As the Giro d’Italia takes a breather on Monday after nine days of hard racing, American participant Larry Warbasse offers a stark warning of what’s to come for himself and the remainder of the peloton.
“The third week looks insane,” the AG2R-Citröen veteran told Cyclingnews a couple of days ago in the Giro. “If we can save some matches, that’d be great because I think we’ll definitely see some rolling dead men by that point in the race.
“Already, some of the days we thought it would be easier have ended up being much more difficult, so I think it’s going to be a really hard third week.”
The plus side of the tougher challenges, such as it is, could be that the Giro is harder to control, offering more opportunities for breakaway specialists such as Warbasse to get some air at the front of the race.
“We already saw that a few days ago in Naples, on a day that was surely due to be a bunch sprint, ended up being almost won by a breakaway,” Warbasse pointed out, referring to the attack by Simon Clarke (Israel-Premier Tech) and Alessandro De Marchi (Jayco-AIUIa) that died almost in sight of the finishing gantries.
“Now there are going to be more hungry guys, especially after the break has won a few more times. Guys are going to be thinking, ’I’m not going to lose my chance now’. It’s going to be pretty full on for the breaks.”
Warbasse himself is hoping for his own shot at a breakaway, although he points out that with stage 4 winner Aurelien Paret-Peintre (AG2R-Citroën) well placed on GC until up to the time trial and still running 15th on the rest day, he’s had team duties as a principal priority for now.
AG2R have had a good history of success in the Giro in previous years, too, with Andrea Vendrame winning a stage in 2021 and Geoffrey Bouchard taking the mountains prize that year, while Nans Peters won a stage of the Giro in 2019. Warbasse himself claimed his best GC Grand Tour result in 2020 when he finished 17th overall and claimed fifth on one stage, at Rocarasso, after a long break.
“When you see teammates and friends able to win, that always motivates you and helps you think you can do it too,” Warbasse, part of the AG2R team since 2019, explained.
“That’s maybe part of it, and I think it’s also the course suits our team well as we have probably 85% climbers in the team, not too many big guys. With so many climbs, we can get in the breaks.”
His own race has been shaped by having Paret-Peintre well placed in…
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