After stage 4 of the 2022 Giro d’Italia Donne, the overall podium seemed out of reach for Elisa Longo Borghini (Trek-Segafredo) as she was over four minutes behind third place. Longo Borghini took back time on stage 8 and reduced her deficit to Mavi García (UAE Team ADQ) to 3:21 minutes – still a very big gap.
García had lost 1:27 minutes to the Italian the previous day, and stage 9 included three hard climbs and, crucially, three descents. Although she and her team had come to the Giro Donne to win stages and prepare for the Tour de France Femmes, Longo Borghini saw a bigger picture in the race that went beyond results.
“I think our duty as riders, as athletes, is also to put on a show. The world comes from a difficult period with the pandemic, and there’s an ongoing war almost on our doorstep. The goal of our work must also be to provide excitement, fun, and real emotion. People follow us because of that. When I race, I try never to forget that,” she said.
As an allrounder who won Paris-Roubaix Femmes in April, Longo Borghini’s strategy was to ride her own tempo up the climbs, and this had paid off well for her, losing only a few seconds on Passo Maniva on stage 7 before coming back to and dropping García on stage 8.
She followed the same plan on the decisive climb of stage 9, the steep Passo Daone, catching García who had tried to keep up with maglia rosa Annemiek van Vleuten (Movistar Team) and second-placed Marta Cavalli (FDJ Nouvelle-Aquitaine Futuroscope) before falling back. On the final kilometre of the Passo Daone, Longo Borghini left García behind and then threw herself into the descent.
“Today’s descent was new for me. I rode it on intuition, but a descent is pure fun for me. I got a few trajectories wrong due to fatigue after a hard week, but I always managed to correct and not take excessive risks,” she described the downhill.
After the descent, the 30-year-old was close to Van Vleuten and Cavalli, eventually reaching them with 15 km to go, and García had lost significant time on the downhill, trailing Longo Borghini by more than a minute and a half.
“In the last 20 kilometres of the stage, after receiving the info that Mavi García was losing time, I cultivated for the first time the idea of trying to challenge her for third place. I was there, had nothing to lose and thought ‘let’s get through this’,” Longo Borghini explained the thought process that led to her pulling the group with the maglia rosa for most of the finale.
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