Sunday 13th May

Sulmona - Lago Laceno 229km

STRICT DEADLINE = STAGE START TIME 11:00 CET

Steve's preview at Steephill:

...a hilly route that only has two categorized climbs including a cat 2 summit finish, but with continuous up and down action more amplified than stage 6 which produced a successful break. At the end of the longest stage (229 km), thus far, we'll end up at the southern most point of this Giro d'Italia. The second summit of this year's race features the ascent of Colle Molella (Cat 2 at km 224.6, 9.9 km @ 6.0% gradient to 1087m elevation) to Lago Laceno (photo above). The stage ends with 4 km of flat cycling around the west side of the lake and the finish in the town of Lago Laceno.

Stage 7 Results

Tiralongo, Scarponi, Schleck.

Scarponi was the most impressive of the big names to emerge from the pack in the finale, but Tiralongo held his wheel and used his last ounce of strength to come through for the win.

Nobody had picked Tiralongo, but there was plenty of interest in Scarponi and third-placed Frank Schleck. With both of these picks, our joint stage winners were Gravy24 and VirtKitty. With this second stage win, VirtKitty extended her lead in the GC. She has now worn the cappello rosa for a record-breaking three days.

Link to spreadsheet

Rules

For each stage, pick three riders. The order of your picks does not matter.

The first three riders on the stage score. The basic score is stage winner 4 points, second place 2 points, third 1 point.

In addition there are bonus points awarded. Stage winner bonus is 24 points, second place bonus 12 points, third place bonus 6 points. The bonus points are split equally among all the DS's who picked that rider.

The entry deadline is the official start time of the stage. Now, people may want to be sneaky and change their picks before the stage starts when they see what other people's picks look like. That's fine, it's a normal part of the game and quite acceptable - but we'll allow strictly one change. You can change all three riders if you want, but it has to be in one new post. If you want to make a change, post it as a reply to your original post.

If you miss making an entry for a stage, no problem, you're still in the competition - you just score zero for that stage. Also, there's no limit to how early you can make picks, so if you're going on vacation, feel free to enter ahead of time for as many stages as you want.