Nicolas Roche has said he was disappointed not to make the winning breakaway on yesterday's stage 12 at the Giro, adding when he and Peter Sagan (Bora-hansgrohe) went on the attack and were caught, the very next attack was the successful one.
Roche and his Team DSM team mate, Chris Hamilton, were given the green light yesterday by their team to attack and join a breakaway as the stage looked ripe for a move to get clear and make it all the way.
Hamilton managed to get into the winning move and when it split in the finale of the hilly 212km stage to Bagno di Romagna Hamilton and Andrea Vendrame of AG2R Citroën pulled clear. Vendrame just got the better of Hamilton in the final two-up sprint, with Roche left to rue a missed opportunity for himself earlier in the stage.
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“I tried like a maniac to get away and got off the front quite a few times," Roche wrote in his Giro Diary in the Irish Independent. "But the speed was so high and there were so many other guys trying the same thing that it all came to nothing."
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Roche continued: “At one point, I had opened a gap with Peter Sagan but we both knew we needed eight or nine more riders to come across to us if we were to have any chance of success.
“Instead, the whole bunch steamed up behind us and
another group jumped off the front. As luck would have it, this time they were
allowed escape. I was a bit gutted to miss the right group but at least Chris
managed to get into the 16-man move.”
After his attacking efforts Roche said there was a hard climb out of Florence about 80km into the stage and he took some time to recover, before reverting back to team duties for leader Romain Bardet.
He said after 120km when the bunch hit the 10km cat 2 Passo Della Consuma it started raining but he didn’t take a rain jacket as he didn’t expect it to become so cold. However, by the top of the climb it was “freezing cold”. And though he stayed with the thinned out peloton on the descent, his “arms and legs were like blocks of wood and I was frozen stiff on the bike”.
Having worked to ensure Bardet stayed in the race leader’s
group, which finished over 10 minutes down on the stage winner, Roche
eventually finished in a group a further five minutes back.
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