Key Takeaways: Giro d'Italia Stage 10

Breaking down how a routine post-rest day mountain stage was won & how it signaled a major strategic change in the GC battle

Valentin Paret-Peintre continued Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale’s dream season when he won out of an elite breakaway, formed after a brutal battle to make the front group during a furiously-paced opening to the stage after surging clear of Romain Bardet and mercilessly mowing down a dangling Jan Tratnik on the climb to Bocca della Selva in the Apennines mountain of southern Italy. In the GC group behind, the UAE team of race leader Tadej Pogačar finally appeared to transition into a defensive position by setting a steady pace that allowed the breakaway to build up a large enough gap to contest the stage win. This stalemate held until the final kilometers when Bahrain’s Antonio Tiberi attacked, and Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale increased the pace for a vicious Ben O’Connor sprint for the line, which appeared to tell us who to watch for the remainder of the race after he pulled clear an elite five-rider group, and slightly distanced the rest.

Stage 10 Top Five:
1) Valentin Paret-Peintre (Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale) +0
2) Romain Bardet (dsm-firmenich PostNL) +29
3) Jan Tratnik (Visma-LAB) +1’01
4) Andrea Bagioli (Lidl-Trek) +1’18
5) Aurélien Paret-Peintre (Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale) +1’25

Points Jersey Standings
1) Jonathan Milan (Lidl-Trek) 174pts
2) Kaden Groves (Alpecin-Deceuninck) 122pts
3) Tim Merlier (Soudal-QuickStep) 100pts

GC Top Ten:
1) Tadej Pogačar (UAE) +0
2) Dani Martínez (Bora) +2’40
3) Geraint Thomas (Ineos) +2’58
4) Ben O’Connor (Decathlon AG2R) +3’39
5) Cian Uijtdebroeks (Visma-LAB) +4’15
6) Antonio Tiberi (Bahrain) +4’27
7) Romain Bardet (dsm-firmenich PostNL) +4’57
8) Lorenzo Fortunato (Astana) +5’19
9) Filippo Zanna (Jayco-Alula) +5’23
10) Einer Rubio (Movistar) +5’28

Stage 10 Race Notebook

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142km-to-go: Simon Clarke and Quinten Hermans attack at the very beginning of the stage. Their early action allows them to build enough of an advantage to avoid the constant chase-catch-chase-catch cycle behind.

93.8km: Filippo Ganna briefly leads a strong group off in pursuit of the leaders, but the peloton is chasing hard close behind, which keeps any group from getting enough of a gap to ride clear.

90km: As they approach the intermediate sprint, Quinten Hermans smartly looks over his shoulder and sits up after seeing his teammate Kaden Groves sprinting in the peloton behind to get as many points as possible.

89.8km: Groves flies by a stalling Hermans to take six points for third place (behind the two remaining riders in the breakaway) and begins to close the gap to Jonathan Milan.

77km: While no large chase group can rip clear from the peloton on the opening 50 flat kilometers, a large group rides clear as soon as they hit the day's first major climb.

60.3km: Pogačar’s UAE team, in contrast to Stage 8, is more than happy to let this group contest the stage and settles into a steady pace that lets the gap to the breakaway blow out (Pogačar can be seen on potentially getting his post-race pizza order in over the race radio).

37km: At another intermediate sprint, taken by Filippo Fiorelli, Jan Tratnik smartly leverages the high pace and strung-out group created by the sprint point to attack and rides through the sprint point and past Fiorelli.

29.5km: Tratnik, an incredibly skilled and handy rider, rips clear of the breakaway. An elite group of four riders chases behind, but he is able to extend the gap to nearly a minute before reaching the final climb.

13km: On the lower slopes of the climb, with Tratnik over a minute ahead, Valentin Paret-Peintre attacks, with only Romain Bardet able to follow.

3.1km: Higher up on the climb, with Tratnik’s gap down to 37 seconds, Paret-Peintre attacks, and drops Bardet as he sets off in pursuit of the race win.

2.7km: After closing a fairly large gap extremely quickly, Paret-Peintre blows by Tratnik with a shocking speed differential. He rides clear for the first pro win of his career, while Bardet finishes 29 seconds behind to move up into 7th place overall.

1.8km-1.2km: When the GC group nears the end of the final climb, Antonio Tiberi’s Bahrain team increases the pace before Tiberi attacks himself. Pogačar doesn’t wait for his teammate Rafał Majka to close the gap and wastes no time jumping on Tiberi’s wheel.

400m: Just minutes after winning the stage, Decathlon has a rider get to the front of the GC group and increase the pace in advance of Ben O’Connor attacking/sprinting toward the finish line to shake loose any GC contenders that may be just barely holding on.

Finish: This sprint does just that, as O’Connor crosses the line with Dani Martínez, Geraint Thomas, Tadej Pogačar, and Einer Rubio on his wheel. Riders like Tiberi lose four seconds after being distanced just behind, with Cian Uijtdebroeks further back at 13 seconds.

Key Takeaways

1) Valentin Paret-Peintre & Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale Prove a Team Can Play Two Separate Games: The 23-year-old gets his first professional win after an incredibly well-timed and powerful ride up the final climb. The young Frenchman has the slight build and uneven riding style of a pure climber, but instead of just having top-tier climbing talent, he proved today that his ability to read a race is top-notch.

• After Jan Tratnik rode clear, Paret-Peintre did a great job working but not overextending himself in the chase group behind. Instead of panicking and trying to pull back Tratnik’s gap too early, he let Bardet work with him until he sensed he could use his superior explosiveness and climbing ability to rip clear for the stage win.

  • Interestingly, his older brother Aurélien was also in the breakaway, and, besides both brothers riding well at the Tour of Alps leading into this race, they now have matching Giro stage wins since Aurélien won a similar southern Italian mountain stage last year’s Giro.

• Despite having multiple riders in the breakaway contesting the win, Paret-Peintre’s Decathlon-AG2R team extended their 2024 dream season (they currently sit second in the UCI Points Team Rankings) while still being able to help O’Connor in the GC group behind, showing that if your team is strong enough, it is possible to balance stage wins and a GC campaign.

2) Tadej Pogačar & Team UAE’s Restraint: The race leader's team appeared to settle into the correct decision of finally riding conservatively and letting the breakaway contest the stage after a fast and furious opening hour of racing.

• While I initially assumed this smart decision was made by the UAE team, Pogačar’s post-race quotes clearly suggest that both he and his team were persuaded into this conservative tactic by the other teams, who went to UAE with complaints about Pogačar’s aggressive racing and their view that he is winning too often.

  • Outside of the absurdity of this request (after all, this is top-level professional sports, and if teams don’t want Pogačar to win, they should beat him), this makes no sense coming from the other teams since they are actually forcing Pogačar to ride in a way that actually increases his chance of winning the race.

    • If other teams and riders really want to defeat Pogačar, they should allow him and his UAE team to overextend themselves by pulling back and contesting every stage in the hope that this leads to his eventual collapse.

      • After all, this is how Pogačar has cracked in past Tours de France and how Simon Yates faltered at the tail-end of the 2018 Giro d’Italia, a race in which Yates’ Jayco team pulled back nearly every breakaway to contest as many stage wins as possible.

  • Whatever the reason behind UAE’s decision to race sensibly, Pogačar was clearly agitated after the stage (even going as far as to declare that Tiberi was his only worthy GC rival in the race since he was the only way with the bravery to attack) and is quickly tiring of the repetitive post-race questions about his dominance and ability to win at will.

    • With two weeks left in this Giro and an entire Tour de France remaining, Pogačar’s quickly slipping mask of patience could be something to watch as the season progresses.

3) Antonio Tiberi’s Failed Late Attack Will Likely Put a Chill on Aggressive GC Racing: The aggressive moves in the final few kilometers may have failed to distance Pogačar, but they likely held clues about what to expect in the podium battle to come.

• After Tiberi’s attack and O’Connor’s late sprint for the line, only four other riders could avoid losing GC time on what will likely be the most mild and straightforward mountain stage in this Giro.

  • This likely tells us that behind Pogačar, O’Connor, Thomas, Martínez, and Rubio will continue to put time into the others, while the riders who took time back today, Bardet and Zanna, along with the other fringe GC contenders, will slip further and further back as the race goes on.

    • The fact that Tiberi lost time after his attack won’t go unnoticed by the rest of the GC contenders and will likely inform their racing style in future mountain stages and deter anyone from attempting an attack from further out than a few hundred meters (after all, a podium place at the end of the race is worth more than post-race praise from Pogačar).

      • In short, outside of the time trials, instead of all-out, long-range attacks, I expect this Giro to turn into a game of small jabs off the steady, high pace of UAE and Ineos.

        • The fact that nearly every rider outside of O’Connor in the top ten is likely happy with their current position will only exacerbate this trend. O’Connor is only in fourth due to overextending himself on a climb back on Stage 2.

Stage 11 Preview

Tomorrow’s Stage 11 takes the peloton out of the Southern Apennines to the finish along the Adriatic Sea after a long 207 kilometers. The combination of an uphill start, followed by a tough Cat 3 climb, and a long, flat run down to the finish means we will likely see an intriguing battle between the early breakaway and the teams of the sprinters.

• While the stage would be the perfect terrain for a strong sprinter rider like Kaden Groves to slip into the early move in an attempt to win the stage with faster riders like Milan stuck behind, as well as cutting into Milan’s Points Jersey advantage, the fact that a few strong sprinters, one being Olav Kooij, dropped out during the rest day, means the remaining sprinters may like their chances in a straight-up bunch sprint.

• Prediction: Jonathan Milan wins the stage after holding off the other fastmen in a more power-based bunch sprint slowed down by the cumulative fatigue of the sprinters' legs.