Digital Minimalism

It's kinda funny that I haven't yet written the post about the best part of the race. Consider that a sign of just how much catching my breath and "wtf just happened"-ing I've done since Saturday

This Giro started slow and weird, the first week dominated by Mads Pedersen; then a chaotic second week, where we had an unorthodox GC battle of mostly the GC guys vs the race itself rather than the GC guys vs each other. I counted four different teams when all was said and done who lost their original GC leader: Quick Step, Lidl-Trek, Bora, and UAE (not even counting Bahrain, where Tiberi just blew up at some point and GC leadership ended up going to Caruso, nor Ineos, who kept their leader Bernal but lost key domestiques and had Bernal himself fading badly by the end).

When I last left you all, Roglič and Ayuso were technically still in the race, but the inclusion of Bora and UAE in the list above should tell you that did not remain the case for very long. Roglič crashed once more on stage 16, the first day in the mountains, and that was the last straw. On the bright side, that did enable us to see what Pellizzari could do when riding for himself: podium one of the hardest stages of the race and vault up 9 GC positions in one day, ultimately getting in the top ten of a grand tour that he spent the first two thirds of as a domestique. Ayuso hemorrhaged time on stages 16 and 17, and then, as though that wasn't enough, he got stung in the face by a hornet or bee or something. I don't know how the team allowed him to start stage 18 with one eye literally physically swollen shut like an Animal Crossing character, but he did mercifully bow out in the first few kilometers. I was not at all expecting the Giro to end with me feeling so bad for Ayuso; I came in feeling neutral to mildly negative about him but ended up at "jesus christ this kid cannot catch a break".

In terms of GC action over the last week:

Stage 16: Del Toro's top rivals (Carapaz especially, but also Simon Yates and others) go on the offensive and take back a few seconds to a couple minutes. Not a full-on crack from del Toro, but not a good sign for his chances on the queen stage of the race, stage 20 on the Finestre. With Roglič gone and Ayuso down like 15 minutes in one day, people generally believe the Giro is between del Toro and Carapaz, leaning toward the latter as the stronger climber of the two and the one who has proven himself a grand tour winner. Del Toro might hold on to pink by the skin of his teeth...

Stage 17: ... but instead he finally gets that stage win he'd been chasing since Siena. Carapaz moves up into second over Simon Yates.

Effectively no GC change on stage 18, but Bora do scavenge a stage win with Nico Denz (from a comically deep breakaway recursion, he was maybe the fuga de la fuga de la fuga?) out of the remnants of their Giro.

I'll be honest that I do not remember anything about stage 19 besides del Toro taking exactly two seconds on Carapaz (coming second and third in the stage to take six and four bonus seconds respectively), and Simon Yates being a bit grouchy afterwards for very mysterious reasons.

Bringing us to stage 20. Like I said, the queen stage of the race, with the lads climbing the Colle delle Finestre, a storied climb in the annals of the Giro. And speaking of Simon Yates and deep mysteries, one of those stories is his.

Background time. Simon Yates had been leading the 2018 edition of the Giro ever since stage 6. On stage 19, so close to taking it home, the race went up this very same road. For reasons unclear (that Yates has never gone into in years since, other than to say it's not that he was sick), he lost disturbingly close to 40 minutes in one day, on the one climb. Dropped 17 places in GC. Chris Froome went on a solo raid that day to claim the maglia rosa for himself; indeed, by this time in the present Giro people were referring to the offhand possibility someone other than del Toro or Carapaz might pull off a GC coup on the Finestre "pulling a Froome".

I'll tell what happens next from my point of view. I check the live tracker at some point in the morning, either right before I leave for work (~8:30 EDT/14:30 CEST) or right before I go in (about an hour later). I think I remember Wout being up the road, which, good for Simon if so. I don't remember now if Simon had already attacked the other GC guys at this point. I go about my morning.

I go on my lunch break around 12 and check up on the lads. To my immense surprise, Simon Yates just won the Giro. While I was gone, he bridged up over to Wout, who did what he did for Jonas in 2022 on the Hautacam and gave the ride of a lifetime to deliver Yates to the final climb. What happened to our erstwhile leaders? They were so focused on marking and avoiding attacks from one another that neither went to close down Yates (they do end up filling out the podium, Isaac del Toro second in only his second grand tour, Richard Carapaz third). Weird, frustrating and kind of disappointing from them. But tbh, as a Visma fan and lover of the over-the-top highs of Romance in cycling, I'm too far gone on everything else to care. Yates is crying the whole time in all the post race interviews, Wout's recreated one of the moments that made me love him as a rider, my boys in yellow are winning again, I'm wishing I could have seen Adam Yates' first reaction to all this (imagine you're one of del Toro's top domestiques, he's isolated far up the road from you, and then you hear your twin brother on another team just beat your team in a perfect inversion of what happened to him on this same climb seven years ago: what a cacophony of emotion!)

Nobody asked me what happened when I got back from lunch, so I was apparently able to make my face be normal.

So yeah, a wild fucking ride! It's not every day one of your interests reminds you so intensely why you love it.

Whither now the bike dudes? The Criterium du Dauphiné next week, the traditional tune-up race for the Tour. It'll be the first we've seen of Pogačar since Liège, of Remco since Romandie, of Jonas since Paris-Nice (!!!). Tour de Suisse the week after that. Then, of course, the Tour de France.