Philip Deignan on the stage 10 Giro d'Italia road to Salsamaggiore; when men started hitting the deck right beside him at the finish he backed out of the finishing action.
Tuesday, May 20th, Stage 10: Modena to Salsamaggiore (173km)
By Philip Deignan
After a rest day you can never quite tell how your legs are going to react the following morning.
The worst days after a rest day are the ones where you have a climb to start off with and you’re feeling a bit blocked and empty legged.
Today, however, we had a long flat start with a couple of little hills near the end. I think everybody knew it was going to end in a bunch sprint finish so there weren’t too many guys keen to go up the road.
But there is always something to entice the escape artist. Today a competition for the rider who spends the most kilometres in breakaways at this Giro saw two of those involved in that classification jump up the road at the start.
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Andrea Fedi of Neri Sottoli had already spent a whopping 443km in various attacks before today’s stage and is the current leader of the competition, while his fellow Italian and breakaway partner Marco Bandiera was third in the classification this morning.
Ironically, Bandiera has spent more time up the road than anyone in this Giro but as some of it was spent in a group of more than 11 riders, it didn’t count towards the breakaway competition.
None of that concerned the rest of us today though and everyone was happy to leave them at it while we had a pretty relaxed early par of the stage.
As we rolled along I had a bit of a chat with a few people and congratulated Orica GreenEdge’s Peter Weening on his mountain top stage win on Sunday.
Although I don’t really know the Dutchman that well, I spent the last few kilometres with him in a 20 man group that crossed the line almost 22 minutes down on stage winner Diego Ullissi in Montecopiolo the day before.
We had a bit of a chat as we climbed to the finish and looking back now, he was obviously in the group for a reason that day and was trying to save his energy for an all out attack the following day.
Giro points leader Nacer Bouhanni(Fdj.fr) takes stage 10 yesterday, but Deignan thinks his team mate Ben Swift has the beating of him.
I also had a bit of a chat with Weening’s teammate Michael Matthews today. As I’ve said before, the Aussie sprinter lives near me and we train together a bit.
‘Bling’ has had a great Giro so far with a stage win and almost a week in the pink but told me today that his back is pretty sore after the crash he had a couple of days ago and he didn’t know how he would fare out in the sprint later on.
Obviously with a sprint finish looking likely, our plan at Team Sky was to get Ben Swift up there again today.
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As we got closer to the finish the various fast men set themselves up at the front of the peloton and the ace began to increase with every turn of the pedals.
As we came into a little bit of a narrower section of road with around 20km remaining, suddenly, one of the BMC guys riding right beside me hit the deck in the middle of the bunch.
I don’t know what happened but he must have just touched a wheel and down he went. Seeing him hit the deck so hard made me a bit wary of getting involved in the sprint train so I drifted back out of the way and left it to the experts.
Our directeur sportif at Team Sky, Dario Cioni, has been around the race route and taken videos and pictures of the finishes and important parts of the course.
We all get them handed to us on a USB drive early in the race and are then free to take a look at them at our leisure.
We also go through a few pictures and stuff on the bus before the start every day.
On top of this, Rod Ellingworth also drives to the finish and checks out anything we weren’t sure about in the team meeting, like which side of a roundabout we go around or anything else that might have a bearing on the outcome of the stage.
Today we knew there was a little hill with about 8km to go.
As our sprinter here, Swifty, is quite a good climber the guys tried to put double stage winner and biggest threat Nacer Bouhanni of FDJ under pressure there.
Some aggressive riding by Dario (Cataldo) and Eddy (Boassen Hagen) left most of the sprinters scrambling for position a lot further back than they would have been in the last 5km.
Unfortunately the climb was a bit too short and the descent a bit too long for the guys and Bouhanni managed to pull himself together and arrived at the front with 1.5km to go, eventually winning his third stage on this Giro as Ben took eighth across the line having been impeded by a crash with 700metres to go.
Bouhanni is looking very good at the moment but he’s far from unbeatable. Ben is still recovering from a crash earlier in the Giro too and I think he still has plenty of chances to get that stage win here.
Tomorrow’s 250km stage is going to be interesting.
The first 66km are uphill with a long flat section before the final climb with around 40km to go.
It looks like it could be a day for a breakaway to stay clear to the finish and a chance for me to get up the road. The problem is that half the race is going to be trying to get into that breakaway.
It will be a bit of a lottery, but I’ll definitely give it a go.
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