorë? Largely to promote tourism and put the coastline on the map, it’s central to the country’s expansion in tourism. But it’s also a port city with a regular ferry link to Italy and so the race can make its way to Italy starting tonight.
Don’t call tomorrow a rest day, as if there is no racing it’s technically a “travel day”. UCI regulations cap a grand tour at 23 days which is for the full duration of the race, including the obligatory two rest days, so 21 days of racing. But if there is a start in a “non-adjacent” country then once every four years organisers can ask for an extra day to be used for travel. This is just what happens here, the Giro has been granted this extra day for travel to Italy tonight and tomorrow. There are three ferries chartered to move the convoy, plus two flights to take the peloton and some others.
Tel Aviv, Budapest and now Tirana. The Giro does seem to be shopping around for politically controversial places. Bulgaria with a less contested government could be next, but the big whisper is a start in the Middle-East. Saudi Arabia? There was gossip the kingdom would sponsor the maglia rosa but that didn’t happen.
The UAE would fit because race organisers RCS also run the early season UAE Tour in Dubai so there’s a connection. But would the Sheikhs like to see their home event upstaged by a foreign import? And they already pay a handsome fee to RCS for the UAE Tour, would they pay even more for the Giro? Or RCS could work out a deal as thanks for the UAE Tour; and it could be Abu Dhabi instead of Dubai. Details to be ironed out.
In terms of logistics a fourth day would be required as the minimum, tomorrow’s five hour ferry ride replaced by a five hour flight but this section of the UCI rulebook is more paperback than hardcover, it bends. Sports-wise an Arabian grande partenza would probably feel the same as the UAE Tour, the same desert(ed) roads, the same climbs but the difference is it would be broadcast to millions rather than the niche audience. The challenge though would be the heat, what is warm in February is hot in May.
A breakaway day with the leader’s jersey handed out to some lucky soul, maybe.
I reckon so, although if there’s a big fight for the break they won’t get much time and Trek will be on their tails.
Trek could well try and control things and when they’ve been doing this so far this season it’s not subtle, they’ll take on several teams at once.
At the more subtle end, with all the talk of engineering outcomes, it would not be preposterous to see Roglič sit up on the final kilometre and come in two seconds down on Pedersen.
I’m not sure Bulgaria is any less contested. There’s a debate about whether Rumen Radev, the president, is funded by the CIA or the FSB!
The PM is more boring. I was half-wondering if Minsk would be next for RCS, but it’s not a snarky issue.
Observing Tarling’s TT performances at 19 one might have expected him to progress since though he hasn’t really done so. Maybe it’s a consequence of trying to improve as a classics rider where he has progressed.
He had a rough patch last summer. He missed the Olympics, in part because he slammed into a sunken drain cover and punctured, then was supposed to recover and build for the end of the season but got the rest/training wrong. It was a lot to ask from a teenager.
Practically everyone who owns a bike is coached nowadays. Especially teenagers with ambitious parents. So you end up with riders developing earlier and the big gains that a rider might have historically expected to make in their early twenties have already been made.
There’s still space for later development, but you’re right, it’s the good ol’ Eastern Europe Effect (often quite wrongly attributed to other reasons). As in that case, there’s also a big psychological aspect.
@gabriele
I grew up in Leipzig in the “good ol’ Eastern Europe” if u want. What “wrongly attributed” reasons do you refer to?
When in the 90s athletes from Eastern countries arrived to the West and showed good results, many said that they must have been doping from an early age so they got great results on their first season but then due to the “oh-so-effective” Western antidoping they “had to race clean” and so their “real results” would surface.
This is in stark contrast with what we now know about practice in juvenile cycling in Eastern Germany or Russia, at least for some of the best teen athletes (pharma was normally introduced later on, if anything), and, of course, what we now know about doping and antidoping in pro cycling in the 90s.
Other reasons to explain some trajectories look more plausible, even more so because we have a good deal of counter-examples, so I’d alo suggest that the “general idea” of Eastern athletes being necessarily “short-lived” often feels like generalisation or stereotype due to some manifest cases – ignoring others. Instead, each of them, if examined in detail, may give us some interesting hint about different athletical development curves.
@gabriele
I can assure you that doping was *extremely* prevalent in the GDR from young age. I know that a lot of the results were due to other factors and that DHFK here in Leipzig was often (wrongly) associated with doping research, but check out nearby FSK and/or Ewald:
https://web.archive.org/web/20080921145530/http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_20021025/ai_n12658822
I have relatives – a young niece – that was part of this horror as a swimmer. Don’t be naive.
Note that I referred to cycling and to the specific story some of the prominent figure in the 90s and 00s which are known in relative detail (think Tchmil, later Vinokourov or Ekimov in Russia or Ullrich in Germany).
The article you quote, albeit due, is to me especially weak from a periodistic POV, hiding behind its “obituary” nature in not even naming the corresponding context in USA or West Germany sport.
Most of the time, blaming the monstrous Other is intended to cover up or justifying what’s happening at home (just as it happened in East Germany sports, indeed).
Think Berzin or Ugrumov, talented athletes whose sudden step up held a stronger relationship with what was happening in Italy than with whatever had happened before they moved, let alone their juvenile years.
But just jump back to 2002 when this article was written…
@gabriele
I’m not sure what you point is. Do you deny the immense doping programme that – among other things – propelled GDR to the top of the medal tabels? You are aware that Ewald and Höppner were convicted in 2000? If you deny and try to whatbout it, I have lost all respect for you.
Track back the conversation above and you might discover that it was focussed on *cycling* and my specific point is what was being *said* about athletes from the Eastern bloc arriving in Western European pro cycling. That narrative was essentially a cover up and a distraction.
Related examples are welcome.
That said, East Germany had a massive state programme of scientific doping, of course… just as Western Germany had.
Please, link me some good obituary as the above for Joseph Keul. It would also be more cycling related, by the way.
East Germany was probably stronger in hormones but caught on the back foot when blood doping started to be a thing in the 80s.
Save for some specific historical cases, I’m against reductionist explication in sport which make doping the big explainer leaving aside a huge number of other factors. Same for women sport in the DDR.
The juvenile sport part in swimming isn’t exclusive of DDR, either, sadly enough. Only you won’t have it so easily exposed without that sort of radical political change, which is required to have a broader disclosure about what happens in sport.
That said, the adjective “criminal” falls short to define that.
But whoever sees that as part of a geographically and politically limited past is being naif now.
Can someone explain the logic behing categorizing the climbs? 7% for 5km has no category at all, 10km at 7.5% is just cat 2. Ridiculous.
It’s always subjective and depends on several things, presumably not give away too many points on the weekend otherwise the contest will go flat for most of next week.
But yes, the ratings don’t quite match the metrics of each climb.
Over at ASO they use a formula where you take the square of the slope’s % gradient and multiply it by the length in kilometres to get a score, eg 7% for 5km works out at 7² x 5 = 245 and then these numbers are used as a guide for the rating… but the rating is to suggest rather than set the label. Plus you get climbs in the third week of a grand tour that aren’t even categorised when if they’d be in the first week they’d be a major thing. So it’s always subjective.
Thanks. Surely this is something where the governing body should interfere. The UCI tries to set rules on everything even as ridiculous as sock length but when it comes to something which impacts on classification points within a race, there are no rules at all and the organizers can do as they wish.
It’s surely best left to organisers? Otherwise either the Giro or 4 Days of Dunkerque will be limited etc. I find the best thing is to ignore the ratings, unless you’re thinking of the mountains competition and the points, and look at the metrics. A small giveaway for TV commentators, websites, podcasts etc that don’t know or haven’t researched the route is they use the supplied labels, eg “there’s a Cat 2 climb up next” rather than having the details to hand, it’s often but like all short cuts relying on it means details are bound to be missed.
In the past the Giro was supposed to have extra mystery here with major unrated climbs that caught out the peloton and where locals had a real advantage but now all the routes are mapped and measured with software so there are few surprises. Back in the day team managers could sip beers in the evenings but now they’re at a hotel desk scanning maps and zooming in and out of Veloviewer for climbs and even corners – maybe with a beer to hand – which means they all have the same info.
Technically, the organisers of a stage race do not need to have a KOM competition, if they choose not to. The rules state there can only be four jerseys. One is the GC leader, but the organisers can come up with another suggestion for the other three.
Vlorë is nice on the coast with hotels and all but walk a little deeper inlands and you will find destroyed buildings, poverty and slums. Don’t be fooled by the nice looks presented by the organizers, Albania is far from the country which is portrayed here. I cycled through the country a few years ago and will never go back again.
It happens in Tenerife, Gran Canaria or Fuerteventura, too (and Andalusia’s got many examples, too) but tourists don’t look especially distraught because of that.
This is not really surprising, since Albania is a poor country. The good thing is that the poor have not been banished so as “not to upset the tourists”. This is something that happens in many other places.
Did anyone else see Pidcock’s pre race interview, in which he basically said he was riding cautiously whilst in Albania , because you didn’t want to get injured ‘ in a place like this’? I think the look on the interviewer ‘s face must have given him pause, because he hastily remarked that the ‘hotel was nice’.
Trust a Yorkshire man….
So I guess by Pidcocks “expertise”, Landa has to be death by now after he got severly injured and was brought away in a stretcher by some barbarian savages without hospitals.
Riders were politely asked to avoid controversial things about the host country but you can see a few things come out like this or the titles of Strava rides etc.
Interesting, I cycled through a few years ago (2018) and was thoroughly beguiled. Don’t get me wrong, it’s rough in places, but I was pleasantly surprised. It was much more hospitable than Bosnia.
I’m going Pedersen today for the win, partly due to Roglic not particularly wanting the maglia rosa just now.
But I’m almost always wrong!
Talking of foreign departs, I had a look at Google trends for ‘Albania.’ Any bump the Giro has given the country this week was vastly overshadowed by the times that the Albanian football team managed to make major tournements over the last 5 years.
Makes me wonder just how valuable these starts are co sidering how costly they are for foreign countries.
On average, cyclists are more likely than the general population to be wealthy.
So if you are selling expensive holidays, investment opportunities, or expensive taps it’s a good audience.
This depends on the country too. Cycling has an upmarket demographic in some countries like the US; but the opposite in others, like France and Italy. As an anecdote to illustrate we’ve seen Lexus, Toyota’s premium label, provide the cars at the USA Pro Challenge, at the Tour de France it’s Skoda, VW’s economy brand.
But it’s changing, you can see plenty of Rapha jerseys and Specialized bikes etc on a Sunday morning in Italy or France where the group ride has probably been arranged on LinkedIn.
Indeed, and in Italy it’s a subject for debate within the cycling “community” which feels that “their” sport is being taken away from them by “newcomers” which being big spenders but not as aware are seen as the responsible of the “rising prices / declining quality” effect in the bike market. Which of course isn’t true at local scale and probably isn’t at the global one, either (more of a top-down trend pushed by the industry, which is why the market is currently teetering), but the discourse itself gives a hint about the social perception of the state of things. It’s not happening, if not marginally, in Spain, where such a dynamic involved only a couple of generations (and on a much smaller scale), essentially those born in the 70s and 80s. A decade of decline in the 2000s decoupled the popular class from practised cycling, they went more into motorsports. The renaissance of cycling as a practised sport in Spain from 2010 on already happened as an upmarket trend.
My experience here in the US is that the upmarket road trend peaked a while back when you would regularly see doctors and lawyers on very expensive bikes out on the roads. It seems like I see more hardcore cyclists now and maybe some of the “dabblers” have moved onto gravel. I have definitely seen an uptick in fancy gravel bikes over the past five years. Don’t know if sales stats support this observation or not. I unfortunately don’t see much momentum for a return to major racing in the US, although there is still money around (see Levi’s Gran Fondo).
In Europe, cycling was traditionally a blue collar sport afaik. From what I can see in the club I am in, cycling is now very mixed, with people from all walks of life. Income wise at least, in other metrics of diversity it scores rather low.
Last post was me. Unintentional anonymous.
Lots of people watch cycling races without any intention of cycling in a foreign country. Lots of people like looking at the countryside and finding out about the small places the race visits. It is one of the reasons there are so many shots of local castles and churches. People can take a different kind of holiday, without cycling, and lots do end up visiting the place they have seen on TV (or buying the local produce).
There are cost-benefit reviews that say it works, although coincidentally these are often associated with the bidders or the vendors. Italy and Germany are the big markets for Albanian tourism so tapping into Italian TV at the start of May is probably a boost for summer holidays this year or next although the cloudy skies today show some things can’t be bought.
Germany as a market, maybe. But Albania as a destination for Italian tourists sounds weird to me. If Italy doesn’t lack something than it’s touristical locations.
Why would you hop on a ferry or plane to lay on an Albanian beach insted on the other side of the Adria?
Indeed, but it’s close, “new”, a good number of people speak some Italian, and above all cheap. Hotels look to be about half price and many tour operators are involved to offer the whole package, and most beaches are free, or €5-10 for two sunbeds when along most of the Adriatic coast the beach is €20-25 a day.
Nailed.Touristic market is often about exploitation and part of it usually *requires* new destinations when the implied rising cost of life makes it a social problem to keep the business going smoothly (before the Giro ends, we’ll have another “Canary Islands Day” marked by mass protests across the islands).
@gabriele
Was in Tenerife recently, noticed “F*ck tourists” and such graffiti in a couple of places. Also, maybe I’m paranoid , but it felt like some locals were deliberately unfriendly, particularly outside of tourist hot-spots. In the past, I’ve always found the Spanish were very friendly.
Because it cheaper. Much cheaper indeed without the Euro in Play and arguably more interesting.
For many in Italy, Albania is very close by (a short hop across the Adriatic) while parts of Italy will be a rather long journey.
Albanian start was largely if not entirely funded by the Italian gov to “promote” their illegal deportation project. In fact, presentation was delayed when less money appeared to be available from Italy to support the Grande Partenza and suddenly Tirana had no interest in the Giro.
That said, Google trends used the way you do don’t work very well, if at all, to measure what a country looks for when you host the Giro because it’s more of a specific impact rather than a merely quantitative one. The probability that one of those looking for “Albania” when there’s a football match actually become engaged in, say, visiting the country because of that is close to zero. But even any improved image impact or opinion shift is highly improbable. On the contrary, careful selection and preparation of the scenery *staged* normally achieve a very positive direct impact on spectators of a GT start of any sort, with a broad range of targets (in the case of the Giro, citizens of the host country as the prime objective, Italian public as the secondary one, the rest of the world in third place, with a different hierarchy in the case of the TDF and the Vuelta, with the latter generally priorizing Spain’s image abroad rather than the host country as a destination for Spaniards).
However, it must be acknowledged that RCS’ international media policy of going for ES esclusive deals ain’t help in building serious global impact! Letting go 80% of your million-viewers figures in Spain or France doesn’t look the best strategy to sell the product beyond the first two targets I detailed above.
IMO weird that several have Pedersen as a favourite on a mountain stage. But I acknowledge the risk that the favourites will be passive due to the 40 km easy finish. Maybe some climbers that have lost time have a chance to sneak away, like Jay Vine. Though stage to call, Roglic might also win from a small group.
Both the stage design and the shape taken by the maglia rosa fight (including the fight to let it go…) worked well to generate some suspense in a generally – and relatively – dull phase of the GT narrative. Which of course doesn’t mean today’s stage is gonna be a nail-biter, I’d even bet for a “break ahead and herd behind” eventual dynamic. But the mere fact it’s promising is a good thing…! I’ll be watching at least a couple of hours at least… though not necessarily the last one.
Let me add that if Trek can have 3 men crossing the pass with Mads at less than 3 minutes from the lead, which looks possible given thier form, they can take that back, because the lead isn’t bound to work smoothly together on that flat terrain while the Treks’d go all in. And on the front you can’t climb full gas either (which would leave Pedersen well more than 3 mins behind) if you have 40 “unfavourable” (for a climber) further kms to face, whereas Mads can give it all on the climb, if he then gets to sprint he’ll beat most of the rest all the same. UAE attitude will probably decide much.
Mads Pedersen seems to be improving immensely also on longer climbs. At least when he has his day. His ride to Auron in P-N was amazing. Question is if can do it again? And how many from Lidl-Trek can follow if the going gets rough, to help out on the run home.
He wasn’t a three-chainring pick for the uncertainty but as we saw Lidl-Trek were able to set their pace and Pedersen is climbing so well and able to sprint convincingly. He had the team to deliver him into position. Today’s second placed finisher Strong had to sit in the wind at times to get there and this cost him.
Goats are new!
I would say the most exciting attack of the day came from the goat. The rest was anticipation, anticlimax and a sprint.
Not wanting to take away from the smart and strong teamwork by Lidl-Trek, they did what they had to do very well. But for viewers a large strong break or a GC surprise attack would have been nice.
“Profesionally done” by Trek (with a little help from Bora). Their big guys on the front deserve a day’s rest, as Tuesday looks like another sprint opportunity.
@Paul J
Yes, it’s a complex situation with a mix of factors, including xenophoby. Well-rooted long term social movement try to lead the debate and keep it focussed on the proper key factors (what’s been happening here for decades – or centuries? – is a serious shame), but there are also so called «nationalists» (which in Spain refers to what elsewhere you’d call «regionalists») who try to make of foreigners the scapegoat for structural issues mainly caused and quite deliberately so by the main «nationalist» (again, i.e. localist) right-wing party which, despite never having been the most voted one, spent some 90% of the democratic age holding power with… neoliberal policies aiming at private plunder over public resources.
However, it’s not like there aren’t «external» reasons to be worried. International investment funds entered wildly in a context of general deregulation with brutal consequences.
It’s one of the flaw of the Spanish democratic state model with huge autonomy for local regions, even more so in the case of Canary Islands, but that eventually means that local political structures are too weak to resist against any sort of internal and external economic pressures of *any* kind.