Our man Philip Deignan on the road to Montecassino where he clocked 280km saddle time on a day of crash carnage.
Thursday May 15, Stage 6: Sassano to Montecassino (257km)
By Philip Deignan
When you’re riding a Grand Tour, you can’t stay in a big city every night. And as the race often goes into smaller towns and villages, the difference between the hotels along the way cane be like chalk and cheese.
Every hotel you stay at throws something different at you; whether it’s a smoky bedroom, a dodgy mattress or a disco downstairs.
In Belfast we had weddings going on underneath us on the Friday and Saturday night although that was easily combated with a pair of earplugs.
Team Sky though, has solutions to most of those other hotel problems too.
Every day before we arrive to the hotel, our team carers set up an air purifier in each room and swap the mattress on every bed for a memory foam mattress and a fresh set of sheets in an effort to give us riders a good night’s sleep.
Advertisement
Most of the guys have adapted to the team mattresses but as they say in the Tayto ad, ‘there’s always one’ and I’m sort of the exception to the rule.
The mattress I have at home is pretty firm so I’ve found the memory foams ones a lot different and a bit hard to get used to, so I don’t use them at all.
There Will be Blood: Joaquim Rodriguez shows off the scars of battle from yesterday, when he finished with our man Deignan.
Generally, the hotel beds are fine, with the exception of last night’s mattress, which had a few springs sticking up into my ribs any time I moved and didn’t provide a great night’s sleep ahead of the longest stage of this Giro.
We were supposed to race 247km today but an extra 10km deviation was added because of a landslide this morning. On top of that we had a 6km neutralised section before we even got going.
I don’t really see the point in these long stages to be honest. You could have made today’s stage 160km and the result would probably have been the same and we wouldn’t have had to ride around for an extra three hours for nothing.
Because that’s all we do. You can’t physically ride flat out for seven hours so we just have to go slower, which makes the whole thing a bit pointless.
In a Grand Tour especially, I don’t think you don’t need stages over 200km in length. You could understand it, maybe, if we had to ride in between two big towns. But today we started in a little village with a population of about 400 people.
Having seven hour stages just doesn’t make sense. The Vuelta has proved recently that having shorter stages makes the racing more exciting. Nine times out of ten if they have the same finishing climb, the result will be the same but there’s a lot more action.
As the peloton rolled along this morning with four riders up the road, I had a bit of a chat with Nicolas Roche.
Related News
Usually when we ride along we either talk about trivial stuff; cars, houses or the weather or slag each other in typical Irish fashion.
Soldier Down: As Orica GreenEDGE's race leader Michael Matthews was going forward for the stage win, some of his mates came down very hard in the key smashes 11km from the finish.
Today I mentioned that I’d just sold my car back home. So Nico put on his used car salesman smile and took the opportunity to tell me that he was selling his, if I was in the market.
I just laughed and reminded him that I’ve seen how he drives and therefore didn’t think I’d be getting a great bargain. And we rode along having a bit of craic for a while before things got serious later on.
My role today was to try and stay around the front on the final 8km climb as we thought it was the type of stage that would suit my teammate Eddy (Boassen Hagen).
But with the rain lashing down near the end of the stage, a huge crash with about 11km to go changed everything.
I saw a TV clip of the crash afterwards but it didn’t due it justice at all. The pictures left out at least 50 guys on the ground.
I was riding around a third of the way down the bunch when it happened. My teammate Konstantin Suitsov went down in front of me just before the roundabout. ‘Kosta’ braked a bit too hard and his front wheel just slid out from under him.
There’s not much you can do in a situation like that. You don’t have time to react, and you can’t really manoeuvre much in the wet or you’re going to crash as well. You just have to hope that whatever’s in front of you won’t be there when you arrive.
Fortunately for me, ‘Kosta’ slid out of the way before I got to him, and I managed to avoid the carnage.
Up further, the rest of the guys weren’t so lucky. Eddy, Ben Swift, Cataldo and Henao all fell too and some of them were pretty badly banged up.
Swifty hit the kerb with his hip and was in so much pain afterwards that he ended up fainting in the shower on the team bus.
Some of the guys had to change bikes to finish the stage while Kosta crashed again when a car braked in front of him as he was riding back up through the cavalcade.
A few hours later though, everybody is in pretty good spirits at the dinner table and the mood was improved again when the team brought down an unexpected bottle of wine as a bit of a morale booster.
After the stage I had another 12km ride down the final climb to our hotel so we spent almost 280km on the bike today. I don’t care what type of mattress I have tonight, I’m nearly asleep already.
Topics
