For cycling fans, May marks the arrival of the first two grand tours of the season: the Tour de Yorkshire and the Giro d’Italia.
It was a polarised race this year. The first week and a half had no hills in it. The route was made up of flat sprinter stage after sprinter stage. Then it went uphill and almost never stopped going uphill. It also had three time trials.
John thought his race was over when Dumoulin had to abandon early on. However, an amazing ride by Masnada kept him competitive for the entire race. Bogdan took the early lead scoring big points with Viviani. Viviani never won any stages, but as the only sprinter any of us had brought, some high-placed finishes did the job. Like many of the sprinters, though, Viviani then went home as soon as the race went uphill.
Team Chris was not without its troubles, either. López continued to have bad luck, including getting knocked off his bike by a spectator. The UCI concluded that the punch he threw at the guy was a “human reaction” and cleared him of any wrongdoing.
Mostly, it was plain-sailing though, as Carapaz spun to victory, becoming the first Ecuadorian to win a grand tour. It was so important in Equador that the government paid for the final stage to be moved from paid satellite TV onto a free-to-air channel.
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Tags: cycling, fantasy cycling
This entry was posted on Thursday, June 13th, 2019 at 11:00 am and is filed under Distractions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.