Ben Healy has reiterated his plan to look for more opportunities to go in breakaways on the Giro, hoping for another stage win. And as the number of riders leaving the race due to illness, mainly Covid-19, has spiked in recent days, Healy believed that trend would not only continue, but accelerate.
The 22-year-old, who is riding his first Grand Tour, has already won a stage on the race in what is a breakthrough season for him. And Healy (EF Education-EasyPost) said you could now see the fatigue in the riders at the start of the stages each morning.
Already Remco Evenepoel (Soudal-QuickStep) has abandoned due to Covid-19 while Aleksandr Vlasov (Bora-hansgrohe) has also abandoned through illness. A host of other riders have also withdrawn due to Covid-19, with some rules around mask-wearing re-introduced by the race organisers.
Advertisement
"There's, for sure, a lot dead bodies in a bunch. I think even yesterday at the start you could really see there's a lot of guys suffering. So I think this is only the start of guys dropping out due to illness."
Related News
He added while he had put in a huge effort on Saturday's stage 8, when he rode in the breakaway before attacking it solo 51km from the finish to win, he felt he had regrouped and recover since then as best he could.
"I don't know if I'm quite 100 per cent (recovered) but, yeah, I'm not doing too badly either," he said, adding he always felt yesterday's stage would be one of the sprinters, whose teams were very motivated to keep the race together.
In the end, Pascal Ackermann (UAE Team Emirates) won the stage in a tight sprint from Jonathan Milan (Bahrain Victorious) but Healy believes there will be more chances for attacks on the race.
"I keep saying there's a lot of opportunities and then first you need to get in the breakaway," he said. "We'll just take it day by day and there are days that I think maybe there's an opportunity for me."
