Our man Philip Deignan on the front of the Giro d'Italia breakaway yesterday; great to see him at the front of a Grand Tour again and writing his column for stickybottle on his experiences of racing as part of Team Sky.
Wednesday May 21, Stage 10: Collechio - Savona (249km)
By Philip Deignan
I said yesterday that I thought today’s stage was made for a successful breakaway group and that I would try and get up the road today.
I first went clear with Aussie rider Adam Hanson from Lotto after about 10km this morning. It was just the two of us out front on our own though and we were reeled in about 4km later.
I have to admit the effort killed me and I spent the next 20km sitting in the peloton trying to recover and hoping none of the other non-stop attacks would stay away.
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Almost everybody was attacking this morning and there was a really big fight for about 80km.
I got away again in a big group on the first of the day’s two second category climbs after my 10th or 11th attack.
With the bunch chasing hard on the descent and a bit of jumping around at the bottom, 14 of us attacked out of that group to eventually go clear.
Nicolas Roche was in the move too and as we rode past each other in the line we agreed it was probably the hardest either of us ever had to ride to get into a breakaway.
Straight away all 14 of us cooperated and we soon began to open a gap to the peloton.
In a big group like that it’s not complicated; we just rolled through on the front, taking turns into the wind before drifting back down the line again.
Europcar had three guys up the road today while the Katusha, Tinkoff-Saxo and Bardiani teams had two guys each in the move, so that helped the collaboration a bit.
Deignan pulled clear in a great breakaway on stage 11, but something of a strange chase back in the bunch meant they never built up the time they needed to survive all the way (Photo: Sirotti)
I think we got a maximum lead of five or six minutes but suddenly it dropped down to four minutes after about 150km.
Up front, everybody assumed the chase behind was materialising because Francis Mouray of FDJ was in the move.
Because he was the best placed rider in the break, having started the day seven minutes down, we presumed teams didn’t want him to leapfrog their riders in the overall standings if the gap got any bigger.
With our chances of staying away to contest the stage win now seriously diminished, riders just wanted him out of there.
Everybody was shouting at him, telling him to go back, but he argued that his case, saying that he was going to lose five minutes in the time trial tomorrow and that he wasn’t going anywhere.
In an effort to pull a smaller group away without Mouray in it, what we ended up doing then was everyone started attacking each other, which was stupid really, considering there was still around 100km to go.
Although I didn’t know who was chasing behind, once the gap dropped like that, I knew straight away that it wasn’t going to work out in our favour.
I found out later that it was the Italian Androni Giocotelli team who chased us down today, which was one of those anomalies you sometimes get in stage racing.
Apart from their team manager being pissed off that they had nobody in the break and making them ride to teach them a lesson or get TV airtime, I can’t think of any reason for them to have been chasing today.
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Nicolas Roche was in the escape with Deignan and had a go at getting clear as the gap was coming down, but it was to no avail.
As Androni ate into our lead, I felt my front wheel go down about 15km before the last climb.
It was one of those slow punctures where at first you’re not really sure if it’s actually going down and you spend a couple of minutes bouncing up and down on it a few times to check.
Although we were moving along at the time, I got a pretty quick wheel change from our mechanic Raj in the team car and a bit of a sticky bottle, pardon the pun, on the way back up and rejoined the break a few minutes later.
I used up quite a bit of energy getting back on but, like I said, I knew we were going to get caught on the climb anyway so it wasn’t going to change anything.
I reckoned that we’d have needed three or four minutes at the bottom of the 9km climb to have any chance of surviving to the finish and we started the slope with less than 30 seconds. So when one of the Bardiani guys and Nico jumped on the climb with 34km to go, I didn’t even react.
A few seconds later, Colombian climber Julian Arredondo of Trek was the first one of the peloton to ride past me, dancing up the climb in his king of the mountains jersey.
Even when you know it’s coming, when you eventually get caught after being out in a break for a good while, your morale immediately takes a nosedive.
As Arredondo rode off into the sunset and the rest of the peloton flew past me, I just flicked my gear lever down into the easiest gear on my bike and slowly rode the rest of the way up the climb.
At the top, a big group of around 50 guys caught me and I rode the last 25km with them, finishing 14 minutes down on stage winner Mick Rogers.
Former Irish international Chris Jensen was in my group coming to the line and was pretty happy because his teammate had won but at that stage I wasn’t in much humour for chatting and just wanted to get onto the bus and get a shower.
Today was a hard day for everybody though, not least some of my Sky teammates. I found out later that most of them had fallen again during the stage.
Salvatore Puccio came down to dinner with cuts and grazes all over his face having hit the deck in a big crash on the opening descent.
From what I heard from the other guys, about 15 guys crashed on a corner, falling into a sort of swamp at the side of the road and there were guys climbing out of the ditch covered in mud.
Unfortunately, Salvatore actually landed on the road and though he has nothing broken, he was pretty ripped up.
Later in the stage, one of the Lotto riders hit a hole in the road and fell, bringing down whatever teammates were behind him and a few others.
Nobody from our team hurt themselves but Kosta, Bernie, Swifty, Sebastien and Eddy were all held up in the crash and after getting new wheels and fixing themselves up, spent a lot of energy getting back on.
In the end, it didn’t matter if you were at the front of the race or the back today. It was pretty hard either way.
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