Isaac del Toro in pink. Juan Ayuso making paper airplanes in the press conference. Primož Roglič bruised and behind. And a rest day filled with polite quotes and quiet tension.
The second week of the Giro d’Italia begins Tuesday with a flat time trial into Pisa and a leaderboard that looks, on paper, like a dream for UAE Team Emirates-XRG. Del Toro leads, Ayuso is second, 1:13 down. Brandon McNulty and Adam Yates are eighth and ninth. Four riders in the top 10, all ahead of Primož Roglič, still their most dangerous opponent, 2:25 back. So many options; what could go wrong?
The Giro stands poised for a reshuffle. Ten days in, we’ve had only one (relatively short) mountaintop finish, one short time trial, and a bunch of stages suited to the versatile all-arounders, rather than the specialists. Unsurprisingly, the top of the GC is still packed with those very generalists, and the riders we will most likely see on the podium in Rome are spread across placings from 1st to 15th.
There are two particularly intriguing storylines in the sea of Giro narratives. The first is whether Roglič can come back from nine stages he’d mostly like to forget. The second is whether UAE has a head chef or too many cooks.
What did UAE say on the rest day?
They said all the right things on Monday. Some honest, some dubious, but all pointed in the same direction.
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