Sprinters fooled and foiled in Giro d'Italia stage 15
The sure thing sprint stage that wasn't a sprint stage at all. OOPS!!!
This was a grand tour-sized miscalculation.
According to the race book, the stage into Milan was a guaranteed, full-on sprinters stage. Pick your fast-man: Jonathan Milan, Paul Magnier or Dylan Groenewegen. They’d lugged themselves over the high mountains for a week and now it’s their turn again.
Yes, there was a break of four riders off the front. However, Fredrik Dversnes (Uno-X Mobility), Mirco Maestri (Team Polti VisitMalta), Martin Marcellus (Bardiani CSF 7 Saber), and Maestri's teammate Mattia Bais were doomed. Everybody knew that.
Sure, give them their camera time and then kill them ff. This ain’t no stage for a breakaway to win. They’re just sacrificial lambs for the sprinters.
Only ….. they didn’t listen, defied the odds, took their chances and went all the way to the finish line.
In the team cars, they ran the numbers and their calculations were wrong. For all the experience at Lidl Trek, Unibet Rose Rockets and Soudal Quickstep, despite the expertise in Chasing Down Breakaways, they blew it.
In the final ten kilometers the gap was still a minute. Lead out trains were already wiped out and the deficit barely went down. It was 50 seconds with five kilometers to go.
Now the sprinter teams were in full panic mode. How did they screw this one up? They even called a few of their GC men to the front in a vain hope of shutting the break down.
Perhaps they also assumed the break would run out of gas after such a long day in the escape. Or that maybe they’d start to play games with each other and loose momentum.
But these four bold riders had fooled those director Sportifs. They’d outsmarted the road captains. The usual formula wasn’t working.
On a bright and brilliant day in Milan, three Italians riders and one Norwegian tore up the script and made it look easy. Fredrik Dversnes took the biggest win of his career.
For all the analytics and sports science, this was a major miscalculation by all the top sprinters in the race. In other words, OOPS!