‘Sometimes you have to dare’ Longo Borghini’s audacious ride into Giro d’Italia lead
Elisa Longo Borghini rode into the maglia rosa with one of the most jaw-dropping rides of her long and storied career, but was it planned?
They say it’s never over until it’s over, but before stage seven of this year’s Giro d’Italia Women, it did seem as though Marlen Reusser would keep hold of the overall lead.
The Movistar rider had seemed invincible, even when Sarah Gigante (AG Insurance-Soudal) won stage four’s mountain top finish, but with the Australian so far back on the general classification, surely she only needed to worry about Elisa Longo Borghini.
On stage four, the two had seemed perfectly matched, indeed they started Saturday’s eighth stage separated only by the 16 seconds Reusser had put into Longo Borghini on the day one time trial. Reusser would never let her rival get up the road, surely that would prove the winning margin.
Longo Borghini (UAE Team ADQ) hadn’t read the script. Indeed, if there was a script, the Italian champion ripped it up and started again, as she so often does. Longo Borghini did it her way.
It had been a tough but reasonably relaxed day in the GC group, everyone expecting the race to be a battle of attrition on the final, brutal, 14km climb to Monte Nerone. As they descended to the valley before the start of that ascent, Longo Borghini and teammate Silvia Persico took the lead, finding themselves off the front at the bottom.
“Silvia and I just wanted to have control in the downhill, and apparently we went a bit too fast down, so we had a small gap, so we went ‘just ride it,’” Longo Borghini said.
They did, Persico giving everything for her leader up the climb, ignoring the presence of Reusser’s teammate, Liane Lippert. Longo Borghini would deal with her when Persico was finished.
“I was telling Silvia ‘ride it and we see what the peloton has to do.’ if we start with one foot in front it’s always better, so we took the climb with 20 seconds and then I saw that it was going up and up and up, so I just did my pace. Maybe I overdid it at the beginning, and I paid it back in the last two or three ks."
“But sometimes you just have to dare. You just have to go.”
And go she did, holding a gap of around a minute until the final three kilometres. There she was caught and passed by Gigante, but that didn’t matter. She crossed the line 29 seconds ahead of Reusser, bonus seconds giving her a GC lead of 22 seconds, with one day to go.
“I feel overwhelmed at this moment, I really need to thank all my teammates today, the whole week they were amazing. We built this Giro together, we made the same path, the same training camps, we shared moments, the good ones and the bad ones, and I would like to give this jersey to them because it’s ours.
“But we want to stay humble, we want to keep our feet on the ground, there’s still a very hard stage tomorrow and we will try to defend it to the blood.”
Spare a thought for Reusser, while the Italian sobbed with joy and disbelief, Reusser sobbed too, sat against the hoardings, disconsolate, in pure despair. But if anyone ever needed convincing of the entertainment value of women’s sport, of its ability to entertain, its overwhelming emotion and drama, this was the moment.
A true example of courage and racing intuition, Longo Borghini created one of our sport’s jaw-dropping moments, one which has fans shouting at whichever device they are viewing. Longo Borghini’s ride was a wonder.
