Sunday’s stage was the second of four starting in Italy before the Vuelta heads into Spain and although it is early for Vingegaard to go into the lead, he said: “You’re not going to let a stage win pass so when I saw the opportunity, of course I’ll take it.<\/p>\n
“It’s been a while since my last victory so I’m super happy with how I felt, how the team did, and also to have the red jersey.”<\/p>\n
Vingegaard added: “I went on [Ciccone’s] wheel and, to be honest, before the [final] corner I didn’t think that it would be possible to pass him, but from the corner on it was longer to the finish than I thought so then I could pass him.” <\/p>\n
A 157km flat stage from Alba culminated with a climb of almost 10km with an average gradient of more than 5%.<\/p>\n
Rain fell on a cool day of 20C, and Pidcock and Vingegaard were among a group of riders that slipped to the tarmac on a roundabout near the bottom of that last ascent.<\/p>\n
“I went down pretty hard, but it seems like I didn’t hurt myself too bad,” said Vingegaard.<\/p>\n
“I have a bit of bruising, but I think because it was so slippery I was sliding more, so I didn’t get any bad road rash or anything.”<\/p>\n
Pidcock added: “I’ve got be happy with how I rode. I think I always need a few days to get into a race. We committed, I didn’t have the legs, but we’ll try again another time.”<\/p>\n
On Monday the riders are set for a grinding all-day ascent on a short but winding 138.5km run to Ceres in the midst of the Graian Alps.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sunday’s stage was the second of four starting in Italy before the Vuelta heads into Spain and although…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":90212,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[4985,101,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-90211","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-cycling","8":"tag-cycling","9":"tag-sports","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90211","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=90211"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90211\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/90212"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=90211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=90211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=90211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}