With sweat beading on his tan, freckled face and his body fighting exhaustion after nearly 18 days of racing, Danny Pate pushed himself just a little harder in the final minutes of Thursday’s stage of the Giro d’Italia.
He flexed his muscles. He pedaled faster. After riding in the lead pack nearly the entire race, he stared at the finish line and willed himself across it.
But, for what seemed like the 100th time at this Giro, a rider from Team Garmin-Slipstream came up short and did not win a stage at this three-week race.
PHOTO: REUTERS
As Pate zipped toward the finish, Michele Scarponi of Italy and Felix Rafael Cardenas of Colombia passed him. Pate, from Colorado Springs, was third.
All three, and Lars Ytting Bak of Denmark, were given the same finishing time for their 182km ride: 4 hours, 7 minutes and 41 seconds.
“Oh, a new second place for us,” said one of the Garmin team’s race directors, Lionel Marie, over the race radio afterward, with a hint of sarcasm.
The route took the Giro from Italy’s east coast almost all the way to the west coast, cutting through vast green valleys and farming villages where dairy farmers paused to watch the riders go by. In their white overcoats and white rubber boots, they applauded as the cyclists sped by.
NOT QUITE FIRST
At the end of the stage, the Garmin team did not receive the cheers for the day’s champion. For the squad based in Boulder, Colorado, that makes five close calls. After 18 stages of this 21-stage race, Garmin riders have been runners-up three times and third-place finishers twice.
With only three stages left, 16 of the 22 teams — including Garmin and Lance Armstrong’s Astana — have not won a stage. They hear the clock ticking.
Team Columbia-Highroad, with the help of star sprinter Mark Cavendish, has won six stages.
LPR Brakes-Farnese Vini, with the help of the Italian rider Danilo Di Luca, has won four stages. Rabobank, whose rider Denis Menchov retained the pink leader’s jersey on Thursday, has won two stages. Menchov is 26 seconds ahead of Di Luca in the overall standings.
The success of those teams has left others scrambling.
For Diquigiovanni-Androni, Scarponi’s team, this Giro has been a triumph. The team, which competes one level below cycling’s highest level, has won three stages.
Scarponi, who served an 18-month ban from the sport for his connection to a Spanish doping ring, giggled on Thursday after his second stage victory.
When asked if it was fun to beat the bigger teams, he said: “It’s an indescribable emotion.”
Stage 19 begins in southern Italy, then winds its way along the Amalfi Coast. The race ends atop Mount Vesuvius, the volcano that destroyed the city of Pompeii.
LAST CHANCE
Menchov, who has been the leader for a week, said he considered that 13km climb as the final chance to make a move.
“For sure, it will be the last hard day, it will be the last opportunity for someone to gain time before the time trial,” he said of the individual time trial in Rome tomorrow, the Giro’s finale.
The Saxo Bank team thought it might have a chance to win a stage on Thursday, when it had two riders in the lead pack in the closing stretch.
Jason McCartney, one of those riders, said that the team was eager to win the stage. He finished seventh, while his teammate Bak was fourth.
“Of course, we are a very, very big team and the Giro is the second biggest race of the year,” he said. “We’re not here to have fun.”
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier