Primož Roglič’s tough end to the first week of the Giro d’Italia took a turn for the worse on Sunday as the Slovenian became the biggest victim of bad luck on the much-feared gravel roads of stage 9 and lost over a minute to all the major pre-race contenders.
The Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe leader had been the best-placed of all the favourites when he took a flying charge into the first sector of the 29 kilometres of gravel. But after that, it all went downhill for the 2023 Giro d’Italia winner.
On one of the biggest crashes of the whole stage with 52 kilometres to go, both Roglič and Tom Pidcock went down, with the Slovenian suffering cuts and scrapes down almost all his left side and getting gapped by the group containing arch-rival Juan Ayuso (UAE Team Emirates).
The final 90 minutes of racing became a painful exercise in damage limitation after a promising start to the stage. But if crashing was already one important blow, Roglič then suffered more bad luck with a puncture, and after almost regaining contact with the Ayuso group on one climb, the gap then began to yawn open remorselessly.
Roglič mostly used a notably strong teammate Giulio Pellizzari to try to minimise the time gaps on the remaining three sectors of gravel, and he also received collaboration in the chase from Q36.5 as they worked for Pidcock as well as some assistance from GC outsider Derek Gee (Israel-Premier Tech). But UAE Team Emirates were present in numbers in the Ayuso group, with the Spaniard’s teammates Adam Yates and Brandon McNulty both working hard, and Roglič himself had to put in some major efforts to avoid his entire GC bid going up in smoke.
“It was just hard with the pace in the front and in the back, obviously,” Roglič told reporters at the finish.
“So I didn’t feel the best of the best then, but we’ll take it. I finished it, and now we’ll have to see what we do next.”
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Given his injuries, Roglič was logically not overly willing to expand on what was clearly a difficult day. But as someone with a great deal of experience of both the good and bad sides of Grand Tour racing, he preferred to take a long-term perspective rather than overreact to this setback.
“We’ll see at the end what it means,” he said. “Today we lost this minute, but sometimes you lose, sometimes you win.”
“It’s a long one, first we need to check my wounds and try to recover, and then we’ll see how to approach it for the next stages.”
‘We can still win the Giro’
At the Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe team bus, director Patxi Vila was equally phlegmatic about the defeat, saying that once Roglič had crashed, “after that it was just a chase”.
“Giulio did an amazing job, as did all the rest of the guys. Then it was a question of fighting it to the line, knowing that every second counts.”
With Jai Hindley crashing out of the Giro on stage 6, barring Pellizzari, the lack of other Red Bull teammates to support Roglič in the critical moments of the stage one was notable. But on a day where they had hoped to go for the stage win in Siena with Roglič, Vila explained that their leader was not the only Red Bull racer to have bad luck.
“Dani [Martínez] had some mechanicals on the first sector, and Jan [Tratnik] couldn’t get into a good position on the same sector, so he was completely lost.”
One of four Red Bull riders to fall in stage 6 in the same crash that took out Hindley, Tratnik was also still feeling the effects of his accident three days on, Vila added. Strategically, they had no choice but to burn through other potential support to ensure that Roglič at least had a chance of remaining in contention.
“We used Nico [Denz] to bring back Pellizzari to Primož, and Giulio was the only guy with Primož, but thanks to him, we are only talking about a minute’s loss to Ayuso, not a lot more,” Vila added.
Like Roglič, though, Vila emphasised that the most important thing was to look at the long-term, even if the result from stage 9 was in no way what he would have liked.
“Today was not the best day, but it could have been much worse, and I still think winning the Giro is possible. That time loss is going to be important, and we have nine good guys ahead of us on GC, though.
“So it’s going to be a challenge to get all that time back, but we’ll sit down this evening and work out how best to try to do it.”
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