Win Tratnik, send Almeida

While Jan Tratnik, another top Slovenian, rolled O'Connor, an Australian born among his family's vineyards, on the final slope of San Daniele del Friuli, the squad shouted Long live the chains! As the populace received two centuries ago to the absolutism of Fernando VII after the liberal triennium.

Death to freedom, long live chains, they cried out in the streets;

now the cyclists do it for the earpiece, who circulate comfortably when the leader's team blocks the race.

They deploy their

white and blue

across the width of the road, on the way up to Ragnone, hard ramps, horseshoe curves and a lot of vegetation through which not a ray of sunlight penetrates, which on the other hand, does not appear between the clouds of a gray Italian October.

The men surrounding the leader in pink neutralize the march, and no one complains.

They're happy.

Ragnone, they warned, could be the ideal setting for an ambush.

It goes up three times.

The first serves to recognize the terrain.

The Deceuninck sets the pace;

the second seems ideal for casting the bait, but the Deceuninck continues to set the pace.

Will the third ascent be final?

For the head of the race, yes.

O'Connor catches up with Tratnik right at the top of the harbor, and between the two they gain a sufficient advantage to stake the victory between them.

For the platoon, no.

Perhaps the favorites observe at the top the camo suits of the Italian Alpine Guard, their limbs lined up on the gutter, clapping with a certain martial air and the feather in their hat.

Four inches, black, made of crow, for the troops;

brown, eagle, for officers.

White, like the youth leader's jersey, for the high command.

The cyclists see them and they evoke the great walls of the Alps, where the mountain militia always appears, and that will soon ascend, and then they bow to the tyranny of the Deceuninck.

They think of the 5,000 meters of unevenness of the next stage, which ends at the Madonna di Campiglio ski resort, where no one will want to stay at the Touring hotel, cursed since Pantani was evicted due to his high hematocrit in the 1999 Giro, that seemed triumphant.

He would no longer raise his head.

They also imagine the snowy walls of the Stelvio or the Agnello.

Runners think about those things, and about the week ahead, and they don't mind procrastinating, and leaving homework for another day.

All except the thirty brave men who smell that it may be their stage, and they are increasing their difference before the sloppiness of Almeida's team, who wants to continue one more day dressed in pink, to get Portugal to talk about something more than the positive Cristiano Ronaldo, as he lamented during the rest day.

The leading group is understood throughout the day, and gets messy when it enters the Friuli circuit, and each one begins to look out for their interests.

The strongest are uncovered.

Tratnik is left alone for many kilometers, and it seems like a good trick, and it is, although after on the last climb to Ragnone, O'Connor, the wine expert, makes a supreme effort to overlap the half minute he had been advantage and stick to your wheel.

But in the last kilometer the truth is uncovered.

The Australian has spent all his energy;

the Slovenian still has gasoline for a kilometer.

Even though O'Connor angrily hits the handlebars as he crosses the line, Tratnik takes the glory.

Like Almeida, one more day sleeping in pink, that the Alps will arrive, and with the impudence and ambition of the young cyclists of the new generation, he attacks on the final slope and takes two more seconds from his rivals.