Vincenzo Nibali: Only winning counts at the Giro d'Italia
Vin-cen-zo! Vin-cen-zo! A wall of sound followed Vincenzo Nibali all along the lakefront in Como, but he paid it little heed as he soft-pedalled his way from the makeshift RAI television studio near the finish line to the Bahrain-Merida team bus after stage 15 of the Giro d’Italia. Tifosi craned across roadside barriers for a better view, hollering their approval as he rode past, while Nibali casually held court with a group of journalists who jogged alongside him.
During the fraught finale kilometres of the stage, Nibali had proved equally adept at blocking out ambient noise. After flinging himself into the attack on the final climb of Civiglio with a little over 10km remaining, he had pulled out his radio earpiece in order to focus firmly on the task in hand.
On the sinuous descent that followed, teammate Domenico Pozzovivo radioed to relay the news that chief rival Primoz Roglic (Jumbo-Visma) had crashed in the chasing group, but Nibali had eyes only for the road ahead, as he powered towards the finish in the company of maglia rosa Richard Carapaz (Movistar), Hugh Carthy (EF Education First) and Simon Yates (Mitchelton-Scott).
Nibali crossed the line in 6th place on the stage, 11 seconds down on winner and earlier escapee Dario Cataldo (Astana), but 25 ahead of the chasers and 40 clear of the unfortunate Roglic. In the overall standings, Nibali is now third overall, 1:47 down on Carapaz, while his deficit on Roglic has been cut to just a minute.
“I didn’t hear anything about Roglic during the race as I’d taken out my earpiece in the finale because I was just focused on my attack in the final 10km,” Nibali said. “I didn’t want distractions or anything else. I didn’t know anything about it, I only heard about it at the finish.”
After limiting his losses to Roglic better than most in the San Marino time trial, Nibali had proceeded to pick up only a desultory 4 seconds in time bonuses on the Slovenian in the Giro’s first three days in the high mountains, during which the two principal favourites had marked one another tightly.
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