Geraint Thomas was the alternative, the cyclist who knows more about being old than being a devil. But the insulting youth of Tadej Pogacar is not deterred by the Welshman’s experience, nor by the power of his team, Ineos, which seemed to have everything ready to inoculate the antidote to the Giro and minimize the impact of the race leader. His plans included, at least, achieving the stage victory with the super specialist Filippo Ganna, the man destined to set the benchmarks for the rest of the riders in his squad, who, in fact, achieved very interesting times.
But they didn’t count, or they did, but they hid it very well, with the Pogacar factor, a phenomenon on the bicycle, which came out last, after so many discussions, with a two-color integral jumpsuit, the one that the organization initially proposed. and turned the UCI’s nose upside down. In the first section, everything seemed to fit into the Ineos Excel sheet. Ganna swept, Tadej passed, at kilometer 18, 44 seconds behind the Italian champion, and Geraint Thomas, 52 seconds behind, a reasonable distance from the leader. Also in the second, the leader seemed human, although while his gap with Thomas increased to 40 seconds, the gap he maintained with Ganna only rose to 47.
But that’s when Pogacar plugged in the meat grinder. The race was uphill, literally, for him and for the others, and also metaphorically for Thomas, who with his only 66-tooth chainring suffered when the terrain became 13% gradient. The Slovenian dropped to a more bearable development and began to destroy with a happy pedaling, like his character. In the final kilometers he overcame the differences with Ganna, who watched the champion in disbelief from the provisional winner’s hot seat. In the last kilometer it was already clear who was the best. When he raised his arm at the finish line, his difference was 17 seconds over Ganna, and two minutes compared to Thomas, who finished tenth in the stage and is third in the General classification, at 2.46m, where the Colombian Daniel Felipe Martínez advance in ten seconds. The Giro is beginning to have the color that Pogacar wants to give it.
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