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Columbia-Highroad wins Giro's team time trial; Cavendish dons the first leader's jersey.
Garmin-Slipstream is second and Astana third on the Venetian island of Lido
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Mark Cavendish was cool as a cat as he watched team after team fall short of besting Columbia-Highroad on the flat 20.5km course in Lido di Venezia.
The Cannonball had plenty of time to consider he was about to become the first British rider to wear the maglia rosa.
Columbia started first among 22 teams and he had to wait nearly two hours to secure the victory until Giro rookie Lance Armstrong led final-team Astana across the line 13 seconds short.
“This jersey really isn’t mine. It belongs to everyone on the team,” Cavendish said. “We knew we had the team to win. We didn’t do a lot of training, like other teams do. We know each other well and we just fell in and did their job.”
2009 Giro d'Italia
- Stage 1: Lido di Venezia team time trial
- 20.5km (12.7 miles)
- Stage winning team: Columbia-Highroad in 21:50
- Stage winner's average speed: 35.0 mph (56.514 kph)
- GC leader: Mark Cavendish
- Best young rider: Cavendish
- Up next: Stage 2
- Sunday's stage from Jesolo to Trieste is 156km (97 miles) is one for the sprinters and those chasing the leader's jersey. The route includes one categorized climb, where the Giro's first KOM jersey will be won. The route concludes with three laps on an 11km circuit.
Columbia stopped the clock in 21 minutes, 50 seconds with all nine riders coming through together to fend off defending champion Garmin-Slipstream by six seconds. Astana slotted into third at 13 seconds off the pace.
Cavendish seemed unimpressed about his history-making maglia rosa. No other British rider has worn the pink tunic, with Robert Millar - finishing second at 3:40 down to Stephen Roche in the 1987 Giro - perhaps coming closest.
“I cannot take credit for this. The team won this today,” he said. “I will feel more individual satisfaction if I can win a stage tomorrow and then I can claim it more so as my own.”
The pink jersey is just the latest accolade for Cavendish, who’s charging from one highlight to another throughout his eight-win season so far Italy is obviously treating him nice this year, with his dramatic Milan-San Remo victory less than eight weeks ago.
Columbia DS Ralf Aldag said it was the team plan to put Cavendish first across the line.
With two sprint-friendly stages on tap, having Cavendish in pink will give the team the most mileage out of the victory. The team will ride to defend the jersey until the Giro quickly turns into the Dolomites on Tuesday.
“It’s complicated to finish with the entire team together, but we wanted to do it,” Aldag said. “You have to have super team spirit to finish with all the riders together.”
TTT dogfight
The pancake flat, out-and-back course on the narrow Lido di Venezia island was a glamorous setting for the opening salve of the centennial celebration of Italy’s greatest race.
Within eyeshot of glimmering Venice shining on the horizon, fans piled into ferries to witness the tightly fought team time trial battle. Temperatures were in the upper 70s, ideal weather for the Giro opener.
Pundits picking a showdown between Garmin and Columbia weren’t let down.
The teams started in quick succession, with Columbia out of the boxes first, followed by Garmin-Slipstream as the fourth team out.
Garmin was five seconds off the pace at the first time check at 6.5km and couldn’t recover the lost ground despite posting the fastest splits after making the turn around, taking back three seconds as the course turned against a moderate breeze that blew against the earliest starters.
Danny Pate and David Millar set the pace early and tailed off, leaving a finishing quintet of Dave Zabriskie, Tom Danielson, Tyler Farrar, Christian Vande Velde and Bradley Wiggins.
Last year, the team took an emotional six-second victory to the then CSC team to make Vande Velde the first American pink jersey since Andy Hampsten. This year, the team fell six seconds short of victory.
“From the start, this team has been about perfecting the process. That’s what we tried to do, the result is what it is,” said Garmin sport director Jonathan Vaughters. “The guys rode great. They were just six seconds slower to the No. 1 team in the world.”
On Friday, Cavendish started a good, old-fashioned “polemica” when he openly criticized Garmin-Slipstream’s singular obsession with the team time trial. Cavendish seemed to misconstrue comments from the team that the season starts with the Giro’s team time trial.
On Saturday, Cavendish cooled his comments in a post-victory press conference, saying he respected Garmin’s riders.
Vaughters, meanwhile, insisted the team plans on fighting all the way to Rome when the Giro ends May 31, pointing out that Tyler Farrar will be the team’s man in the sprints and that riders such as Vande Velde and Danielson expect to do well in the GC.
GC shakeout
Astana rode well to third at 13 seconds back to give its top GC hope, Levi Leipheimer, a small advantage to such riders as Ivan Basso (Liquigas – 8th at 40 seconds back) and Carlos Sastre (Cervélo – 11th at 49 seconds slower).
Astana started last and race organizers were hoping for the miracle finish to put Armstrong into the maglia rosa, but it wasn’t meant to be.
“We know that we have a strong team, we have good rider in Levi who can be a contender in the overall,” Armstrong said. “I think we’re pleased with that, considering the amount of preparation we put into it, which was minimal.”
Riding surprisingly well was 2007 Giro champ Danilo Di Luca’s LPR team, which stopped the clock in fourth in 22:12, just 22 seconds off the pace.
Basso’s Liquigas crew did the best it could against the specialists and the 2006 Giro champion seemed happy enough with the result.
“Today our goal was to be do as well as possible and I think we can be satisfied. You have to remember that Columbia is a specialist in time trialing, so in respect to the others on GC, I am content,” Basso said. “We have a team here to fight for three weeks, so things went today as well as expected. We're just in the first day of a three-week fight.”
That was the sentiment among most of the GC favorites.
Defending Tour champ Carlos Sastre also expressed satisfaction: “The team did a good job. This is a young team here, with a lot of young riders and people riding their first grand tour,” Sastre said. “We maintained a good rhythm throughout the time trial and the time we lost to teams such as Liquigas, Rabobank and Lampre was minimal.”
The course didn’t produce major differences between the Italians, with Damiano Cunego’s Lampre crew riding to ninth at 42 seconds slower.
The biggest losers (at least in terms of time forfeited) were two-time winner Gilberto Simoni’s Diquigiovanni squad (16th at 1:06 back) and No. 1 bib Stefano Garzelli’s Acqua e Sapone (19th at 1:21 back).
Tomorrow’s stageThe 93rd Giro continues Sunday with the 156km second stage from Jesolo to Trieste. The relatively short and straight-forward route should deliver the Giro’s first sprint finish. Columbia-Highroad and LPR will be working together to control any breakaways to set up the mass gallop going into the historic city of Trieste, located on a narrow sliver of Italy that juts into the Balkans.
The route hugs the pancake flat coastline until hitting a short but steep climb three times on a finishing circuit around Trieste that features the Giro’s first King of the Mountain points (and jersey). The hill at Montebello is almost 1.8km long and features ramps as steep as 7 percent.
The final passage comes 4.4km from the line, so it’s sure to produce some attacks from the likes of Filippo Pozzato (Katusha) and others hoping to spring free of the sprinters.
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- Armstrong tickled pink at Giro
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