Five Quick Thoughts On the First Three Days of the Giro

Posted on 2009/05/11 by Rob Larsen
  1. Petacchi! It’s an obvious story, but… hot damn that’s a fine couple of days for him- two impressive stage wins and la maglia rosa. Tomorrow will be a whole different story as the road turns steeply upward, bit he’s basically made the race for LPR already and The Killer hasn’t even had a chance to stretch his legs.
  2. On the other end of the spectrum, is Garmin in a bad place or what? They lost the team time trial and then they lost Christian Vande Velde to injury. Farrar’s 2nd today might give them some hope for a result, but it’s still been a tough couple of days. Hopefully they can bounce back.

    We were talking about Tom D. maybe making some noise. That’d be a welcome sight as he’s had a tough couple of years.

  3. Is the glass half empty or half full for Mark Cavendish?

    A pink jersey? That’s good. Really good, in fact.

    Getting beaten by a 35 year old Petacchi from 300m out and then getting caught out behind a crash the next day? Not so good.

    And then he’s got to drag himself up and over the Dolomites tomorrow. Not his happiest terrain…

  4. Speaking of the Dolomites… Liquigas vs. Astana tomorrow (along with some jabs thrown by LPR, Columbia and Rabobank, maybe?) It’s a long race, but it’s still going to be instructive to see how the strong men react when the road turns upward tomorrow. It’ll be interesting to see who ends up in pink and how that plays out strategically. I don’t think anyone with real aspirations actually wants the jersey at this point. Liquigas and Astana are so strong they could probably hold the jersey from here to Roma, but they certainly don’t want to. It’s tricky though, because with two mountaintop finishes in a row there’s going to be a serious GC shakeup over the next two days. There’ll be real gaps opened up so unless there’s a breakaway, the onus of the jersey is going to fall on one of the favorites.

    Quite a wrinkle.

  5. Speaking of wrinkles. This is a nutty course. The two sprint stages have been super sketchy (small roads + full peloton = carnage) and the they go right into a mountaintop finishes for stages 4 and 5, cracking the race wide open in the first week. It’s abnormal, but the more I think about it, the more I like it. With such an early shakeout, there’ll be serious tactics in play from tomorrow straight through to the finish on Vesuvius.

    I approve.

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