It wasn’t to be. Top favourite Jonathan Milan‘s dream of winning the Giro d’Italia‘s first full-on stage 1 sprint in 13 years evaporated some 300 metres from the finish line when the Lidl-Trek racer suddenly found himself running on empty.
Milan had a lot at stake on Friday afternoon’s slightly uphill sprint in the Black Sea coastal town of Burgas, with a chance not just to take his fifth Giro stage but also his first ever maglia rosa – and the first of the 2026 race, too, in a year when the jersey is sponsored by his home region of Friuli-Venezia Guilia.
Lidl-Trek did plenty of the hard work during the relatively straightforward stage keeping a two-rider break in check and when Milan claimed third place – first from the bunch – in the intermediate sprint at Sozopol, with 57 kilometres to go ahead of Kaden Groves (Alpecin-Premier Tech), it boded more than well for his chances in the finale.
Instead, as Milan explained to reporters while pedalling towards the team bus, after losing contact with his teammates just as the roads began to narrow dramatically on the run-in to Burgas – it was a big casino [chaos] as he put it – the energy he needed to chase back to the front was the energy he then didn’t have for the sprint itself.
“We were up there in the last kilometres doing fine, but we lost contact with one another with five kilometres to go or so, maybe a bit less, I don’t even know how. It was a big casino,” Milan told reporters afterwards.
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