Giro Stage 18 - Fiera di Primiero to Padova
Welcome back! We’re nearing the end of this year’s Giro and I’m out of time today, so let’s get to it!
Stage 17 Recap
Man, the breakaway cannot keep it together this Giro!
Luckily, Georg Steinhauser from EF Eduction Easy Post held out and managed to avoid being gobbled up by Pogačar on the second ascent of the Passo Brocon. I’m very proud of him, winning a stage at age 22 in his first Grand Tour! Also, this is just cute:
Unfortuantely for the race overall, nothing else is changed!
Withdrawal Corner!
Here are some guys we said goodbye to over the past few days. I hope they have a good time recovering at home/at altitude camp doing their Tour prep/on vacation:
Vadim Pronskiy (Astana Qazaqstan Team)
Clément Davy (Groupama – FDJ)
Jenthe Biermans (Arkéa-B&B Hotels) (ravine)
Danny van Poppel (BORA-hansgrohe
Benjamin Thomas (Cofidis)
Julius van den Berg (Team dsm-firmenich PostNL)
David Dekker (nld – Arkéa-B&B Hotels)
Ciao, friends!
Tiny Italian Sandwich Corner!
We’re in the Veneto region for Stage 18, so I want to bring your attention to the Venice region’s love for tiny sandwiches called teramezzini. I’m going to make some of these for lunch over the weekend!
Stage 18 Preview
The Giro decided to throw the sprinters one last bone - Stage 18 is a 166-kilometer mostly-flat stage starting in Fiera di Primiero in the Alto-Adige and descending to Padua in the Veneto. Look for sprinters like Kaden Groves from Alpecin-Deceuninck and Tim Merlier from Soudal-QuickStep who have been shut out of sprint stage wins to try their damnest on this one.
Padua, the finish town, is located about 20 kilometers west of Venice. Padua was - say it with me - bombed to hell by the Allies in 1943 and 1944. The bombings killed 2,000 residents and destroyed most of the hundreds of meters of frescoes in the Chiesa degli Eremitani. Fragments of those frescoes, which were painted by Andrea Mantegna in the mid-1400s, are on display today.1
Padua is fresco central, because there is also an incredible set of Giotto frescoes from the early 1300s at the Cappella degli Scrovegni that depict Christ’s life, the Madonna, and the Last Judgment:
That’s it for me today! Enjoy Stage 18 and I’ll see you tomorrow!
In case you needed another WWII fact: there was a hugely successful uprising of partisans in Padua in April 1945, as a result of which 5,000 troops and 3 German generals were captured.