There is no need to wait for the long stages or the much-vaunted third week. Long ports are not always needed. Nor are snowy peaks mandatory. In a stage with 147 kilometers and with a highest point of 688 meters, the Giro changed hands. In a day with four ports of second category, the race became very expensive. Inaccessible to Juanpe López, who woke up from his pink dream after 10 days. He ran to the face of a dog, as if there were no tomorrow, as if the next day there would be no more mountains. The solitude of the Sevillian in his impossible defense of the leadership contrasted with the ambition of Carapaz and the strength and tactics of Jai Hindley's Bora.
The double passage through the Superga and the Maddalena witnessed cycling of many carats. There were no contemplations. The two laps of the Turin circuit ended the illusion of Juanpe López, after ten days collecting wolves on the podium and honoring the pink. The pink jersey moved back. Carapaz is the new skipper, although his team floundered in Turin, more or less like López's Trek. But the legs of the Carchi locomotive go a long way in these scenarios.
On the other hand, the cyclist from Lebrija fell on the world in the second ascent to Superga, the grave of the great Torino de Mazzola father. On the first climb, the Bora en bloc had launched the race and there were only 15 cyclists left in the main group, where Alejandro Valverde, Aresman and Guillaume Martin were no longer there.
López paid for some exhibitions in the early stages. Hindley made the selection even smaller. But there the young leader resisted, who even overtook Landa when the Basque had problems. López rubbed shoulders with the Australian, Carapaz and Nibali while he suffered Almeida and other favorites. But it is also allowed to go out in the first person to an attack by the Ecuadorian. He was showing his face. Perhaps he taught himself too much. Even with powers that perhaps did not correspond to him. The desire for him played a trick on him.
Until in the second acceleration of Carapaz the seams were seen. There he could no longer go. That's where the crisis came in. He began to lose positions. He couldn't keep the wheel from Landa, who didn't have the best legs. Nor that of Pello Bilbao or Almeida, always regulating. Just what López did not do, who was left without help or references.
He only did the last 27 kilometers, which became eternal. The Andalusian dropped the seconds like a slab. He even lost more than four minutes. He saw the limits of it, knowing the other face of a Giro in which everything had smiled at him. Alone he was able to get used to the idea, accept what he was going through. “I have given everything. There were moments when I was ahead and I'm happy, I didn't expect it, so I continue with the same smile as this morning”, he said at the finish line, already dethroned.
The only but that can be put against Bora is that he neither won the stage nor managed to dress as the leader. But that was not his demerit, but it must be attributed to Carapaz first, who was caught by Hindley and Nibali in the second Maddalena, and to the class of Simon Yates, who attacked without surveillance to win his second stage and who would be fighting for the general of not be for its collapse in the Blockhaus. Just what Mikel Landa avoided, who leaned on Bilbao to save a day when his rivals let him go. "Time has been lost but the Giro has not been lost", analyzed the man from Alava, fourth one minute behind the leader and 30s from the podium.
4
