Translated material
Waiting for the mountains
The fun begins at the Giro d'Italia
The prestigious multi-day cycling race "Giro d' Italia" has come close to its equator. Yesterday the peloton rested, today the race participants will take to the start of the tenth, completely flat stage with a length of 212 km between the city of Ravenna and the town of Rossano Veneto. Tomorrow will mark the first of five planned mountain stages of the highest difficulty category, with cyclists having to finish at 1514 km after a steep and tiring 12 km climb. Most likely, serious changes in the general classification will take place on this day, and the Giro favorites will show how justified their claims to the final victory are.In nine days, the holder of the pink jersey of the overall leader changed six times. The winner of the prologue, Australian Brad Lancaster, at the finish of the first stage gave this attire to the Olympic champion of Athens, Italian Paolo Bettini, a recognized master of one-day racing. Then the leadership passed to another representative of the Green Continent, sprinter Robbie McEwan, after which Bettini, nicknamed the Cricket, twice returned and twice lost the coveted jersey. Now the first place is occupied by the Italian Danilo Di Luca from the Liquigas Bianchi team, who is having the best season of his career. Before the rest day, a significant event occurred - the stage was finally won by the leader of the season in the number of victories in races on the international calendar, Alessandro Petacchi (Fassa Bortolo), who distinguished himself nine times at the last Giro.
29-year-old Di Luca has been a professional since 1998, and things have never been so successful for him. Di Luca has won three Pro Tour events this year - the five-day Tour of the Basque Country and the classic races Flèche Wallonne and Amstel Gold Race. At the stages of the current Giro, Di Luca has already finished first twice, and his leadership was not shaken even by the 45-kilometer time trial, where the American David Zabriskie showed the best time, and one of the favorites of the stage race, Italian Ivan Basso, reduced the gap in the overall standings from the winner of the pink T-shirts for 1 min. 18 sec. Now Basso is in second position in the general classification with a deficit of only nine seconds, which is not difficult to win back on the mountain stages.
Di Luca himself speaks very cautiously about his prospects: “In the third week I may not have enough physical strength.” In the meantime, the Italian is painstakingly collecting points in the existing “Pro Tour” classification for the first year, which replaced the classification of the International Cycling Union (UCI), which is rather complex in its scoring system. For getting into the top three winners at the Giro stage, depending on the place taken, three, two or one points are awarded, which can hardly be called fair. Success in a classic one-day event is worth 50 or 40 points. It is due to the already mentioned victories on the roads of Holland and Belgium that Di Luca confidently leads the Pro Tour standings.
Experts are unanimous in their predictions: the Giro winner should be either Basso from the Danish cycling group CSC, or last year’s winner Damiano Cunego from the Italian Lampre. It is not difficult to determine who is the leading rider of each team in cycling - the number of this participant ends with one. Among the riders from the countries of the former USSR, only Sergei Gonchar (Domina Vacanze) received this honor. A year ago, Ukrainian road racers had a great run at the Giro - Gonchar came second in the overall standings, and his compatriot Yaroslav Popovich finished in fifth place. Last Sunday, Vladimir Karpets (Spanish Il Balears) looked decent at the time trial. He showed the sixth time, losing a little more than a minute to Zabriskie, and in the general classification the Russian is now 11th - minus 2 minutes. 24 sec. from Di Luca.
The next Balearic loses to Karpets for about six minutes, and the current situation obliges the team in the mountains to work for Vladimir. The best young rider of the 2004 Tour de France is perhaps the most unusual climber in the world peloton. Typically, cyclists of this specialization look miniature and are short in stature, but Karpets, with his 190 cm, is in no way inferior to the “kids” on steep climbs. As for the other Russians, Evgeny Petrov is still working in the covering group of his eminent teammates Damiano Cunego and Gilberto Simoni, and Alexander Kolobnev has the best time among the representatives of the Dutch Rabobank, although he is five minutes behind Di Luca.
The Giro prize fund is 1.15 million euros. The overall winner will receive 264 thousand, of which 164 thousand are paid by the USI, and the rest of the money is paid by the race organizers. There are also many different bonuses for victories at individual stages (16 thousand euros each), for success in various classifications - the most active and most aggressive racer, the best miner, for championship at intermediate finishes. Formally, in only three categories, prize money is paid to the team, but the following order has long been established in the peloton: the main earnings of riders are the amounts of their personal contracts, all individual awards received at races are added to a common basket, and the management of professional cycling groups decides how and for what spend this money.