May 21, 2006
Basso Domination
This week’s action in the Giro D’Italia has been about mostly Ivan Basso and a little bit about Jan Ullrich.
Ivan Basso is dominating the Giro to a degree that nobody outside of the CSC team expected. Last year we had a glimpse of the climbing ability and developing TT skills before a severe stomach bug took Basso out of contention. This year Basso has turned his skills up a notch. His time trialing finesse is much improved where he was able to overhaul most of his competition in the long and flat 50km Pontedera TT. Basso has mastered the discipline of racing against the clock, but it seems like he can still improve.
Basso’s climbing skills have matured to the level of a Lance Armstrong. No longer is the Italian simply following wheels, he is setting the pace with his CSC team and then blasting away the competition as if he just stole the US Postal Service playbook. Take a few Spanish climbers, set a very fast pace, watch your rivals flap around like fish trying to follow, crush to a pulp.
CSC had Questa and Sastre pushing the pace to a level where some frightful climbers were left looking human. The threats from Cunego and Rujano appeared breifly in the form of wet noodle attacks. They were quickly reeled in by Basso and left by the side of the road to wonder what hit them.
In the La Thuile stage, Rujano was distraught (or who knows what is up with him) enough where he dropped out of the Giro with only 3km left in today’s stage. Damiano Cunego has been overhauled so badly by Basso and crew that he is left in a daze wondering just what is going on. He can’t blame mononucleosis for his poor performance. The Lampre team that was filled with climbing specialist has been nonexistent in mountain stages. The man making the most appearances up front has been Marzo Bruseghin who is more of a passista.
Gilberto Simoni is up near the front as usual, but he owes much of that to La Thuile stage winner and now lightest man in the Giro at 50kg Leonardo Piepoli.
The climbing specialist can take solace in the fact that the “real” climbing has not begun. There are four stages in the final week of the Giro that can really turn the General Classicification upside down. The problem for Simoni and others is that they did not look very strong against Basso in the climbs. In fact the only weakness that Basso has show in the past two weeks was a cautious descent to La Thuile, where he let Piepoli go by around 40 seconds.
Rumor was that his wheels were the lighter climbing variety and with the slick roads, Basso did not want to risk everything for a few more seconds.