Waiting for Vingegaard: Giro d'Italia braced for impact on the Blockhaus

The ‘real’ Giro d’Italia doesn’t start at the Blockhaus, because the real Giro d’Italia has been happening relentlessly since the race left Nessebar last week. Indeed, for some lofty names, the Giro was all too real and already over after the mass crash on the road to Veliko Tarnovo the following day.

But that caveat aside, it’s also true that a different Giro gets under way on stage 7, which brings the gruppo on a marathon cross-country jaunt from the seaside town of Formia to the heights of the Majella massif in Abruzzo. 

The Blockhaus has been metaphorically looming on the horizon of this Giro from the outset, with everything that has happened in the opening week seeming to exist as a function of the race’s first summit finish. 

When Egan Bernal betrayed surprising signs of suffering on the climb of Cozzo Tunno on stage 4, for instance, there was little need to make a snap judgement. One way or another, the Blockhaus would deliver a verdict on the Colombian champion’s prospects.

Any questions about internal leadership hierarchies have also felt moot in the opening phase of the Giro. As a general rule, the road tends to decide these things. More specifically, the 13.4km of Strada Provinciale 64 above Roccamorice should tell us plenty about the relative standings of Bernal and Thymen Arensman at Netcompany-Ineos, and of Jai Hindley and Giulio Pellizzari at Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe.

By a similar token, it would be remiss to draw too many conclusions about Afonso Eulálio’s prospects of maintaining his unexpected hold on the maglia rosa until he has faced real scrutiny on the Blockhaus. 

The Portuguese rider has shown flashes of his ability as a climber in his short career, but he is also relatively untested at this exalted level. The Blockhaus will tell us whether he can make a surprise run at a podium finish in the manner of David Arroyo in 2010 or if a Giro like this is simply too much and too soon at this point in his cycling life.

But more than anything, the Blockhaus is about Jonas Vingegaard, who will be expected to make his first real strike on this Giro. The Dane is, by a considerable distance, the favourite to win in Rome, and it’s been hard to shake the sense that the consensus stretches beyond the press room and deep into the peloton.

There has certainly been no indication yet that teams like Red Bull and Netcompany-Ineos are looking to apply any real pressure to Vingegaard. There have been potential pitfalls aplenty in the opening week of the Giro, most notably on the rugged and rain-soaked run to Potenza on stage 5, but there was never even the faintest threat of an ambush on Vingegaard. 

Pellizzari and Hindley’s Red Bull teammates did produce a spell of pace-making at the head of the bunch ahead of the climb to Viggiano, but they relented once Visma’s Victor Campenaerts had dropped back from the break of the day. 

Their aim, it seems, was not to probe Vingegaard for any weaknesses, but rather to make sure the Dane and his team didn’t steal a march on them before the Giro had even reached its first real mountain pass. So far, the GC teams have been looking to minimise risk rather than actively seeking out opportunities

Everybody in this Giro, it seems, is waiting for Vingegaard. The Blockhaus included.

Vingegaard gave a brief but telling signal of his intent for this Giro with his attack on the climb to Lyaskovets Monastery on stage 2. But although, as his sports director Marc Reef told Domestique, the attack had been in the Visma playbook since last winter, the intent behind it was more defensive than offensive. The overriding motivation was for Vingegaard to get out in front ahead of the final descent and avoid any unnecessary risks.

That thinking has informed Visma and Vingegaard’s approach for the entire first week. Unlike Tadej Pogacar two years ago, whose all-out aggression in the opening phase of the Giro even included an attack on the first sprint stage, Vingegaard has been altogether more cautious to this point.

That is partly down to the terrain, given how the Pogacar Giro began with a punchy stage in Turin followed by a full-blown summit finish at Oropa. But it’s also been a clear choice from Visma to spare their energy where possible, with this Giro and July’s Tour de France in mind.

That thinking has seen Visma often surrender their traditional position at the head of the bunch on flat stages, preferring to mass around Vingegaard towards the back as and when the roads allow it.

“With the three-second rule in place, you really have to be on a big gap to actually lose time,” Sepp Kuss explained to Domestique. “So yeah, it’s better just to be relaxed and have a braking distance in front of you. I think a lot of the other GC riders and teams see that too, so then you all kind of collectively take it easy. There’s a bit more solidarity in that instead of mixing in with the sprinters and making their life harder.”

That détente among the GC men won’t hold in Abruzzo on Friday, of course, and it’s hard to imagine Visma being in any way passive once the road starts to climb at Roccaraso. The sharp final climb to Blockhaus, 13.6km at 8.4%, offers a clear and obvious platform for Vingegaard to impose himself on the race.

“I think the Blockhaus is a climb where you cannot hide,” Vingegaard said. “It will be for sure a stage where you can fight for the GC.”

The thought was echoed by Pellizzari, one of only two riders to follow his attack in Bulgaria and the man most touted to offer some manner of challenge to Vingegaard’s expected hegemony in the high mountains.

“It’s a hard stage and I think there will be riders who want to open the gas, so I hope I will be ready,” Pellizzari said on Thursday. “And it’s a big block coming up, because the stage to Fermo is hard and then there’s the summit finish at Corno alle Scale and the time trial.”

Between now and time trial in Massa on Tuesday, the complexion of the general classification should change radically. Above all, the coming days look like the cornerstone of Vingegaard’s tilt at the maglia rosa. “You needed to survive everything up until today,” Reef said in Paestum on Thursday.

The wait is now over. With the Blockhaus, a new phase of the Giro begins.