Giro Stage 12 Preview: Città Sant'Angelo - Porto Recanati

Stage 12 :: Thursday May 20, 2010
191km :: Città Sant'Angelo - Porto Recanati

Well, that wasn't solemn or somber was it, particularly not for my VDS team (Venga Sastre!)

A new GC table and a few stages for it to settle in and let everyone get a bit of rest.  The peloton is heading to the beach and is gonna stay there for a day or so. And by beach, I mean I had to force Google Earth to route them that close to the sand.

Gavia's Poggio:

Wednesday isn’t looking like much of a surf day for most of Socal…but there may be a few pockets hiding out there through the morning.

In the water we will have a mix of new SSW swell (190-210) moving in and mixing with some building local NW windswell and a touch of leftover S swell still hanging on from last weekend.

Feed my Frinkenstein:

Speechless! Clueless! Unbelievable! Bunch of losers! Snails! *******! HTFU! No \o/ but ?o?. What a stage we had.. Bye bye Vino, Evans, Basso, Nibali. Hello Porte, Arroyo, Kiserlovski, Tondo and Sastre! All heli to you. The good breakaway gave yo around the 13 minutes! Where are they going to make that up? And 56 man! It is never been shown in a GC! Or at least in the modern era. Again WHAT THE %#%^.

And well. What can you say.. Do I try to say something about tomorrow's stage? A sprinters stage? Looong stages and rain could be a killjoy for the sprint.. Who is capable to hold it together? It's up. Battery needs a reload.. WE ARE PEOPLE! Is what they would think.. Freaking 6 hours on a bike.. But surely we would get them dopefree with this horrorstages.. (Altho I have to get in my lawn.. Sorry Donny) I'm clueless.. Nut my 0.02 cents for what it's worth... (Thinks hard)

Ok The breakaway will stick.. Stamsnijder or Flens.. Because it's flat with now and than a montain.. Maybe the sprinters are going in the break themself.. Hinault par example..

That was it.. Still speechless

I'l Angolo di Cristoforo:

Action: More transition. Given what's coming, they'll need it. At least this one is delightfully "short" at under 200km, for once. Sprint time in Porto Recanati, a regular stop in Tirreno-Adriatico.

Pageantry: Beaches again! After the previous couple days, the mood should be noticeably lighter.

The Plan: Morning checkin for the finish. I have my weekly crit that afternoon, so I may have to roll into work early.

I confess, for the first time in a long time, I have no clue what Frinky's talking about. I think he got all kinds of excited there.

So, like I said... lots of nice sandy beaches and drinks with little straw hats (I hear England has beaches too).  It's a day of Giro'ing the Adriatico... heading north... bringing us closer to the Alps with every passing pedal stroke.

Two climbs on the route tomorrow... the Macerata and the Potenza Picena (man, everything sounds cooler in Italian)...

1. Macerata : 280m over 4.9km.  It rises 181m averaging 3.7% and maxing at 9%
2. Potenza Picena : apparently this is so small, that it didn't even warrant RCS describing it in the race materials.  So I'm going to say... 12,439m over 2km.  It rises 12,258m averaging 83.7% and maxing out at ... ohhhh... let's say... π

Here are the official materials from La Gazetta:

1. Stage Map
2. Stage Profile
3. Timetable

Here's PodiumCafe's Google Earth map file for Stage 10.