Tour de Romandie

With Astana protecting their jersey and us trying to make the race hard it wasn’t the best of conditions for the early breakaway attempts.

Fuglsang himself took the lead on the first descent and at the bottom we had a peloton of 119 riders and no breakaway.

For some really weird reason Kelderman decides to attack early on the flat section. Fine by us as he will hopefully be tired when hitting the mountains then and plenty of other teams are willing to do the work in the peloton. He is joined by Rabottini and Tiernan-Locke.

The front trio has 4’30’’ on the peloton at the start of the climb.

Bøchman and Santander does a great job pulling towards the final climb, but Kelderman manages to keep his advantage close to four minutes.

At the start of the descent the Dutchman hold on to a 2 minute gap in spite of a frantic chase behind.

So Fuglsang tries to take advantage of his great downhill skills.

He reduces Wilco’s gap and even gets a small gap on the other favourites.

Until the last 700 m that is…

Quaade sets best time early on in spite of the hard route. He is even 4 seconds faster than the World Champion today.

Kessiakoff just manages to squeeze in ahead of Durbridge proving that this is not an ordinary TT.

The Swede is beaten several times, but then Bøchman takes back the lead to our team. It really is a difficult route for the riders to administer their energy on.

Fuglang is determined to do well when he sets off.

He destroys Pozzovivo’s time at the intermediate. 16 seconds faster than Kreuziger, 51 seconds faster than Kelderman and 1’20’’ faster than Albasini. That puts Jakob in the provisional lead with 7 km to go!

In finish Jakob is 49 seconds faster than Domagalski on 2nd.

Now we can just wait for the final three riders to come in.

Giro d'Italia

Starts with 19 km TTT
2 Flat ITT’s (Total 74 km)
1 Mountain ITT (18 km)
6 Flat Stages
3 Medium Mountain Stages, 2 finishing uphill
1 Cobbled Medium Mountain Stage
7 Mountain Stages, 4 summit finishes


On paper Duarte should destroy everyone on the mountains, but his shape is a big question as we haven’t really seen him this season. Antón, Pinot and Atapuma are three other strong bids for the mountains. They are all pretty bad at TT’ing though and that could turn out to be a huge problem in this Giro.

Of the sub-top climbers defending champion Jakob Fuglsang and Kevin de Weert are the best TT’ers. On top of that Fuglsang has been training all spring to improve his abilities on the cobbles and he should be able to gain some time on some of the downhill finishes as well.

All-in-all this will be an exciting race where all the favourites have an obvious weakness for the others to exploit.


With 6 stages looking like a bunch sprint we have a strong field of sprinters this year. Farrar, Keukeleire and Cavendish will be looking to challenge home favourite Appolonio while Rüdiger Selig will make his debut against the really big names. For Novo Nordisk - SAS Kristoff will get his chance against the big boys with support from Hushovd and Rasmussen.

Astana with Spanish champion Castroviejo and Colombian Champion Suarez are one of the team the bookmakers expect to challenge us. And as expected they set a strong time right from the start.

Fuglsang has a strong team around him for this discipline and the guys beat Astana fairly comfortably in finish.

Spoiler

Actually I only started the stage to take the pics and then I quit to quick-sim as I really didn't feel like racing it properly