2013 GIRO D’ITALIA Stage 5 preview:
Tuesday May 7, 2013, 3pm New York Time:
Today's stage 4 to Serra San Bruno delivered all the action I'd hoped for. The rain added to the long, challenging course without wreaking complete havoc on the riders. In fact, there were fewer crashes than yesterday. We saw a lot of lively moves from the younger riders (Minguez, Le Bon) and from some road-worn veterans (Di Luca, Duque, Willems). Kudos to 23-year-old Enrico Battaglin for a dominant sprint win, the first GT stage win of his young career.
Tomorrow threatens more rain, and possibly thunderstorms for the 203 km, mostly flat, stage 5 northbound run up the Ionian Coast to Matera. A short, punchy category 4 climb coming about 25km to the finish might encourage some optimistic attacks, but staying clear to the end will be tough since the final climb is neither steep nor long enough to cause the kinds of splits we've seen on the last couple stages. Sprinter's teams will hope to mow down the breaks as they try to get their fast men to the line first. The last 1 km does have a slight ascending drag to the finish which could rule out some of the flat-drag sprinters. I think a strong Classics-type rider will succeed tomorrow--maybe Paolini again, Sacha Modolo, or perhaps Oscar Gatto?
STAGE 5 PICKS:
LIKELY PICKS: Mattia Gavazzi, Matty Goss, Luca Paolini, Nacer Bouhanni
DARK-HORSE PICK: Fabio Felline
MY PICK: Ella Viviani
 | |
| STAGE 5 Profile |
=========================================================================
No comments:
Post a Comment