May 12, 2023
A back loaded route has caused a stalemate between the key GC contenders
If the riders needed to reach for a caffeine gel to get them round today’s six hour Giro d’Italia stage, I needed one just to keep me from falling asleep watching it from my sofa. Of course, it’s easy to criticise from the comfort of your living room when these guys are on their seventh day of racing mostly in the pouring rain, but could we not have been treated to just one or two attacks? Just a little bit of intrigue? A few fireworks? Something to make me feel like I didn’t just spend an entire afternoon watching paint dry?
Credit should go to the opportunistic breakaway trio who, when they escaped the peloton at the start of the day, very few expected to make it to the finish line and duke it out for the stage win. Davide Bais’s eventual victory for Eolo-Kometa is a huge one for his wildcard team, but through no fault of Bais, it won’t be a stage that is remembered in the history of La Corsa Rosa.
Even as the peloton let the gap to the breakaway creep up to the 10 minute mark, there was still that little bit of hope that the tension was simply building, that we were heading towards a nail-biting finish where the GC contenders would throw punches as the gradients kicked up to the Gran Sasso d’Italia. In the end, though, there was nothing of the sort. Riders chatted at the back of the more than 30 rider strong group, spread out across the road like they were cruising on a group ride. Movistar did, rather unexplainably, begin to pull on the front of the bunch in the closing kilometres, but to no real avail.
Read more: Giro d’Italia 2023 stage eight preview – a punchy circuit finish
Around 500 metres from the finish line came the only real action from the peloton of the day, as the likes of Remco Evenepoel, Geraint Thomas, Thibaut Pinot and Primož Roglič decided to sprint it out for fourth place. No time gaps were created between them and this sprint finish seemed to solely serve as a chance for them to shake out the adrenaline that might have been building during the 20 kilometre stalemate up the Gran Sasso. Evenepoel won the scrap for fourth in the end ahead of his main GC rivals. Perhaps that’s the Soudal-Quick-Step rider dealing another subtle blow to his competitors, proving that the crashes and mishaps of the…