With four riders, the representation of Colombia in the Giro d’Italia hopes to be noticed starting this Saturday.
To aspire to be on the podium at the end of the three-week competition, the card is Rigoberto Urán, while Fernando Gaviria appears as well as Einer Rubio to reap stage victories.
The fourth beetle in the race is Santiago Buitrago, a young promise who may well surprise and seek to be in the Top 5.
Remco Evenepoel and Primoz Roglic start as great favorites of the Giro d’Italia, which will begin on Saturday with an already decisive individual time trial, with the Ineos team as judge and judge, and with the covid-19 threatening.
The Belgian and the Slovenian are both looking for a first victory in the Giro, a deliciously unpredictable and cruel race with which they have scores to settle in the three weeks before the end against the Colosseum in Rome.
Evenepoel, 23, has only participated once, in 2021, in his return after his serious fall due to a crash in the Lombardy Tour. In that edition he went from more to less, before giving up on the morning of the 18th stage.
This Saturday, the world champion, current winner of the Tour of Spain, will face, with a Soudal-Quick Step team fully at his service and with a preparation calibrated to the millimeter, the second phase of his plan, which involves winning all three great stage races.
Roglic, 33 years old and three times crowned in the Vuelta, already knows what it is like to climb on the Giro podium (3rd in 2019).
But the leader of the Jumbo-Visma, who claims to “age like good wine”, in turn aspires to expand his record, although he does not face the race in the best conditions. Up to three of his colleagues have had to be replaced after testing positive for covid.
To this was added this Friday a fourth loss at the last minute, that of the Slovenian Jan Tretnik, who fell in training and injured a knee. He too had to be replaced.
The resurgence of the covid-19 places the sword of Damocles over the peloton, where the masks are once again present, although the organizers have not provided special measures for the moment.
Evenepoel and Roglic have already dueled this season in the Tour of Catalonia. The Slovenian prevailed on points, just six seconds ahead of Evenepoel overall.
In the Giro, their duel starts strong, with an opening 19.6km time trial on Saturday on a cycle track along the Adriatic coast, between Fossacesia Marina and Ortona, where they will try to open up the first differences, in a stage for which specialists such as the Italian Filippo Ganna and the Swiss Stefan Küng start as favourites.
Three time trials are on the program for this 106th edition for a total of 70.6 km. That data ended up convincing Evenepoel, an excellent roller, to opt for the Giro instead of the Tour de France this year.
And Roglic, three years after losing the Tour de France, which Tadej Pogacar won, in a final time trial on the Planche des Belles Filles, dreams of settling accounts with his past in the penultimate stage of this Giro: a time trial with a climb terrible to Mount Lussari, not far from the border with Slovenia, (7.3 km at 12.1% average gradient with a peak at 22%).
But the Giro is a particularly indecisive race and one that is prone to overturning the script, with often variable weather, with high temperatures one day and snow storms the next.
As usual, the third week is decisive, with the main mountain stages and six ports above 2,000 meters.
There is one team in particular that hopes to break the forecasts: Ineos, which again will have several tricks depending on the circumstances with Geraint Thomas, the winner of the 2018 Tour de France, Tao Geoghegan Hart, the only former winner of the Giro (in 2020). at the start, Thymen Arensman and the Frenchman Pavel Sivakov.
Among the other candidates for the general are Joao Almeida (UAE), Jack Haig (Bahrain), Alexandr Vlasov (Bora) and Thibaut Pinot (Groupama-FDJ)./ENS-AFP