Philip Deignan is feeling better every day in this Giro towards his goal of trying for a stage win in the final week.
Saturday May 17, Stage 8: Foligno - Montecopiolo 179km
By: Philip Deignan
For the past few days my Aussie teammate Chris Sutton has taken on the role of ‘CJ the DJ’ on the team bus before the start of every stage.
His choice of music leaves a lot to be desired though and he constantly gets slagged about the dance tunes blaring out as we get changed. With the drum and bass combining with the smell of sun cream, for a few minutes this morning, it felt more like I was on holidays in Magaluf or Ibiza than getting ready to ride a stage of the Giro d’Italia.
As soon as I hopped up on my bike this morning however, I knew the holidays were over as we had a seriously fast start today.
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With two first category climbs looming towards the end of the stage there were plenty of riders willing to attack in the hope that the early breakaway would stay away to the finish.
As it was his birthday today, my roommate Eddy was pretty keen to get up the road and managed to infiltrate the 10 man move that went clear about 15km into today’s proceedings.
For a while the Movistar and Tinkoff-Saxo teams weren’t happy with the make-up of the lead group so they held them at about 15 or 20 seconds before everyone started attacking again keeping the pace at full gas until around 30km into the stage.
With the break established, there was then a bit of confusion surrounding which team was going to lead the chase at the front of the peloton.
As race leader Michael Matthews knew he wouldn’t be able to hold onto his pink jersey on today’s final climb, his Orica GreenEDGE team didn’t want to take up the chase today.
As teams bluffed each other and discussed what to do, we rode really slowly for about 10km and the gap quickly went out to nine minutes before Tinkoff-Saxo and BMC decided to ride at the front.
We had some really atrocious road conditions today with some massive holes in the road and CJ was pretty unlucky to puncture at a time when we were riding around 50kph chasing the breakaways later on.
He didn’t panic however and just used the cars in the cavalcade as mobile stepping stones to help himself get back up through the group, sheltering for a few seconds behind each one before moving onto the next.
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Just as he had closed the gap and ridden back into the bunch though, CJ punctured again and all in all, he suffered three flat tyres in 20km today so he was pretty pissed off.
My role today was to look after my Italian teammate Dario Cataldo and help him out on the climbs towards the end of the stage.
In 19th place at just over two and a half minutes, he was our main GC guy coming into the stage but after banging his knee in the big crash a couple of days ago he had a really hard time today.
Of the three big climbs towards the back end of today’s stage, the first one was the worst. It had a really irregular gradient, flattening out every so often before getting really steep again.
We were about halfway up when I noticed Dario suffering and sliding out the back door as the Ag2r team drove the group along so I waited and rode alongside him or the rest of the stage.
While he was hoping to finish in the top 10 at this Giro, Dario just wasn’t feeling great today and it soon became apparent that we weren’t going to regain contact with the front of the bunch.
Dario was pretty disappointed with his form today but when your body doesn’t respond, there’s not a lot you can do really.
As our team car drove past, our directeur sportif Dario Cioni told us to just ride easy to the finish, so that’s what we did, if you can call traversing two more climbs including the first category final ascent to Montecopiolo, riding easy.
This last climb had a 14 percent slope in places so all you could do was try to get up it with the minimum of stress.
Although I lost 21 minutes today, I felt pretty good, a lot better than the last few days and feel like I’m getting better as each day goes along.
But it’s hard to judge a climb when you’re not riding up it at full pace. It’s amazing how much faster you can climb when you’re on the wheels.
It’s sometimes harder to ride it at your own pace though, so I’m pretty happy with where I’m at.
My teammate Konstantin Suitsov finished in the group of favourites today, taking 16th on the stage, 28 seconds behind winner Diego Ullissi of Lampre. ‘Kosta’ is now the best placed rider at Team Sky, 5’42” down in 23rd overall on the team, Kosta would be a lot closer to the pink jersey if he hadn’t crashed twice on the road to Montecassino on stage five but hopefully he can move up another bit now.
Although Eddy’s breakaway attempt came to nought on the final climb today, my Norwegian roommate had the consolation of a nice birthday cake at the dinner table this.
Tomorrow is another day where I think, nine times out of ten, the breakaway will stay away to the finish so I think there will be a lot of people trying to get in the moves in the early kilometres.
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