![]() ![]() There’s even a couple of hundred metres of flat halfway up for riders to catch their breath before the final, grinding ascent up to the first summit. Certainly, none of the riders seen out training on Friday morning shifted their position off their time trial bikes to go around them, and most were still in the big ring. There are a couple of switchbacks, one rising to about 9% - the steepest ramp of the ascent - but they are not excessively difficult. But it’s not a hugely difficult ascent, rising with an average gradient of five percent on broad, well-surfaced roads for roughly a kilometre. ![]() It then runs for about half a kilometre on flat roads between a small dock and the new railway station before swinging sharply left onto the final climb. The sting in the tail to the resoundingly flat first 80% of the course comes when it moves off the bike path in Porto di Ortono. Hopefully, there won’t be any problems."Ī closer look at the climb at the end of the course (Image credit: RCS Sport) It's a good course for specialists like Ganna, who can hold the most aerodynamic positions. I hear there could be a pretty strong headwind which can make the time trial tough on a bike path course like that. “We reconned the course on Thursday, and I hope that the wind changes. The big difference is that this opening test is an individual one, not a collective one, so there's no hiding poor form in the midst of a cloud of teammates.Īs for the climbers amongst the Giro's GC contenders, Jack Haig (Bahrain Victorious) recognised on Friday a 19.6-kilometre solo TT like this one is "not ideal for me" or his teammates. The longest tunnel measures 520 metres and comes just after the first intermediate checkpoint at kilometre 8, when the course rolls past the platform of the old railway station of Marina di San Vito.īike paths running along disused railway lines have been used before in Giro opening time trials in 2015, the race started with an 18-kilometre TTT on the Riviera dei Fiori cycle path, built on a former coastal rail track between San Lorenzo al Mare and Sanremo. But the railway-turned-bike path simply bores through any of the craggy headlands in its path, with six tunnels featuring on the time trial course. The coastline gets notably hillier as the route heads northwards, and the snow-peaked Apennines are visible some 50 kilometres further inland. ![]() But in any case, to the right, there’s always the sea, sometimes a couple of hundred metres away from the bike path and sometimes so close if a rider doesn't pay attention or gets caught by a gust of wind, he could almost end up veering into it. The route tracks a bike path up the coast until it nips inland for the late climb (Image credit: RCS Sport)Ĭuriously enough, the more built-up areas of high-rise apartments and hotels that clog up so much of the Italian seashore don't feature at all in this part of the Adriatic coastline. For much of the course, the path cuts a clean, straight line through a dense semi-rural jumble of low-lying homes and gardens, beach bars and restaurants, small fields and painfully narrow twisting access roads, all of these coming off a weatherbeaten B road that runs roughly parallel to the coast. The one thing that does change is the backdrop to the bike path, but only up to a point. After just a few hundred metres, the course moves onto the bike path, and there it stays for the next 15 kilometres, with none of the turn-offs, sharp corners or other variants that usually feature in a TT.Īs you'd expect from a former railway trackway, the bike path itself is a seamless ribbon of khaki green tarmac, the width of perhaps a car and a half and running on a gradient that barely changes. For the record, the course starts at two metres above sea level, reaches 14 metres above sea level after eight kilometres and then drops back to six at Porto di Ortona, by the time it reaches the foot of the climb that concludes the course. The start of Saturday’s TT, close to a marina docking area on the Adriatic coast, is not the most spectacular, situated on the windswept edge of an area of scrubland and bushes. Running along a disused railway line, the time trial is just a small segment of a much larger network of coastal bike paths, known in its totality as the Ciclovia Adriatica and, in this particular section in the Abruzzo region, the Ciclovia Costa dei Trabocchi. In contrast, Saturday’s course is mostly resoundingly flat and smooth, and all bar the last three kilometres - which contain a very short fourth category climb - are held on a bike path. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |