The Giro d’Italia starts tomorrow and i’m already getting itchy and nervous like an addict waiting for the crack to arrive, COMEONALLREADYLET’SGETGOIN’!
I love the Giro. The first I read about it involved a dude called Andy Hampsten and a stage that became an absolute classic where grown men, proper hard riders, sheltered behind parked cars in a blizzard and cried.
The love affair started then and hasn’t abated since, and when I read the story of Gino Bartali saving Jewish people and also the country from civil war, well, I fell a little harder then too.
But back to this year, 2022, and looks like I’m not the only one getting excited. One young Dutchman is chomping at the bit as he has his eyes on taking a Pink Jersey home, to match the Yellow one he won at last year’s Tour de France, and that man is Matthieu Van Der Poel.
Not content with smashing the peloton in one day races and taking everyone’s breath away with his sublime ride on Stage 2 last year in France, he is now targeting the famous Maglia Rosa, the leader’s jersey at the Giro
How do we know? Well, he’s been posting his training rides and it is clear that he has been working to increase his explosive power as well as his time trialing power.
Last Friday at a training camp in Spain, his data shows him doing multiple hill intervals for a minute up a climb that has a similar gradient to the opening stage, which is a 195 km ride from Budapest to Visegrád.
If he does win it there, it seems he’d like to hold it, because Stage 2 is a 9.2km, and he’s been getting to know his TT bike, riding for an hour on Sunday at what for him looks a not too hard 38.8km/hr.
Look out for the VDP Show coming to a tv screen near you very soon!
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