Key Takeaways: Giro d'Italia Stage 16

Breaking down how an abridged mountain stage was won and exposed the fact that we are currently watching one of the sport's all-time greats

After spring snow forced the removal of an early high-mountain pass and significant shortening of the stage, Tadej Pogačar continued to stamp his authority on the 2024 Giro d’Italia by riding clear for a fifth stage win and extending his GC lead over seven minutes with Giulio Pellizzari and Dani Martínez rounding out the stage podium a few seconds behind.

While Pogačar and his UAE team seemed content to sit back on a rain-soaked day and let early-escapee Julian Alaphilippe win the ultra-short sub-three hour stage that tracked through the Adige valley before kicking up a long climb tracking the Schlern Massif into the stunning Val Gardena, Movistar had other plans and came forward to hold the gap through the majority of the stage. However, a late collapse from the Spanish team left Alaphilippe just a few seconds up the road and meant all Pogačar had to do was tap out a high pace to drop the peloton up the steep climb to Monte Pana to extend his GC lead and rack up yet another stage win.

Stage 16 Top Five:
1) Tadej Pogačar (UAE)
2) Giulio Pellizzari (VF Group-Bardiani CSF-Faizanè) +16
3) Dani Martínez (Bora-hansgrohe) +16
4) Christian Scaroni (Astana Qazaqstan) +31
5) Antonio Tiberi (Bahrain-Victorious) +33

Time Top Seven GC Contenders Gained(+)/Lost(-) On the Stage:
Pogačar +0
Martínez -22
Tiberi -43
Arensman -48
O’Connor -59
Thomas -59
Bardet -1’29

Current Top Ten GC Standings:
1) Tadej Pogačar (UAE) +0
2) Dani Martínez (Bora-hansgrohe) +7’18
3) Geraint Thomas (Ineos) +7’40
4) Ben O’Connor (Decathlon AG2R) +8’42
5) Antonio Tiberi (Bahrain) +10’09
6) Thymen Arensman (Ineos) +10’33
7) Romain Bardet (dsm-firmenich PostNL) +12’18
8) Filippo Zana (Jayco-AlUla) +12’43
9) Einer Rubio (Movistar) +13’09
10) Jan Hirt (Soudal-QuickStep) +14’07

Stage 16 Race Notebook

BTP is seamlessly following every twist and turn of the 2024 Giro d’Italia with the fantastic Tour Tracker app (iPhone/Android/Web)

118km-to-go-84.7km: After a long, drawn-out fight between the race organizer and the riders about whether they would have to ride through freezing temps and snow to climb, and descend, the Umbrail Pass, the riders are bussed directly to the Adige Valley at the base of the Stelvio for the start of the drastically-abridged stage, which rolls out unceremoniously from an Esso parking lot. With the race starting with 80 kilometers in a slightly downhill valley, it is extremely hard for a breakaway to get clear and build up a gap, but Julian Alaphilippe eventually forges clear with a small group.

53.7km: Back in the peloton, with UAE looking more than happy to let the breakaway contest the stage, Movistar gets to the front to keep the gap close, presumably so they can contest the stage win.

32.9km: As they begin the climb of the 24-kilometer-long Passo Pinei, Movistar is still driving the pace on the front, with Alaphilippe riding strong and holding the gap at a minute.

20.3km: With Movistar letting the pace go on and off through the slightly flatter section through the German-speaking slopes of the Schlern massif, Alaphilippe pulls the gap out to 1’25 and, confusingly, Pelayo Sánchez, whose Movistar team has been working all day, attacks.

16.1km: Sánchez, likely getting team orders through his earpiece, sits up and allows his pace-setting team to reel him in. Their disorganized work does seem to be paying off for their GC leader, Einer Rubio when Romain Bardet is dropped.

14.4km: However, Movistar, as if attempting to act out a play about the often ill-organized team, suddenly drops off the front after working all day; Sánchez attacks again and pulls out of a small group before dropping his chain and being sent back to the peloton.

13.3km: With Movistar off the front, the race gets slightly chaotic, which allows 20-year-old Giulio Pellizzari to bridge up to the breakaway and off in pursuit of Alaphilippe.

12.5km: With Movistar done pulling and no team willing to take up the pace, UAE almost reluctantly goes to the front. Note that Pogačar must feel good and that he can win since he can be seen joking around with other riders while top ten contenders are being dropped.

4.8km: Once up and over the Pinei and following the descent into Val Gardena, Rafał Majka gets to the front to increase the pace on the climb to the finish.

1.3km: As the climb goes from mild to absurdly steep pitches (11% average for the final 2km), Majka pulls off, and Pogačar chugs along. Behind, the GC group has been shredded, with Dani Martínez the only rider able to stay remotely close to Pogačar’s wheel. Geraint Thomas has been dropped earlier and is lagging behind his teammate Thymen Arensman, who has made the decision to mark Pogačar for his own GC chances instead of waiting for Thomas.

700m: Pogačar, riding a steady but hard pace (470w/7.2w/kg avg for the final climb), reels in the last man standing, Pellizzari. Pogačar doesn’t attack, but we can see that when Pellizzari tries to latch on, he is immediately in trouble and can't hold the wheel.

400m: As he steadily cruises to the finish line, Pogačar looks over his shoulder, almost as though he is considering waiting for Pellizzari to gift the win, but the presence of GC rival Martínez means no gifts will be given.

Finish: Pogačar crosses the finish line as he counts out his stage wins at this Giro (now five!), with Pellizzari just holding off Martínez for a massive runner-up. Martínez moves past Geraint Thomas and into second place in the GC.

Key Takeaways

1) It Is Time to Start Having ‘The Conversation’ About Tadej Pogačar: After extending his GC lead to over seven minutes and winning his 5th (and counting!)) stage at this Giro d’Italia (moving into 9th place for Giro stages amongst active riders despite this being his only career start at the race), making absolute mincemeat of a decent GC field and winning stages with an ease that modern cycling has only ever seen from dedicated stage hunters/sprinters, freelancing as one of the sport’s top one-day riders, all while looking like he is the favorite to win this summer’s Tour de France, and we may need to start considering that Pogačar may not just be the best rider currently, but one of the greatest champions of all-time.

• I realize this is a big claim to make, and, to be fair, I didn’t witness Eddy Merckx’s dominance, but if we take a snapshot of their careers after 5.5 pro seasons, Pogačar is shockingly somewhat matching the pace of Merckx in an era where the level of competition is higher and the total number of race days are lower.

  • And, outside of the raw statistics (he has won 12 races with just 26 total starts in 2024), the ease and effortlessness with which he racks up victories that rip the hearts out of his rivals and destroy their souls, all while having the demeanor of being just out on a local group ride, is without precedent.

    • While we’ve seen machine-like winners both in past and current cycling (e.g., Mathieu van der Poel, Remco Evenepoel), one can almost sense the intense preparation and training that goes into their victories. Meanwhile, Pogačar always seems like he just rolled up to the start line after seeing a group of riders and is just looking to shake out his legs a bit.

2) Movistar Showed Why UAE & Pogačar Won’t Be Pressed at This Giro: The irony of today’s stage giving Pogačar an even bigger buffer in the GC and adding to his Giro stage win tally is that even after the advantageous stage shortening/alternation, he and his UAE team showed no interest in contesting it until Movistar, who had controlled the breakaway all day, simply fell to pieces late in the stage and dropped the perfect stage-winning scenario into Pogačar’s lap.

• While we may never know exactly what Movistar was doing, the effort served to remind us that while we may hear endless chatter about how the UAE team is Pogačar’s weakness since they can’t possibly control difficult Giro stages (even if this isn’t true), there will almost always be a GC team willing to come forward to do a race-leading team’s bidding for them.

  • Despite this phenomenon being widespread, especially in modern racing with the increased importance of the UCI points system, pundits seem to forget this during Grand Tours when they forecast potential long-range GC raids that could pin a race leader back in the peloton with a hopelessly outmatched team.

  • Also, one of the reasons the rest of the GC teams are willing to come forward to attempt to move up from 9th to 6th is that UAE and Pogačar have so successfully opened and held the gap between them and second place and extinguished any hope of competing with them (the gap between second and tenth is still greater than first and second).

    • This dynamic is why it can pay off to come out swinging at a Grand Tour and to never drop your intensity by ‘gifting’ wins to GC rivals, since, if they see no hope in getting first, they will willingly race against each other for 2nd-10th, which gives the race leader nine additional teams to do their work for them.

3) Riders Who Attack Are Paying the Price on Subsequent Stages: There will be a lot of talk in the next few days about how GC riders outside the top three should attempt to get clear early in stages to take up massive chunks of time, but, today showed us exactly why this isn’t advisable at a race as consistently difficult as this Giro.

• For example, if you look at the riders who made big efforts on Sunday's Queen Stage, Romain Bardet and Nairo Quintana, both suffered today and performed well below their expected level, which I would attribute to them putting out more kilojoules than the others in the last stage.

  • This may be a slightly sobering thought, but the fact that even short and straightforward stages like today’s are now raced at such a high pace, it is becoming increasingly difficult to make massive efforts to get into the breakaway on one stage without losing time on another.

• While the others seem to be fading or struggling to maintain the same performance day after day, Dani Martínez has held steady and is looking better and better compared to Geraint Thomas as this race goes on.

4) This Stage Was Surprisingly Good: Despite the confusion and mess at the start of the stage, mainly due to race organizers being befuddled by the presence of snow at 2,500 meters (8,000+ ft) of elevation and the fact that asking riders to race through sub-zero temperatures and snow, even with an (idiotic) ‘neutralized’ three-minute clothes-changing period at the top of the climb, is a bad idea, the end product produced a great piece of sub-three-hour racing.

• While long stages with multiple mountain passes will always have their place in Grand Tour racing (See: Sunday’s Queen Stage), this short stage, which featured half flat terrain and half one really long climb with a steep finish, was an incredibly watchable race that created GC gaps and gave us a thrilling breakaway vs. Pogačar pursuit to the finish line.

• Also, one subplot of the day was the strong performances of young Italian riders, with three Italians under the age of 26 finishing inside the top five. The tiny VF Group-Bardiani CSF-Faizanè team going toe-to-toe to nearly win a hard mountain stage highlights just how much raw talent there is in the country’s long-struggling cycling scene.

Stage 17 Preview

Tomorrow’s Stage 17 takes the peloton directly up the high-altitude Passo Sella as they leave the picturesque ski hamlet of Sëlva in Val Gardena before a long descent to the base of the Passo Rolle before finishing with two trips up the Passo Brocon (from different sides).

• The steep final climb, with sustained gradients over 10%, means that if the GC group comes to the final climb together, Pogačar will undoubtedly win.

• But, with such a challenging climb out of the gate followed by a long descent, a strong breakaway will likely ride clear, and with UAE wanting to sit back and let Pogačar ride as though he is simply at a pre-Tour de France Dolomites training camp.

  • With every GC contender outside of Pogačar and Martínez looking like they were trying to limit losses today, it seems unlikely any team will want to work to pull them back just for Pogačar win and Martínez to add to his lead in the fight for the runner-up position (then again, that is precisely what happened today).

• Prediction: A large breakaway of strong climbers, including fringe top-ten GC contenders, rides clear on the Passo Sella, as UAE sets a steady tempo behind and holds the gap at a reasonable, but not too close distance that allows the breakaway to contest the win.

  • BTP’s Picks: Valentin Paret-Peintre to win at +650, Michael Storer to win at +11000