Tirreno–Adriatico - Stage 6

A “simpler” and less demanding day on paper, Stage 6 was one of those days that became much harder than it needed to be.

The few sprinter’s teams helped control at the start, and it looked like a good combination was away on multiple occasions, only to see the Russian Gazprom team pull it back. I’ve seen some crazy team tactics over the years, but this display was next level confusing.

They would send a guy up the road, then chase their own teammate down, repeatedly. It became clear they were hoping to put one of their riders in the break to snag some mountain points, but it seemed they were as confused as we were about how they would do it.

This kept the pace high for a while, but eventually things settled down. We took the punchy and (once again) atrociously paved first half of the stage behind the sprinter’s teams who were controlling the gap. Another inefficiency display as they would drill it, then see the gap coming down too quickly, sit up, and repeat.

No complaints from me as we were happy to sit back a little and save whatever we could for tomorrow. With 80 kilometers to go, we descended to the coast for laps of a flat hot dog circuit. As the gap to the break fell, things heated up and the group continually swarmed and bunched before again getting strung out.

We did a pretty good job of staying together and persisting in regrouping with all the guys making good digs to keep Simon safe. One more road stage before the final TT stage. Tomorrow is anything but straightforward including some punishing laps on a hilly and technical circuit with a sharp uphill finish.

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