Giro d'Italia Stage 3 Review 🚴♂️ 🇮🇹
The third and final stage in Albania, featuring a difficult climb around 40 kilometres (Spoilers Included)
The third and final stage of the Albanian Grande Partenza didn’t live up to the unpredictable race that some may have been expecting, but still provided an exciting finish. Ultimately, Mads Pedersen and Lidl-Trek delivered another world-class performance, with the Danish star outsprinting his rivals to take a second stage win and regain the maglia rosa.
In the process, Mads Pedersen overtook Rolf Sørensen’s record of 52 professional wins, becoming the Danish male rider with the most professional victories. Speaking about the record, Pedersen stated:
“Records are here to be broken, and hopefully someday someone will take mine. But right now, I am just fully committed to extending it as much as possible.”
Rewinding to the start of the stage, there was a decent fight for the breakaway, which resulted in a strong group of six riders: Dries De Bondt, Chris Hamilton, Mark Donovan, Alessandro Tonelli, Lorenzo Germani and yesterday’s stage winner, Josh Tarling.
There wasn’t too much action in the first half of the stage, except for the attempted assault on Intermarché-Wanty rider Dion Smith by a goat. Thankfully, Smith avoided any potential nasty incident, meaning we could appreciate the funny side to the bizarre moment.
The key action of the stage came where most would have been expecting it, on the second category, Qafa e Llogarasë, with the summit of the climb coming around 40 kilometres from the finish. Many sprinters had already gone out the back at this point, but key riders were distanced on this climb due to Lidl-Trek’s strong tempo, including Wout van Aert. The dynamics changed when a group of three riders attacked from the peloton and bridged across to the breakaway: Gianmarco Garafoli, Pello Bilbao, and Lorenzo Fortunato. In the end, the latter two were able to catch and distance the rest of the breakaway with Fortunato taking maximum points at the summit, taking the lead in the mountains classification, and signalling his intent to win that competition.
Behind in the peloton, Tom Pidcock moved to the front of the group inside the final kilometre to the summit, which saw an injection of pace into the tempo, also caused by the fight for position ahead of a treacherous descent. Importantly, Mads Pedersen was still looking strong in the peloton at the summit, with his chances for the stage win seemingly looking better by the minute.
Thankfully, there were no issues on the descent, and with the finale being flat, Lidl-Trek were able to catch Bilbao and Fortunato comfortably, and set a strong enough tempo to deter any potential attacks. The whole team pulled their weight significantly, illustrating another team demonstration of strength and intelligence. Leading into the final kilometre, Mathias Vacek delivered another masterful leadout for Mads Pedersen, who stormed to victory on stage 3.
After narrowly losing the maglia rosa by one second to Primož Roglič during yesterday’s individual time trial, Pedersen is deservedly back in the race lead and will get to wear pink again during stage four on Tuesday, after tomorrow’s rest day. That stage looks to be the first pure sprint stage of this year’s race, and with the form of the Dane, you shouldn’t rule him out from taking win number 3.
From a GC perspective, there were no significant changes except for the obvious change in race leadership, with Pedersen leapfrogging Roglič into first. As previously mentioned, there will be a rest day tomorrow as the Giro d’Italia circus travels from Albania back into Italy and Alberobello, where stage four will begin.
My stage four preview will be out on Monday on Domestique’s X and Bluesky social media pages.
