Philip Deignan gave Irish fans something to cheer about on stage 15 when he soloed away from the front group in the last 10km of the tough mountain stage.
Sunday May 25, Stage 15: Valdengo - Montecampione 225km
By Philip Deignan
We got to our hotel pretty late last night, which meant that by the time everybody got massage, dinner was late too.
I have to admit I went to bed feeling pretty stuffed but suffered for it afterwards with a heavy stomach ensuring I got a crap sleep of about four hours.
With a long stage of 225km ahead of us, we were up bright and early this morning with the team plan for me and a couple of the other guys to try and get in the early breakaway.
I don’t know whether the bit of sleep deprivation had anything to do with it but I found the first half an hour of racing fairly hard this morning.Starting the stage near the back probably didn’t help but I couldn’t go with any of the early moves at all.
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In the end that worked out in my favour as the group that did get away had Damiano Cunego of Lampre in it.
Cunego started the day 10 minutes down in 13th place overall, so nobody was going to give him too much leeway and they were eventually chased down on the final climb.
We spent a long day winding our way through the Milan suburbs for over 200km before we hit the bottom of the final 19km climb so I ate and drank as normal today and got a final bottle with about 40km to go, as the ‘yellow fluo’ team hit the front and began to chase down the breakaways.
I couldn’t understand how we were suddenly doing over 60kph in one long line for about 20km, until I looked up and saw the TV motorbike sitting in front of the Italian squad giving them shelter with the rest of us gritting our teeth to hold onto the wheels behind them.
It was so fast that I drank my whole bottle before the foot of the 19km climb to the summit finish and as it was too late to get another one, I rode up it with empty bottle cages.
To be honest, I was initially thinking about just riding up the climb in the gruppetto. I didn’t see the point in grinding my way up to maybe finish 20th on the stage, but talked myself into giving it a go and seeing how I felt.
I started the climb in around 30th place and thought ‘I’ll just keep going and see how long I can hang on for here’.
Like most things, a certain amount of cycling, or any sport for that matter, is in your head. But for the last two weeks I’ve told myself to have a go but when I tried to go hard the legs just weren’t there, I just didn’t have it and when I knew not to force it.
Today as we climbed, I saw some of the other guys in the group getting dropped while I was still feeling comfortable and able to ride around them, so that gave me more motivation to keep going.
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With around 10km to go, we were just bringing back the last two guys in the breakaway.
There was an Omega Pharma Quickstep guy riding on the front at the time, for race leader Rigoberto Uran. I was sitting in the group thinking ‘well I could stay here and hang on and try and go for a good stage placing or I can try something and go for the stage’.
The Quickstep guy was fading a little bit so I thought if I went around him and got 10 seconds quickly it might work out for me.
I jumped up the climb catching the last three riders that were left up the road within a kilometre and jumping around them to find myself out front alone.
Immediately after I attacked, Mick Rogers of Tinkoff-Saxo went to the front of the chase group and set a pretty hard tempo though, so the gap didn’t go out very quickly.
I managed to open about 22 seconds with 5km to go but I was hoping the group of favourites would start looking at each other and would stall behind me.
It was a bit start-stop for a while but I was hoping for more of that really, guys attacking and sitting up. They stalled a little bit but then they started attacking each other with race leader Uran throwing the first dig with 5km to go.
A kilometre later, Pierre Rolland of Europcar came across to me but the pace didn’t increase too much so I sat in behind the Frenchman and was fine until inside 3km to go where one of the Colombians, Fabio Duarte, came across to us and attacked straight away.
I didn’t have the legs to go with him and when Fabio Aru of Astana, Uran and then Nairo Quintana of Movistar came past 500metres later, they were riding about 5kph faster than me and there was no point even trying to hang onto them.
Rafal Majka of Tinkoff-Saxo came by me in the last 500metres but the rest of the group with former pink jersey Cadel Evans in it only caught me with about 100metres to go.
I didn’t even know they were coming. If I’d known, I might have made a bit of an effort to finish ahead of the group and would maybe have been 7th the instead of 14th on the stage but who’s to say I’d have had the legs to do that anyway?
While I ran out of legs in the last 3km today, I felt a lot better than I have so far in this Giro which is a good sign and has given me a bit of a confidence boost heading into the rest day.
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