The Pain and the Glory: The Official Team Sky Diary of the Giro Campaign and Tour Victory. Chris Froome

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       STAGE 3

      Morale was high for the first foray into medium mountains with Team Sky’s Giro débutant still incredulous that he would be the one wearing the iconic maglia rosa. Puccio had gone to sleep with the jersey on the seat next to his bed, pinned up with his race numbers ready for the next stage. At the morning meeting in a hotel bedroom, he was the only one not wearing a jersey. The pink pile of fabric remained bundled by his side until the others left the room and he enjoyed the private moment of pulling it on over his head, tweaking the fit and admiring himself in the mirror. Downstairs in the lobby, his father, girlfriend and best friends were waiting to surprise him; they had set off at 4am and driven six hours to make his day even more special. ‘It is a great honour to wear the maglia rosa,’ he said. ‘As this is my first experience in the Giro, it took time to understand all this was reality and not a dream.’

      ‘It was a nice day for “Baby Puccio”,’ said Knees. ‘The Gazzetta dello Sport called him that in their report and I took it up and ran with it. He hadn’t dreamed he’d be in pink, and now he had a pink helmet, pink saddle and pink grip on his handle bars!’ The tifosi in Sorrento town centre were buzzing. In a race that boasted a strong international field, the race leader’s jersey was on the back of an Italian for the first time in 2013. Standing out in that distinctive pink – even above the assembled mass of dayglo team kits and helmets – Puccio was loving every minute of the experience, receiving congratulations from riders, fielding banter from fellow Italians, waiting under the rose-tinged shade provided by an official umbrella girl for the signal to roll off. The great thing for Wiggins and the GC contenders – Nibali, Cadel Evans and defending champion Ryder Hesjedal – was that the home media had an alternative focus away from the intense speculation about their rivalry and form.

      Looking at the course, analysing its demands and assessing the attributes required for a serious campaign are an exercise all the teams undertake as soon as the race route is published. The 2013 Giro d’Italia had its traditional quotient of massive mountains – ‘They tend to find new super-steep climbs each year,’ notes senior sports director Marcus Ljungqvist – but it also had a fair amount of time trialling. This would normally play into the hands of Wiggins, but Nibali, third behind Wiggins and Chris Froome in the 2012 Tour de France, was super-motivated to take the challenge to the British knight.

      Riding on home soil, for a new team, Astana – which had built itself around its lead rider’s ambitions – Nibali had worked doggedly at improving his time-trialling performance so that he could consolidate the advantages his steely descending prowess would doubtless win him. He arrived in Naples on tremendous form, having won the Tirreno–Adriatico (holding off Froome in the final time trial) and the Giro del Trentino, and had sent the odd psychological salvo in Wiggins’s direction. There was no doubt he meant business.

      Cadel Evans, ultra-competitive in spirit but recovering from a virus, came in with only five weeks of dedicated training compared with other contenders’ six months or so and admitted his entry was ‘a bit of an experiment’. Race form was also a question mark over Ryder Hesjedal, as was the amount of time trialling (not his speciality) in this edition of the Giro. Samuel Sánchez’s legendary appetite for courageous descending put him in the mix even at the age of 35. But pre-Tour speculation evaporated in the edginess of the third day. The Giro had not yet developed a rhythm. Teams had not shown their cards. It wasn’t clear who had good legs. It was all about the here and now, with everyone trying to stay safe.

      An early seven-man breakaway led the peloton by more than 6 minutes when Team Sky, Katusha and Omega Pharma-Quick Step took turns to up the tempo at the front. Wiggins, Nibali and Hesjedal were visible in the lead group. Hesjedal twice attacked, but happily slotted back into the pack, before Luca Paolini – leaving the big guns to stalk and unnerve each other with surprise bursts and dummy moves – escaped with a late attack on the descent.

      It was a day bookended by two Italian Giro debutants in pink as Baby Puccio surrendered the jersey to his compatriot, 36-year-old Paolini. ‘We knew there would be a lot of teams going for it at the end and that’s how it played out,’ said Ljungqvist. ‘It was always going to be a tough finale. We set a tempo at the front, and Xabi and Danny did a great job to control things there with the breakaway up the road. Today was really nice for Puccio but now we’re back to looking after Brad and making sure we’re ready for the hard days coming up.’

       Skip photographs

       STAGE 4

      The Giro always throws in a couple of hard stages early on, and the 246km stage from Policastro Bussentino down the Mediterranean coast to Serra San Bruno was a trademark shocker. As legs were beginning to long for the masseur’s attention on the second-longest stage of the race, up loomed the Category-3 climb of Vibo Valentia, followed by the Category-2 challenge of Croce Ferrata СКАЧАТЬ