The Giro Update Nobody Asked For

OK, so Woods isn't going to win the Giro in his debut grand tour. But boy oh boy is this race delivering. It's almost more than enough to make me want to take the next two weeks off of work, fly down to Florence, and follow the rest of the race. I guess I won't though. Yesterday was something else. After Quintana had attacked on the Blockhaus climb and taken the race leader's pink jersey just before the rest day, everyone knew that his 30 second lead over 3rd-place time-trial-specialist Tom Dumoulin wasn't safe. The only question was how much time Quintana might lose to Dumoulin in yesterday's time trial and therefore how much work he'd have to do in the mountains to get it back. Wowzers, though: I don't think anyone expected Quintana to lose THREE minutes (well, 2:53 to be exact). Dumoulin had hoped that he might be able to take a minute. He now leads the race, ahead of Quintana by 2:23. Interestingly, that puts 2 Dutchmen in the top 3 (with Bauke Mollema sitting in 3rd 2:38 back). The exciting thing about Dumoulin is that he is a much bigger guy than Quintana and hasn't traditionally been known as a mountain stage guy. He was leading the Vuelta a couple years back for a while on the strength of his TTs and doing OK in the mountains but then when the altitude really pushed up he faded into oblivion. He's now a real GC threat though and had been working on his climbing and on putting his body into the right shape for maybe winning. I think he lost something like 5 kg since last season and even told the media he was worried about how his TT would suffer. Well, worry no more! Dumoulin easily won the TT stage yesterday with 2nd place finisher Geraint Thomas 49 seconds back. If Dumoulin can survive the mountain stage today that will be his first test passed. But then the final week finishes in the treacherous Dollomiten... time will tell.

Woods didn't have a TT that exactly set the world on fire. He finished 144th of 190, 8 minutes slower than Dumoulin. That puts him in 22nd place in the GC (not so bad actually), nearly 16 minutes back. This is nothing too surprising of course, but too bad for Cannondale as their main GC guy Davide Formolo also had a pretty lackluster TT and now sits in 13th over 6 minutes back. The good news here, though, is that since Woods is no longer a GC threat, he will be free to go for a stage win. And today's stage was designed for a breakaway to succeed. A hilly mountain stage with many complicated descents, it will be impossible for any team to control a break (nor would they want to). Could Woods win a grand tour stage today? Doubtful, but maybe! And potentialities are the mother of something...

Giro Season

It is (finally) Giro season. The Giro d'Italia (cycling's greatest grand tour) got under way last Friday and has already provided glimmers of drama and promises of even greater excitement to come. This year marks the 100th edition of the Giro d'Italia making it something extra special, but the race is always something to look forward to for any cycling fan. It is well known to be the most difficult and also the most beautiful of the three grand tours, and this year is certainly no exception. The three week stage race will cover 3605 km, beginning (began rather) in Alghero in Sardinia last week, was in Sicily for the last couple of days, and will now have the riders make their way up all along the Adriatic coast before tackling the northern Italian mountains (where we were a few weeks ago) and finally finishing in Milano. One amazing thing about the Giro this year (and several other years including 2012 which we will discuss in great detail shortly) is that the final stage actually means something. The final stage in the Tour de France, for example, is a "show" stage where the race has already been decided and peloton arrives into the centre of Paris with the winner getting to triumphantly take a few victory laps along the Champs Élysées and then there's a completely meaningless sprint at the end for those lame sprinters. This year in Milano the Giro ends with a time trial which could very easily end up deciding the race on the final day.

The Giro isn't just the best race because it's the most difficult and the most exciting, with more challenging climbs and more mountain-top finishes than the other races (and the aforementioned "real" final stage). Its history is long and rich, but most interesting to many of the readers of GWMD, I presume, might be the Giro's very recent history: 2012, to be exact. Five long years ago when Pemulis and Joelle had recently arrived in one of the meccas of cycling smack-dab (I think people say that) in the middle of the Alps in Grenoble, and had ridden their first ever Alpine climbs up to (e.g.) Lans en Vercors, et al., Ryder Hesjedal became the first ever Canadian to win a grand tour and he did it in style. For the last several Tours de France, the winner has been essentially clear from the very first week, making for a kind of boring experience. Hesjedal won the Giro d'Italia in 2012 on the very last day in a time trial where he moved from 2nd place, 31 seconds (!!) behind Joaquin Rodriguez, into the lead, ultimately finishing 16 seconds ahead of Rodriguez. What an exciting stage and finish to three grueling weeks of racing! And it was insanity going into that final stage as well. Everyone knew that Hesjedal was a good time-trialer (including Rodriguez) but no one could pull away from him in the 2nd and 3rd last stages of the tour -- both summit finishes. Pulling together some very recent and very sad history related to the Giro, Hesjedal worked hard together with Michele Scarponi -- the 2011 winner of the Giro -- on the stage 20 ultimate climb up the Stelvio, eventually completing the stage within a couple of seconds of each other to keep them both within the top 3 positions of the general classification. Without Scarponi -- who would go on to finish fourth overall that year -- Hesjedal would not have been in striking distance for the final time trial, and would very likely have never won and continued out his career widely unknown in his home country. Tragically, just before this year's Giro, Scarponi was struck by a vehicle and killed near his home town in southern Italy while on a training ride. The organizers of this year's Giro have dedicated the Mortirolo climb to the memory of Scarponi and his legacy and history with the race. Hesjedal showed up for the unveiling of the race and paid great tribute to his one-time adversary, mentor, and partner of convenience.

This year, with Hesjedal now retired, the Giro still retains all of the excitement of previous years. But it's of course always nice to have someone to cheer for. The superstars (Quintana, Nibali, ...) are expected to win and seeing them run away with the race (like Froome in the TdF basically as far back as anyone can remember these days) contributes nothing to the soul seeking that excitement of an underdog giving everything he has to somehow eke out a victory. Choosing someone at random to be your hope might be a strategy but you need some kind of connection to really get into the race and actually feel the highs and lows as he succeeds or fails. With Hesjedal, we had the first Canadian to ever win a grand tour cycling race. Now that he has won, maybe we'll need something even deeper? Enter Michael Woods...

Michael Woods is one of two Canadians racing in the Giro this year. The other is 40-year-old Svein Tuft who has no aspirations to win but who is a bit of a hero for us getting on in age as he is still successfully supporting his team in a grand tour and is even older than me. Tuft is a domestique (basically, he helps the main guy on his team win) and so while I admire him and hope he does well for his team, he can't be the guy you "cheer" for as the general classification just isn't what he's there for. Woods, on the other hand, might be...

Woods is 30 years old and is racing in his first ever grand tour. He might have raced last year but was dealing with injury problems. One of the super cool things about him and his past is that he only started bike racing five years ago when he was 25! Woods started out as a middle-distance runner and was hailed as a future Canadian track star. The Ottawa native had a world ranking in the mile distance in the top 50 and was a "sure bet" as a future Canadian Olympic star. He won Gold in the 1500m at the 2005 Pan American Junior Athletics Championships but raced his last running race in 2007 due to a recurring foot injury. Despite multiple surgeries to try to correct the problem, he had to quit altogether and for about four years after that he worked regular jobs around Ottawa trying to figure out what he would do in life. His competitive spirit hadn't diminished, however, and in 2011 he borrowed his dad's bike to enter some local cycling races. He stood out and soon found a spot on the Canadian national team in 2012. He went through the expected trials and tribulations of finding a team that would sign him and then just last year was picked up by pro-team Cannondale-Drapac. Interesting historical side-note: before Ryder Hesjedal retired last year he raced one year with Trek Factory Racing but prior to that had spent most of his world tour career (including his much-decorated 2012 campaign) with Garmin which a couple of years ago merged with Cannondale and kept Garmin's race director. In effect, Woods is now racing for the same team that Hesjedal was on when he won the Giro in 2012.

Woods was set to make his grand tour debut in last year's Giro but was involved in a fairly serious crash at the spring classic Liège-Bastogne-Liège. His injuries were bad enough to keep him away from any racing for two months. This year he has gotten off to a good start though. He finished 11th in the Flèche Wallonne classic, 9th (instead of crashing out like last time) in L-B-L, and 2nd in the Gran Premio Miguel Indurain. Yesterday (stage 6 of the Giro), he finished in 5th, at the head of the main group of GC contenders which includes Bob Jungels, Adam Yates, Bauke Mollema, Geraint Thomas, Nairo Quintana, Vincenzo Nibali, Tom Dumoulin, and Steven Kruijswijk (et al). After six stages he sits in 21st place overall, 1m27s behind current race leader Bob Jungels. In the end, he may have to work to support his teammate Davide Formolo who is in 13th place, tied with essentially all of the other GC hopefuls at 10s back. But one never knows what might happen in this race...