If you only tuned in for the last half hour of stage 15 of the Giro d’Italia, then you probably missed the best of the action with an astonishingly quick start to the stage as a break struggled to get away.
While Bob Jungels won the stage, for many teams the big fight was to get into the day’s early break, with a glimpse at their Strava stats showing just how hard that was.
Cannondale-Drapac’s Kristijan Koren averaged 50.1kmh for the first 150km of a stage that finished more than half an hour ahead of the fastest time schedule.
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Over that period Kristijan Koren averaged 282 watts, which may not sound like a huge number for a professional cyclist, but hides the number of peaks and troughs in Dombrowski’s figure, plus the fact that this is after two weeks of hard racing.
Dombrowski’s highest power figure came just 20 kilometres in to the 199km stage, hitting 1174 watts as he attempted to make it across to an early attack.
Watch: Giro d’Italia stage 15 highlights
The Slovenian’s Cannondale-Drapac team failed to make it into any of the moves which went away in the first half of the stage, meaning that Koren spent a lot of time working on the front of the bunch.
During that time Koren spent his time either recovering in the wheels at around 200 watts, while having to put out frequent bursts of 500-700 watts when doing his turns on the front
In the bunch, things were a little easier, but hardly a Sunday spin, with Team Sunweb domestique Laurens Ten Dam averaging 247 watts for the first 150km.
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The fast start to the day was reflected in the title that some of the riders gave their rides on Strava, with FDJ’s Tobias Ludvigsson calling it “Giro d’Italia Fast and Furious”, Ag2r-La Mondiale‘s Quentin Jauregui going for “Pas de mot!” (“no words”), while Trek-Segafredo‘s Julien Bernard went with “Moto GP Giro d’Italia”.
After cresting the final small climb of the day with three kilometres, a small group of contenders remained to contest the stage win, with Bora-Hansgrohe‘s Patrick Konrad among them.
Although there is no power data on Konrad’s Strava file, it’s still pretty astonishing to hear that the Austrian averaged 66kmh for the final three kilometres, including a top speed of 76kmh in his final sprint to take sixth place.
