The Giro d’Italia organisers got exactly what they wanted – and more – out of stage 10’s 42km time trial, the longest test against the clock in a Grand Tour since a 59.4km stage in the 2015 Giro. Filippo Ganna – who else? – cruised to victory, but did so with an unexpectedly enormous victory margin of 1:54 over his Netcompany-Ineos teammate Thymen Arensman. The battle for pink was also reshaped and remoulded, but not how it was predicted it would be: Afonso Eulálio holds onto the maglia rosa, and three GC riders posted better times than Jonas Vingegaard, two of them – Arensmen and Derek Gee-West – by quite some distance. It’s a job well done for the route designers.
Ganna will hog the backpages of the Italian press tomorrow, and rightly so. This was his eighth win in five Giro participations, but none of them have been as convincing as this one. Raced on a pan-flat circuit from Viareggio to Massa, with just over 100m of elevation gain, Ganna was always likely to defeat the opposition, especially with no other time trial specialists lining up, but he did more than that – he crushed his competitors.
En-route to the 32nd time trial victory of his career, he passed seven riders in front of him. Seven! Riders one, two and three who began before the Hour Record holder, would have been anticipating it, but not riders four, five, six and seven. It was less humiliation on their part, though, and more complete dominance and mastery on Ganna’s. His average speed was a mind-boggling 54.922kph. Most club riders don’t even reach that speed going downhill. Ganna averaged that for 45 minutes.
“It’s really nice, a long TT like this – I really like it,” Ganna beamed afterwards. “I’m really happy to finally find a good TT for me without a climb.” Don’t be fooled into thinking it was a coincidence that a time trial like this was slotted into the Giro, the longest in over a decade, when Italy’s best time triallist for a generation was competing. Helping Ganna win was the race organisers’ first task.
Their second was to shake the GC apart. They definitely accomplished that. Eulálio, we can say without disrespecting the Portuguese, surprisingly hung onto the race lead. He did so by limiting his losses to 1:57 to Vingegaard, who now sits 27 seconds off the race lead. Pink will surely land on Vingegaard’s shoulders soon, but it probably already should be. However this was a poor time trial from the Visma-Lease a Bike rider, who finished three minutes adrift of Ganna.
Why was he so sub-par? The flatness and length of the time trial no doubt exacerbated a skinny climber’s lack of raw power, but he’s shown in the past that on his day he can challenge for the victory even in flatter time trials. But here he was never in contention. Perhaps the most damning – and alarming – statistic of the day is that Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe duo Giulio Pellizzari and Jai Hindley were 18 and 31 seconds shy of him, respectively. Two riders who have been struggling with a stomach virus and weren’t able to ride during the rest day.
Marc Reef, Visma’s lead DS at the race, downplayed the result, but others will not. This was a chance to put some significant daylight into the rest of the competition – more than the 90 seconds advantage he now has to Arensman and 1:57 to Felix Gall – but he was unable to. “I think he did a good job,” Reef said. “It wasn’t the most ideal parcours for him. All the big guys with more power were in front of him but against the GC guys he did a good job. We’re still in a very good situation and we took time on most of the guys.”
It’s tangential, but Remco Evenepoel, holed up in Sierra Nevada at a pre-Tour de France altitude training camp, must be looking at the race results and wondering what could have been if he had raced the Giro. In the past few years, even on flat courses, he’s been superior to Ganna. If Ganna put three minutes into Vingegaard, logic suggests Evenepoel would have at the very least done the same. That could have set up a tantalising and riveting second-half of the race, as Vingegaard became the hunter in pursuit of Evenepoel, having to claw back time in the mountains. Persuading Evenepoel to race the Giro, however, is something the organisers were not able to do.
Back in the real world, the upshot is Vingegaard is still in a very healthy position and he remains the overwhelming favourite to win the maglia rosa. Gall, who curiously opted against wearing the visor on his time trial helmet, was a bigger loser, and the Austrian now has Arensman in front of him. Within a minute of him are three Australlians: O’Connor, Hindley and Michael Storer. The battle for the podium is taking shape. There’s a lot more life in this Giro at the halfway stage than many had assumed there would be. The 42km time trial was as consequential as organisers had hoped.
