We’re halfway there but the hard days are still to come. It’s been an enjoyable Giro so far, we’ve had a variety of stages and the breakaways have been rewarded. Egan Bernal might be on the verge of riding away with the Giro but that’s conditional, for all the drama of the ski slope finish at Campo di Felice was dramatic the 8km Turin time trial saw bigger time gaps.
Another chance for the sprinters, more so since Caleb Ewan has gone home. It’s all on familiar roads to Foligno, the novelty today could be the wind.
A good day for the breakaway and also a hard stage for the GC contenders although today’s stage isn’t severe, the really selective part is the gravel slope right at the end.
A good day for a breakaway in a race that’s been rewarding the breakaways so this should make for an exciting start to the stage too.
A quick note on stage profiles. We all rely on cross-section graphics used to depict the route elevation of a race, this blog’s daily race previews use them as the prime graphic because they’re a graphical heuristic for the day to come, at a glance you can tell a sprint stage from a GC day. Study it for a moment and it says even more but sometimes races can hide information about the route, deliberately or not.
A hard stage in tough weather, today’s stage features several tough climbs to reshape the overall classification.
An interesting stage where the day’s hardest climb masquerades as an intermediate sprint and it’s chased by tricky roads to the finish. Which sprinters can hang on in this hectic finale?
