It's been a great Giro d'Italia for Philip Deignan and coming out of the race feeling better than when he started, the Letterkenny man is looking forward to his next event already.
Sunday June 1st, Stage 21: Gemona to Trieste (169km)
By Philip Deignan
Today was a really strange stage. We started off really slowly, like a traditional final stage.
The Movistar team and race leader Nairo Quintana were on the front getting pictures taken and we were really going slow, around 30kph.
When Maarten Tjallingi of Belkin and Orica GreenEDGE’s Svein Tuft went away for the mountains points after 17km, nobody flinched, but then they kept going.
Tjallingi had started the day nine points off the lead in the intermediate sprints competition so the Androni team of sprints leader Marco Bandiera started chasing full gas.
So we rode the next 50km in an hour which was pretty horrible and a lot of people were pretty pissed off about it.
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When we brought those two back it was sort of steady for a while until we came onto the finishing circuit.
We were all really motivated today to try and get that elusive stage win and tried to set up our sprinter Ben Swift for the final sprint.
We had said we’d try to control things if a move went on the finishing circuit in the last 50km and that’s the way it was really.
When Tuft went again with Lars Bak of Lotto, I went to the front at around 35km to go and did a few turns before going back up again later on.
I knew I wouldn’t be able to help Ben in the last kilometres so I tried to keep the pace high and stop any groups going away in the last 12km or so.
I didn’t really get a chance to help Ben in the last three weeks so it was nice to be able to do something today and I felt pretty good too so it was good to finish the Giro off strongly.
We knew we were never going to drop the sprinters on the one kilometre climb but the plan was to keep it fast and make it hard for the others.
Deignan on his way to his best result at Giro d'Italia 2014; 3rd place on stage 18 in the mountains.
In the end, Ben got pushed out in the wind from a long way out which took the kick out of his legs in the final sprint and he finished 16th on the stage.
It started lashing it down just a minute or two after we finished but everyone was relieved to get away with it today. We’ve raced in enough rain in the last three weeks.
After the finish, we had a couple of slices of pizza and a beer on the team bus. It’s funny, you spend four weeks with the same guys and all of a sudden everybody’s getting showered, changed, and going in different directions.
Some guys were driving home while others were going to different airports. So after a few quick goodbyes, that was it until next time.
Looking back, this Giro went almost as I thought it would, or as I’d hoped it would.
Due to my broken collarbone in February, I hadn’t much racing in my legs before it and just got through the first two weeks and gradually started to improve.
Although I was doubting myself a little bit for the first 10 days and didn’t feel so hot, coming out of the second week it was nice to be able to be up there on a few stages.
It was nice to get into three or four breakaways in a Grand Tour and they weren’t soft breaks either.
The first one I was in, on the long stage 11 to Savona, got caught before the finish but I probably wouldn’t have had the legs after 250km anyway.
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The first high point for me came on stage 14 when I went away from the GC guy's group with 10km to go. Although I got caught in the last 3km, that was the first day I felt really good and it was nice to be able to go off the front at that late stage in the race.
I fell short of a stage win but the day I finished third was another highlight. Overall, I’m pretty happy to have come out of the race feeling stronger than I went into it.
One last team meeting. Deignan's photo of this morning's final pre-stage team talk on the Sky bus.
When five of the team crashed in Montecassino on stage six, it set the team back a bit. But team spirit has been really high, even when I could see some of the guys were suffering with different injuries.
It was pretty impressive the way they handled it.
Sometimes you can have somebody on a team whose morale is low and it brings the whole team down but that didn’t happen at Sky. And the bright attitude and smiling faces all the time made everything a lot easier.
This Giro was my first big race with the team and I have to say it’s the best set up I’ve ever been on, by far.
Everybody just seems to go the extra mile and it’s the little details the team go into that make the difference.
The team chef cooked great food for us every night and it was really nice to go down for dinner every evening knowing you were going to get a really lovely meal.
Getting good massage also made a difference for me. Unlike some teams where you get 30 minutes, at Sky we got an hour and all of the staff have been brilliant.
The mechanics, the carers and the directeur sportifs, they just seem to put more effort into their jobs and that little bit extra goes a very long way and I really appreciate it.
To start the Giro in Ireland of course was a really special experience for me. It was a bit of a surreal experience to have friends from Donegal coming to watch me race.
I didn’t really get the chance to enjoy it that much at the time because I knew what was ahead of me.
The circus was in town and I knew everybody in Ireland was going to have a great weekend and then on Monday, they’d go back to work again. Whereas, for me, the circus would be every day for the next three weeks so I had to try and stay relaxed and not get too excited about it, but it was very special.
One of the things I’m really bad at is replying to people in general, so I’d like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who called, sent me a message or a text during the Giro.
I might not have answered but I read every one of them and it’s great for the morale to know I have so much support back home.
Next week will be a recovery week for me but I’ll still be going out on the bike most days.
I’m already looking ahead to my next race, which is the nine-day Tour de Suisse, which starts in two weeks.
I really want to go there in good shape and do a good job there for the team. So instead of coming home after the Giro as planned, I’m going to stay in Monaco and stay focused on the job ahead.
After that, I can enjoy a mid-season break and spend some time with family and friends in Letterkenny.
I’d also like to thank stickybottle and Chainreactioncycles.com for hosting these daily diaries. I hope everyone enjoyed reading them as much as I enjoyed working on them.
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