With his squad without a stage win on this year's Giro and just two days left, Philip Deignan is beginning to feel the weight of expectation that comes a with riding a Grand Tour for Team Sky.
Saturday, May 30th - Stage 19: Monte Grappa Mountain Time Trial, (27km )
By Philip Deignan
As the three riders on the team who were going to have a tilt at getting a decent result in today’s race against the clock, myself Dario (Cataldo) and Sebastian (Henao) went out on the bikes this morning at 10am and checked out part of the stage.
It was a really nice course with about 8km flat followed by a 19km climb to the finish.
The climb itself went up gradually, starting off at around seven per cent gradient and was pretty regular before a short flat section around the middle but then it got a little bit steeper towards the end.
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We rode for about an hour this morning, checking out the corners on the opening section and the guys also wanted to suss out where they were going to change from the time trial bike to the road bike at the base of the climb.
While I did the whole stage on the traditional road bike, Dario and Sebastian both changed bikes today. Looking back, it was definitely the best thing to do.
You could make up almost a minute on the first flat section and then, if you got a quick change, you’d only lose about 15 seconds by hopping onto the road bike for the climb.
I wasn’t really sure what I could do on today’s stage but a mountain time trial is normally something I’d be pretty good at so I was optimistic this morning.
Deignan has been really strong in the last week of this race, up the road chasing that elusive stage win for Team Sky, with a best placing of 3rd so far.
In the start area beforehand, I felt pretty good in the warm up too so I thought ‘I’ll give it a good go here’.
I started off pretty well and passed my minute man, Davide Malacarne of Europcar, a couple of kilometres into the climb.
Whereas some guys might pedal at 80 rpm on the climb, I tend to spin a smaller gear and probably rode a 39x21 gearing at around 90-95rpm for most of the ascent. I spent most of that time in the saddle but getting out of it every so often on the hairpins to get the speed back up again.
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I knew what sort of power I needed to be putting out to get a top ten on the stage and I was going well for a while but I think the last two or three days in the breakaways have taken a lot out of me and after about halfway I started to fade.
When I knew I couldn’t hold the power that I was going to have to hold, I wouldn’t say I rode easy, but once I realised I didn’t have the legs I just rode the second half a bit steadier.
There seemed to be quite a few guys stressing about the time limit today because you could lose a lot of time on the climb and while I wasn’t in top form, I’m sure there were some guys really struggling.
Whether you were first or last today, nobody went easy. Even if you finished ten minutes down today you still had to go pretty hard.
I lost around six minutes to stage winner and race leader Nairo Quintana today and I can’t see anybody taking the pink jersey off the little Colombian now.
Sebastian though put in a really great ride today. I thought he might surprise a few people but he really impressed me. He ended up finishing 8th on the stage which, for a 20-year-old kid in his first Grand Tour, is pretty impressive.
He also lost a bit of time on a few days where he got caught up in crashes and waited for other guys too, so he probably would be a lot higher up the GC if that hadn’t happened and is definitely one for the future.
At the top of the climb afterwards I put a rain jacket on and rode about 3km down to where the cars were parked. I got into the car, got changed and we had an hour and a half drive back to the hotel.
With just two days to go there’s a bit of pressure on us to win a stage now, though not from the team.
But I don’t think there are many Grand Tours this team has done where they haven’t won a stage. So I think there’s that expectation there from Team Sky fans and there’s a bit of pressure from ourselves too. We want to carry on that tradition.
For us climbers, tomorrow is the last chance saloon.
We don’t hit the mountains until 90km into the stage but after that we have three huge climbs in the last 70km culminating with the ultra steep 12km monster that is Monte Zoncalon coming right at the end.
It’s going to be a huge stage and although I’m getting tired now, I’ll give it one last dig to try and get up the road and do something.
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