Philip Deignan's efforts to go in the Giro stage 9 early breakaway came to nothing yesterday, but he still feels he's on course with his pre-race game plan.
Sunday May 18, Stage 9: Lugo to Sestola (172km)
By: Philip Deignan
As the three climbs on today’s stage were preceded by 100km of flat road, there was ample opportunity for an escape group to go clear and try and build up a big lead before we hit them.
We knew this morning that the last climb wasn’t really hard enough for the GC guys to do any damage to each other so it was a prefect day for a decent sized breakaway to stay away to the finish.
It’s probably strange for fans to see Team Sky without a standout team leader like Chris Froome, Bradley Wiggins or Richie Porte here, but while we’re not riding on the front of the peloton all day, we’re not just riding around like headless chickens either.
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Some of the guys crashed heavily in our first few days in Italy and are still recovering too so we’ve had to try and change our tactics a little bit.
Every day, we each get a role for the stage and everyone knows what their job is. We also have a more general overall plan of what we want to do for the three weeks.
My personal role today was to try and get in a break at the start and if that didn’t succeed I was to try and look after our Belarussian Kanstantin Suitsou on the climbs towards the end of the stage.
Although I jumped into a few moves early on, a cross-headwind made it very hard to get away. Any group I got into only got a small gap and was brought back almost immediately.
After about 40km, there was a big crash in the bunch that saw former pink jersey Michael Matthews of Orica GreenEDGE lose the side of his shorts and a fair bit of skin from his arse.
Having lost his Maglia Rosa on Saturday, Michael Matthews lost some skin from his hip yesterday, or his arse as our man Deignan puts it.
Because of the crosswind we were in an echelon along the side of the road and a lot of guys were riding in the gutter in an effort to get a bit of shelter from the wheels in front of them.
As often happens in an echelon, somebody ran out of room and went off the edge of the road. When he tried to hop off the gravel back up onto the tarmac again, his front wheel dug in and he came down onto a couple of guys including Matthews and Chris-Juul Jensen of Tinkoff-Saxo.
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I was pretty close to the crash myself and had a narrow escape, only just managing to ride around it.
About 10km later and after racing the first 50km in little over an hour, a group of 14 guys eventually broke free and as we had my Italian teammate Salvatore Puccio in there, we were happy enough with that.
The BMC team then went to the front of the peloton and set a pretty steady tempo for race leader Cadel Evans. The gap went out to five or six minutes but with nobody of any danger to the overall contenders up front there was no need to panic.
At one point Garmin Sharp started riding hard but I don’t know what the reason behind that was and they seemed to stop just as suddenly as they started.
Having gone over the third category ascent to Sant Antonio and the fourth category Rochetta Sandri at a decent tempo, we had a really technical downhill section for almost 10km before the final 16km second category final climb to the ski resort at Sestola.
BMC really put the pressure on down the descent and with soon had the bunch strung out into one long line as we weaved our way around the hairpins.
I wasn’t in a great position, probably about halfway down the bunch, but managed to avoid having to chase back on when the peloton split under the pressure as we approached the last climb.
The first 10km or so of the incline were only around five percent but the gradient got steeper in the middle. And we soon began to claw back some of the breakaway group.
Having caught Salvatore on the way up, we also had Dario Cataldo and Sebastien Henao in the group so I stayed beside ‘Kosta’ until around the 10km banner, before letting go and riding up the last part at my own pace. I finished in a group of nine riders 10 minutes behind stage winner Peter Weening of Orica GreenEDGE.
After nine days of racing I don’t want to say I’m disappointed with how I’m feeling. I suppose I knew coming into this Giro that it would take a week or ten days to get going after missing so much of the season with my broken collarbone in February.
While I haven’t been in magnificent shape, I’ve been feeling better the last few days and am pretty positive that if I can look after myself over the next week or so that I can do something in the last few days. That’s the plan anyway.
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