Demare delivers Frenchman powers to Giro stage win
Arnaud Demare claimed his first win of 2019 with victory on stage ten of the Giro d’italia in Modena.
The Frenchman held off Italian national champion Elia Viviani and Rudiger Selig in a reduced sprint after a crash under the flamme rouge brought down several riders, including sprinter Pascal Ackermann in the points leaders’ ciclamino jersey.
With only a handful of riders left to contest stage honours, Demare launched his sprint on the left while Caleb Ewan raced down the right.
Viviani, running out of opportunities to win a stage of this race in the Italian jersey, looked to come through the middle and though he and Ackermann’s BoraHansgrohe team-mate Selig rounded a fading Ewan, Demare had the power to hold them off.
Some minutes later Ackermann eventually crossed the line surrounded by team-mates with his jersey and shorts badly ripped, though with the crash coming inside the final three kilometres he suffered no time loss. There was no change in the overall race lead as UAE Team Emirates’ Valerio Conti retained his one minute 50 second advantage over Team Jumbo-visma’s Primoz Roglic, the race favourite.
The 145km stage from Ravenna, almost entirely flat, was not a stage to mix up the general classification following the thorough shake it received in Sunday’s time trial when Simon Yates suffered a poor day and left himself more than five and half minutes off pink and more than three and a half minutes down on his main rival Roglic.
But the Lancastrian seemed unperturbed yesterday as he sat in the peloton, enjoying the easy pace and laughing with his teammates along the way.