Philip Deignan was called in to action for Team Sky in the last 20km yesterday when teammate Kanstantin Suitsou required a spare bike.
Friday May 23, Stage 13: Fossano to Rivarelo Canavese (157km)
By Philip Deignan
When a rider leaves Team Sky, he also leaves his team phone number with the team and it’s generally passed on to a new rider the following season.
When Rigoberto Uran left Sky for Omega Pharma Quickstep last year his team phone number transferred to his Colombian compatriot 20-year-old Sebastian Henao in January.
As Uran won yesterday’s time trial stage and is now the leader of this Giro overall and a lot of journalists and others still have the old phone number, poor old Sebastian’s phone has been going non-stop ever since.
The highlight last night was when he had the president of Colombia calling him, thinking he was calling Uran, which was pretty funny to the rest of us.
Advertisement
Although today’s stage was pretty flat, I felt a bit tired and lack lustre on the bike, which was a bit strange considering I only had an hour’s racing yesterday.
But I’m hoping that it was because I spent that relatively long period of time crouched down on the time trial bike yesterday and the different position and bigger gears used just meant I’d used a few different muscles and I’ll be okay tomorrow.
Six guys went away in the first couple of kilometres today and even thought they didn’t get much rope from the Francaise de Jeux and Giant-Shimano teams, they played it really smart.
The bunch only gave them about three minutes headway but the escapees kept a little bit in reserve for when the peloton really put the hammer down in the end and three of them managed to stay clear to contest the stage win.
During the early part of the stage, most of the talk in the peloton was about the mountain stages ahead.
With reports that some of the mountain passes have seven metres of snow on them and pictures of the race organisation trying to plough a path up the Stelvio on the internet the other day, we were wondering if they will be able to clear the roads in time and what the race organisers will do if they can’t.
The weather has been a bit weird on this Giro. Today we started in sunshine, finished in rain and just missed a huge hailstone shower in the last 30km that the police had to clear off the road in order for us to race through.
Related News
Kanstantin Sioutsou needed a bike change as the race hit the finishing circuit, but with our man Deignan waiting for him, he regained contact pretty quickly.
With the chase full on as we came onto the 20km finishing circuit today, Kosta (Kanstantin Suitsou) had a problem with his bike. His handlebars slipped down a little, which caused his brake cable to tighten and pull on his back brake, which meant he had to stop and change onto his spare bike.
Unlike most amateur clubs back home, the roof rack on the pro team cars can carry nine spare bikes so that the whole team is covered every day.
As Kosta is our best placed rider on GC at the moment, his bike was easily accessible on the outside of the rack and after a quick swap he was back in action in no time.
Myself and Sebastian waited for him to remount and with him safely in our slipstream brought him up through the cavalcade and back into the peloton.
Although it was pretty fast at that stage we managed to get back in contact with the bunch after about 2km, so we didn’t waste that much energy.
Swifty was fifth in the bunch sprint behind the three breakaways for eighth on the stage today but it’s never the same when you’re not sprinting for the win and I think he can still pull one out of the bag in this race.
Tomorrow is another tough stage with four mountains to be tackled, including the first category finish at the Unesco World Heritage site in Oropa.
I’ll try and go in the breakaway again tomorrow but I’ll have to see what the legs say.
