procycling

What a stage. A pity for Roglic but so many contenders for the overall victory.

4^th^ crash for Roglitch in less than 10 days. I don't suppose this one was especially hard (I didn't see it), but the accumulation made him throw the towel.

There was basically no group in the last climb. Almost everyone was climbing alone or in temporary groups of 2 or 3. In fact that's not even the first time on this Giro, that the race goes like this. Despite the supposed power/domination of the UAE team, they have mostly appeared to lead by applying fake pacing when nobody else wanted to lead; real pulling was most of the time done by Trek, Ineos, EF and a couple of other teams depending on the stage.

It is much, much more open that it was expected to be. Of course, crashes played a rather important role in this, unfortunately.

Pellizzari could show what he is capable of!

Contrarily to him, Del Toro looked uneasy with his new role. Whereas he was shining the previous week when he could jump upon anyone, without any worry about negative consequences as he wasn't his team's official leader (if he blew up / failed at catching up with some attacker, nobody would have blamed him), now that he must be more careful, it gets more difficult.

And after 15 stages without an Italian victory, such a nice hat trick 🇮🇹

Another kind of trick was played by French riders: the first one came 32^nd^ after over 13 minutes. Sigh...

I see that Piganzolli (🇮🇹 Polti) came 18^th^ at 5 minutes. That's not bad, especially considering that 5 of the guys ahead of him were in the breakaway: that's (sort of) an equivalent of a 13^th^ place from the leaders' group.