Ireland's Philip Deignan said with no boss man in the peloton any more, negotiating with the Giro officials was chaotic on the road to Bari.
By Philip Deignan
Tuesday, May 13th, Stage 4: Giovinazzo to Bari (112km)
Our first day in Italy didn’t get off to a great start when it began to rain just as we got to the start line this morning.
Because it doesn’t rain a lot in southern Italy, the oil and diesel from the city centre traffic never really gets washed away and it makes the roads notoriously slippery down here.
When you hear 200 riders letting the air out of their tyres on the start line in order to get a bit of grip on the road surface, you know it’s going to be a nerve wracking day in the saddle.
The road conditions meant that nobody was too keen to attack in the early part of the stage. So there was a bit of a truce called for the first 50km or so today. But even though we were riding slowly there were still guys crashing in the bunch.
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The rain eventually stopped and the roads dried up a bit around an hour later. But just before we came onto the fairly technical 8.3km circuit in Bari, which had to be covered eight times, it started raining again and things got really slippery.
As we don’t really have a big leader in the bunch that everybody listens to nowadays, it was a bit chaotic in the peloton to be honest.
With some guys wanting to race and more wanting to stop riding altogether, a few of the more experienced Italian riders were up the front talking to a motorbike commissaire trying to find out what was going on; whether they were going to stop the race or if they were going to neutralise it.
Former national French champion Nacer Bouhanni (Fdj.fr) winning Giro d'Italia stage 4 (Photo: Sirotti)
Some people might think we should have raced flat out regardless of the weather today but at the end of the day the riders’ safety has to come first.
Nobody wanted to finish their Giro today. Nobody wanted to end up in hospital today, which was a distinct possibility if we raced hard on that circuit in those conditions.
On the final lap when guys were going all out for the stage win, there were three big crashes in the last 2km which showed the danger that we all knew was there.
With four or five laps to go, I heard in my radio earpiece that we were going to stop the race but guys were shouting and you could see there was a lot of discussion still going on at the front.
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My Austrian teammate Bernie Eisel is one of the rider representatives in the sport’s world governing body, the UCI. So he rode up alongside the commissaire to see if they could reach an agreement on what we were going to do.
In the end, it was decided to take everybody’s time on the second last lap through the finish and let the sprint for the stage go ahead but without the time bonuses usually awarded.
As soon as we heard the sprint was going ahead we all knew our team sprinter Ben Swift, who was second in Dublin, had to go for it to keep himself in contention for the points jersey.
With a couple of laps to go however, it started raining again and as it was inevitable what was going to happen when the sprinters teams started their lead-outs on the last lap, I stayed well back out of it.
I wasn’t going to be part of Ben’s lead-out train in the sprint anyway so there was no point in me being up there.
As the Cannondale team led their sprinter Elia Viviani into a sweeping bend with 2km to go, they all suddenly hit the deck on the slick surface.
Behind them, Ben and our lead-out man Chris Sutton fell too and there was another crash just before the final kilometre.
Having aquaplaned along the surface and not hitting anybody else, thankfully, neither of the lads are badly hurt.
Ben was a bit unlucky in more ways than one today.
Having begun the day in second place in the points classification behind double stage winner Marcel Kittel, he should have taken over the jersey this morning as Kittel didn’t start due a fever.
But the Giant Shimano sprinter must have left his decision until the last minute and there was no red jersey for Ben. His crash in the finale today means he has now dropped down to fifth in the standings and won’t wear it tomorrow morning either.
Of the sprinters here though, ‘Swifty’ is pretty versatile and can also climb a bit.
He won a very tough mountain stage at the recent Tour of the Basque Country out of a group of maybe 20 strong guys so he will have plenty more chances to take his first Grand Tour stage win over the next few weeks.
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