Usually, on a brutal 244km mountain stage when your team decimates the peloton, you win the stage, and you smash a climbing record by more than a minute, it means you have taken total control of the race, which for 1.5km seemed like exactly what Jonas Vingegaard had done at the Giro d’Italia.
He’d put his team to work on the lower slopes of the 13.6-kilometre Blockhaus climb, and with 5.5km of the ascent left to take on, he had attacked with only one man able to follow: Gilulio Pellizzari. A worthy challenger, yes, but Vingegaard looked ominous as he controlled his breathing and kept looking back at the Italian, knowing that he could accelerate at will until he broke the Italian.
Just seven stages have been raced, but the expected result was already materialising, with pink jersey Afonso Eulálio getting dropped under the pressure of Vingegaard’s impressive Visma lieutenants, Davide Piganzoli and Sepp Kuss. It was business as usual for the men in yellow and black.
That was until Felix Gall started to mount a comeback that is rarely seen against Vingegaard when he’s in top Grand Tour form, as an elite rider who definitely sits in the same dominant club as Tadej Pogačar and Mathieu van der Poel on his best days; when they have gone solo, you don’t tend to see them again.
Everyone else,…
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