On the top of what is billed as the hardest climb in World Tour cycling, the Giro d’Italia entered its final week with the standings finely poised after a dramatic comeback from Chris Froome put the quadruple Tour de France winner back in the frame.
Simon Yates successfully held the pink jersey, gradually opening a gap on the defending champion, Tom Dumoulin, but his advantage does not look decisive. Not yet.
For the first time since the race left Jerusalem 15 days ago, Froome resembled the rider who has won the Tour de France four times in five years, although any result he gains in the Giro remains subject to the verdict on his adverse analytical finding for salbutamol. He made his move four kilometres from the finish, which was perched on a dizzyingly high mountain in north-east Italy, and forged ahead in his familiar style, part cyclist, part praying mantis trying to work out which leg ought to go where.
Froome is never pretty to watch but he has broken plenty of hearts. Yates was not among them here; he could be content, if not euphoric, after escaping the other overall contenders a kilometre after Froome had broken clear.
Theirs was a classic pursuit match – old Briton versus new kid on the block – with the outcome in the balance until Froome turned the final right-hand bend and faced the last 100m to the finish line up a final painfully steep slope.
“It’s a really, really special feeling, on such a monumental climb,” said Froome. “It’s such a good feeling after a really hard start to the race for me and the team. I felt it was the moment [to attack], the race was really on the limit. Right to the line Simon was right behind me. I kept hearing: ‘Five seconds, 10 seconds, five seconds.’ I didn’t know if he was going to catch me, it was such a relief to get to the last 100 metres.”
Behind Yates came two noted mountain men, the diminutive Domenico Pozzovivo and the grizzled Frenchman Thibaut Pinot, but if there was a surprise at the top of the monstrous 10km ascent through 100,000 baying Italian cycling fans, it was Dumoulin. His substantial Dutch frame does him no favours on a mountain this steep but he rode the perfect race for a time trial specialist. His mission was to limit his losses and he never faltered as he held Yates to 31sec, where more highly rated climbers – most notably the Italian champion, Fabio Aru – ceded time.
“Everyone was expecting [Dumoulin] to lose big chunks of time because it’s steep, but a climb like this is good for him, it’s a constant pace,” said Yates. It is, however, a merciless challenge with zero respite once a rider cracks and Dumoulin never looked under pressure.
“It’s a nice gain for us,” said Yates’s team manager, Matt White, who expects his young Briton to go on the attack again on Sunday’s stage, which has a difficult finish with repeated climbs leading to the ski resort of Sappada, where a steep little ramp will favour Yates’s explosive finish. There the standings are likely to be reshuffled again
Yates had led the race since Mount Etna, a couple of days after the Giro’s return to Italian soil following the start in Israel. The 25-year-old from Bury had followed his electrifying attack up Etna with an assured eight days in the pink leader’s jersey, in which he had won two stages including the mountain-top finish in the Abruzzo at Gran Sasso last Sunday. This was a challenge of a different order, however.
Gran Sasso was long but relatively evenly graded, whereas the Zoncolan is notoriously one of the hardest climbs in Europe, ascending 10km at an average gradient of 12% and going as hard as 22% in places, putting it on a par with the fearsome Alto de l’Angliru in Asturias. Special low gears, with ratios more often seen on mountain bikes, had to be fitted to all the bikes to enable the riders merely to ascend without setting foot to the ground, because once a cyclist comes to a halt on the Zoncolan there is little chance of getting going again.
Nicknamed The Kaiser because of its proximity to the Austrian border, the climb becomes so narrow that the race organisers allowed none of the usual service and organisation vehicles to tackle the ascent for fear they might stall on a bend and block the road. Motorbikes were provided instead.
For Froome, this was a welcome comeback. His Giro had stalled before it even began, with a crash as he reconnoitred the prologue time trial in Jerusalem, and it had got worse with each day, with another fall – uphill, on wet roads – on stage eight before he had subsided in the final 2km at Gran Sasso.
He had looked out of the picture going into the Zoncolan stage, 3min 20sec behind, but his deficit on Yates narrowed slightly and he moved within reach of the riders fighting for podium places behind the Mitchelton-Scott leader: Pozzovivo, Dumoulin, and Pinot. For a man who had been written off in the last week – only seven journalists attended his rest-day press conference – it was sweet revenge.
