A time trial to reset the overall classification.
The Route: a 42km time trial. There’s not much to describe beyond the map and profile you can already see above. The distance is notable, longer than the Worlds this year.
There is 16km to out on one road and then back on the same road towards the start, this is a substantial part of the course. A lot of this portion is narrow and so riders will get blasts of air from team cars going in the other direction. This happens again near the finish in Massa but this time on much wider roads.
The Contenders: Filippo Ganna (Netcompany-Ineos) is the specialist. His win rate in time trials had dipped in recent years but he’s picked up again. Plus there’s nobody at the Giro this time who looks likely to beat him, no Evenepoel, Pogačar or Ayuso if there were they’d want a hillier course; there’s no Tarling either. Magnus Sheffield and Thymen Arensman (Netcompany-Ineos) could be close.
If there was to be an upset then it could be Alec Segaert (Bahrain) who is due a breakthrough TT win and still a work-in-progress in this domain.
Derek Gee-West (Lidl-Trek), Niklas Larsen (Unibet), Rémi Cavagna (Groupama-FDJ) and maybe Lorenzo Milesi and Ivan Romeo (Movistar) could surprise too if they have a great day but the combination of the flat course and the distance suits Ganna so well.
Jonas Vingegaard (Visma-LAB) is another contender but he too would like hillier course if he wanted to win the stage. Instead today’s flat course is perfect for him in a different way as he has a relative advantage against his GC rivals. The likes of Gall, Hindley et al should flounder compared to the Dane. This is an interesting test for him as he’s been 9th in the Vuelta TT last year and 13th in the Tour’s Caen TT, below par each time. Now he seems sharper in terms of form so it’ll be interesting to see how much time he gains on rivals. Victor Campenaerts has been a TT specialist and could be tempted to try but again it’s hard to see him topping Ganna, plus in his role as a helper he may well take today as a rest day and cruise around to better help Vingegaard.
Weather: rain early in the morning but there should be dry roads for all, helped in part by a 15-20km/h onshore breeze. 18°C.
TV: the first rider is of at 1.15pm and the last should finish around 5.15pm CEST. Ganna starts at 2.20pm, Segaert 20 minute later.
Postcard from Forte dei Marmi
One of the locals today is Oleg Tinkov. The Russian billionaire started out as a cyclist. When travelling to race in another Soviet state he came across someone selling denim jeans in a market stall, then a rarity and a rebellious symbol of western consumer freedom. Tinkov wanted to buy all the four pairs and the seller noted his desperation and hiked the price from 35 to 50 roubles each. Tinkov handed over 200 roubles, took them home to Saint Petersburg… and sold them for 200 each.
This taste of arbitrage saw him do the same with consumer electronics and soon he had a chain of stores called Technoshock selling CD players and Walkmans, then he sold the whole business. He then went into dumpling production, buying foreign machinery to produce industrial pelemeni for middle-class Russians who’d become too busy to cook, and sold this business to Roman Abramovitch.
Next was a brewery called Tinkoff, a play on his name but also a nostalgic pre-Soviet royalist past and he soon sold this for €200m to Belgian brewery giant Inbev. He founded an online bank and credit card company next. His trick was to spot businesses that worked well in the US and Europe, import the concept and launch it with big publicity, then later sell it to a ready buyer.
He was sometimes portrayed as an oligarch because he was a Russian billionaire, but despite the overlap these are not the same things. Instead Tinkov became famous as the outsider, the consumer champion even. He’d often appear in adverts for his own businesses.
His fame had some wondering if he’d go into politics. “Political ambitions? What is this? It is terrible. You do not need this. I shit on politics” he wisely replied. Instead he stayed in business but also went into cycling, starting with the Continental level Tinkoff Restaurants team which became Tinkoff Credit Systems and when he sold this to genuine oligarch Igor Makarov it became the Katusha team.
Tinkov ploughed his money to the Saxo team and in turn took it over, making the Tinkoff team the superteam of the 2010s with Peter Sagan and Alberto Contador. He was a mega fan, running his own team like you might do with a Velogames fantasy account. But also going to events, often riding the route ahead of the race, including pulling over in time to have a soigneur douse him with water from the team car while he took a shower beside the road.
He left the sport after having his fun, also dogged by a big tax case in the US and a leukaemia diagnosis. He’d wanted to shake up the sport and, egged on by others, was a big advocate of revenue sharing only to discover there were few revenues to share.
He’s been against President Putin. He branded the full invasion of Ukraine as “crazy” in an Instagram post. The Russian authorities responded within days with an offer to take over his Russian credit business. “I couldn’t discuss the price,” Tinkov told the New York Times. “It was like a hostage – you take what you are offered. I couldn’t negotiate.”
Probably still a billionaire, he lives and rides in Forte dei Marmi – at the second time check – and might appear today. He’ll certainly know the course well.