A re-examination of the split times from the opening time trial of the Giro d’Italia saw Tao Geoghegan Hart hastily assigned the maglia azzurra of best climber minutes before the start of stage 2 in Teramo. That cosmetic adjustment aside, however, the key verdict of the race’s opening test remained unchanged: Remco Evenepoel (Soudal-QuickStep) is the man to beat on this Giro.
Still, even though Evenepoel’s hefty advantage from Saturday evening remained the same on Sunday morning, the initial shock and awe that greeted his finishing time had seemed to soften slightly among his rivals overnight. The emotions of this race can understandably lead to snap judgements, but its sheer difficulty demands perspective.
Or, as Ineos Grenadiers Directeur Sportif Matteo Tosatto put it: “The Giro is long, and we’ve only done 19km. We’ve got another 3,380 kilometres to go.”
Geraint Thomas had confessed to a certain disappointment when he completed his time trial on Saturday afternoon, a feeling surely exacerbated when Evenepoel flashed through the finish area shortly afterwards and consigned him to an early deficit of 55 seconds. The gap was abyssal for a time trial as short as this, yet surmountable in an event of these vast dimensions.
“Taking all the emotion out of it, it’s probably where I’d expect to be coming in here after the year I’ve had. It’s a decent start and 20 days to go,” Thomas said in the mixed zone ahead of stage 2.
“It wasn’t so bad, but you always want more. I just overcooked it slightly at the start and that meant I didn’t quite have enough to really go on that climb. I wasn’t a million miles away.”
Evenepoel better than Ganna’s best
In truth, Evenepoel’s remarkable performance skewed the graph for everybody else. While Thomas’ deficit of almost a minute to the Belgian is an obvious concern, he could still draw satisfaction from limiting his losses on Primož Roglič (Jumbo-Visma) to just a dozen seconds. Similarly, Geoghegan Hart’s concession of 40 seconds to Evenepoel masks the fact that his effort on the road to Ortona was perhaps the best time trial performance of his career.
“We all said Tao did maybe his best-ever performance in a time trial. But it wasn’t a surprise, it was another test that told us that Tao, from February until now, has been constantly improving,” Tosatto told Cyclingnews.
“Geraint was very fast in the first part, but he was missing that change of rhythm on the first part of…
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