Astana Cycling Team

Days like Stage 11 are what make the 2010 Giro distracting and exciting to Josep (Luk Beines/AFP/Getty Images)

Hola amigos,

Today the riders in the Giro have had a day, we could say, of transition. It’s been curious because we saw from the first meter of the race that there wasn’t much motivation to fight. The riders were talking and there was little tension in the neutralized zone, a symptom of taking a calmer start. I think that we all had yesterday’s tough stage in mind, with the rain, the cold, the fast tempo and, of course, also what happened in the GC. All this has made us take it easier at the beginning of the race and, good luck! since the first kilometers went up.

With a few attacks, just going over the top of a climb, the escape group of the day formed. I think that the riders in the escape of the day were only trying to accumulate kilometers since at the end of the Giro there’s a prize and a classification for the rider with the most kilometers in breakaways.

In the rest of the peloton we were enjoying a day of sunshine and peace and quiet. That’s right, Garmin and Columbia worked to control the escape and to be able to sprint for the win at the end. These circumstances gave the rest of us a chance to talk about the experience and what had gone on the day before.

Even so, in the end, like good professionals, there was tension and attacks that put excitement in the race. Although the sprinters had gotten over the third climb, a massive sprint wasn’t an option, since the team leaders were really stirring things up and they got to the finish with a few seconds gap.

That’s how I saw this stage and, like I already told you in the last article, we’re having a very distracting and exciting Giro, and it’s going to keep being like that, since a lot of very hard stages are left and in the next stages a lot of our teams will be waging war in order to fight for the stage wins and the general.

A hug for everybody and until next time!

Josep Jufré, cyclist with Astana

Originally appearing in BICICICLISMO