Battling Romain Bardet fights to the line on Oropa summit finish

After Saturday’s opening stage, the Giro d’Italia headed to even more climbs on Sunday and a summit finish to the Santuario di Oropa; where Romain Bardet battled to the line once more.

Taking stock after stage one, the team rallied around Bardet once more and kept him safe throughout the day, avoiding several nervous spills within the bunch. Coming into the finale Bardet was well positioned by Gijs Leemreize, Chris Hamilton and Kevin Vermaerke, and was riding mid-pack within the GC group as it slowly thinned down on the ascent of Oropa. At around six kilometres to go the pace increased dramatically before Pogacar made his stage-winning move at five kilometres remaining. This saw the GC group blow to pieces with Bardet using his experience to ride at his own pace, once again limiting the losses on the climb, fighting all the way to the finish on Oropa.

After the stage Bardet reflected: “It was a tough day for me today. The guys looked after me well onto the climb and I just gave what I had until the line. I hope to recover and feel 100 percent over the next days again and improve from there for the rest of the race. We will keep fighting.”

Team dsm-firmenich PostNL coach Matt Winston added: “We built a little bit on yesterday. We saw Romain was able to hold the leader’s group for longer today and bounce back a bit from yesterday. There is still a long way to go in this bike race so we will keep fighting and looking for our opportunities in those mountain and hill stages. In the next few days though we will focus on the sprint finales and look for our chances there.”