Eddie Dunbar (Team Jayco AlUla) looked set to finish Giro d'Italia 2023 in 7th place overall when the race concluded in Rome today and though the Irishman will need time to recover, he is already looking ahead to his next big target races in the months ahead.
The Cork rider yesterday took his highest placing of the three TT stages in the Italian Grand Tour, finishing 19th. However, most of the riders competing for places 4th to 9th were separated by less than two minutes, with much smaller gaps between some of them.
And when Dunbar's rivals had a better mountain TT than he did, it saw the Irishman drop down the standings from 5th to 7th. He has now explained he was not on a good day but is already setting out his plans for the months ahead.
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"It was hard, I was a bit off, wasn't feeling 100 per cent," he said of yesterday's 18.6km TT on Monte Lussari. "I paid the price for it and lost a few places on GC. But it is what it is, you just have to try to take the positives out of it and move on, there's not much I can do really."
He added while the precise detail of the remainder of his season had not yet been set, Tour de Pologne - from July 29th to August 4th - and La Vuelta, which begins on August 26th, were on his schedule. While Dunbar made no reference to his goals on those races, he was expected to be a protected rider for both and racing for the general classification.
Having led a team in a Grand Tour of the first time - and justified that status with 7th - Dunbar added he had learned a lot from the experience.
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"There was a lot I learned, I haven't spent too much time thinking about it, now is not the time, next week's the time to do that. I just want to enjoy today and get through it safely. Then I'll sit down in the next few weeks and assess," he said, adding he felt he handled the stress well.
"It's only a stressful as you make it and thankfully the guys made it easy for me these last three weeks to be kind of stress-free, to a certain extent. A lot of guys were a lot more stressed, I felt. That's one thing I probably learned over the three weeks; control your stress and you will enjoy it a bit more."
