MONTENERO-BORMIO
Ever heard of Italian music stars Alessio Alunno, Vanessa Angeloni or Alex&Co? Neither had we, although according to the signboard outside Nuovo Mondo, the nightclub pressed into service as the media centre for the Giro’s stage 10 time trial in the finish village of Montefalco, all three of these artistes will be playing there soon, and there are probably still tickets available. In the meantime, for Giro journalists, with the usual press room clutter of computers, cables and results sheets in the midst of Nuovo Mondo’s darkened, windowless dance floor – with its bizarre backdrop of fake gold balustrades, thick velvet curtains and glitterballs – writing about a bike race rather than knocking back cocktails meant the sense of being oddball intruders was inescapable. Then that feeling increased when, rather than a small-town musical act, a very different kind of star powered his way onto Nuovo Mundo’s stage, where – this is the Giro, after all – nobody had bothered to turn off the flashing neon lighting.
Perhaps the one thing that was appropriate about Tom Dumoulin sitting in the midst of blinking small-town disco lights to discuss how he had upturned the Giro’s overall classification was the name of the venue. After all, Nuovo Mondo means New World, and in the case of the Giro 2017, a whole raft of uncharted GC territories had been created by Dumoulin himself. It had all been so sudden, too. As recently as the previous Sunday, at the summit of the Blockhaus, the Giro d’Italia had unfolded more or less as expected. In the face of a dominant performance by Nairo Quintana and above all by the Movistar team, the Colombian’s rivals had seemed powerless, reduced to bickering among themselves – as Dumoulin and Bauke Mollema had done near the Blockhaus summit – as they struggled in vain to limit the gaps.
Finally, Thibaut Pinot and Dumoulin had finished stage 9 in second and third, just 24 seconds back on Quintana at the summit of this 100th edition Giro’s single most difficult ascent. But initially, the overall scale of the destruction wreaked by the time trial stage left that considerable achievement all but unnoticed.
There wasn’t just the crash that had put paid to Geraint Thomas, Mikel Landa and Adam Yates’ GC hopes, all thanks to one policeman’s poor parking, and – if a furious Matt White’s point of view was to be accepted – Movistar’s failure to act in a sporting way and wait for Yates to regain contact. There was also the virtual annihilation of the GC hopes of a host of second-level contenders, from Tejay van Garderen through to former leader Bob Jungels, Ilnur Zakarin and Steven Kruijswijk to contemplate. In one climb, Quintana had distanced everybody. Movistar thinned out the lead group with a relentless pace, then Quintana turned the screw. It looked like the race was over.
At best, after Blockhaus, podium positions were all these riders could hope for, while Italy’s top star Vincenzo Nibali, a disappointing fifth, could only mumble about how little Quintana weighs and how much of an advantage that gives Quintana on the climbs –hardly the defiant words of a four-time Grand Tour champion.
As the stand-out pre-race contender, Nairo Quintana had therefore acted as expected, using his favoured terrain, the mountains, to scatter the favourites to the
Beyond Movistar’s collective performance wreaking havoc, the biggest knock- out GC blows came thanks to Dumoulin
four winds. But when the dust settled the time differences were such that for Nibali, Pinot and Dumoulin – now the three key rivals to the Colombian for pink - the performance had not done much more than establish Quintana as the man to beat. Hence the repeated questions to Quintana in his rest-day press conference about whether he could really, as he had boldly stated atop the Blockhaus, hold on to the leader’s jersey all the way to Milan. “We have the team to do that,” Quintana retorted and, given the way Movistar had ripped the race apart on the lower slopes of the Blockhaus, unsurprisingly Quintana was also asked if Movistar had taken a leaf out of Sky’s book from their devastating collective mountain riding at La Pierre Saint-Martin in the 2015 Tour.
Yet beyond Movistar’s collective performance wreaking havoc among the Giro outsiders, individually the biggest knock-out GC blows during the Giro’s trek up through central Italy and to the edge of the Alps at Oropa came thanks to Dumoulin. Recouping his losses to Quintana on such a smoothly rising and falling time trial course at Montefalco had been all but a given, and Movistar’s Eusebio Unzué later admitted he had expected a gap between the Dutchman and the Colombian of around two minutes. But for Dumoulin to trounce the opposition so thoroughly, putting nearly three minutes into Quintana and a minimum of 44 seconds or higher on the rest? Even Dumoulin admitted that was a shock.
And then, with Dumoulin in pink and a healthy, if not decisive lead (when, in any case is a Giro lead decisive?), what the Blockhaus had indicated about his climbing was confirmed on stage 14. Quintana had done everything that he should have done at Oropa by putting Movistar on the front on the final climb then attacking at 4km. But Dumoulin’s comeback – so similar to his ascent in the 2015 Vuelta at Cumbres del Sol, where steady-paced climbing took him past a more explosive Chris Froome – not only gained the Dutchman 24 seconds on Quintana and a stage win, it also showed that he would be a far tougher nut to crack in the mountains than even the Blockhaus had suggested.
“Two and a half minutes’ advantage is nothing in the third week of the Giro,” Dumoulin repeated time and again. Yet his advantage on Quintana, after – let’s not forget – three summit finishes was much more than anyone could have expected, either. Welcome to the new world.