Men's Road Cycling UCI World Tour 2023 (Giro d'Italia)

[heywoodu 16,017]

2 minutes ago, Federer91 said:

Looking at this year's startlist, i can't remember a recent Giro with so few, clear GC leaders. We have the big 2 Roglic and Evenepoel, then another 2-3 that are a few steps below them and then a bunch of question marks in what their role will be.

At least with Roglic and Evenepoel, two of the four big GC riders of this moment are present, which - if they don't run into trouble - at least increases the chance of not having another winner like Jai Hindley of all places ahead of some have-beens  

 

Nothing against Hindley, but yeah...that's a bit of an outlier in the list of recent GC winners (although not more so than Geoghegan Hart arguably).

[dodge 1,040]

2020 was clearly the biggest freak result. The race overlapped with the Vuelta

 

To be fair to Hindley, he was second in that 2020 race, so his win in 2022 had at least some previous form.
 

Last Carapaz was a huge favourite with Almeida and maybe Simon Yates behind him. 2 of them didn’t finish the race but I wouldn’t say any giro field has been stacked by big GC contenders in recent years 

 

This year it has two genuine top class riders but the likes of Almeida, Vlasov, Carthy, Geoghegan Hart, Thomas (3rd in TDF last year) are all very, very good

 

[heywoodu 16,017]

Evenepoel is destroying this whole thing already, surprise surprise  

[frantic13poland 55]

Stage 2

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FINAL KILOMETRES

[heywoodu 16,017]

As expected with a stage like this: absolutely nothing happening until the last few kilometers. And then a big crash, with some riders being hit fairly hard and a lady in the audience making a nasty fall as well. Hopefully everyone is alright.

[frantic13poland 55]

Stage 3