Primoz Roglic was a brilliant winner of the third stage of Tirreno-Adriatico, announcing himself once again as one of the biggest emerging talents on the World Tour circuit and also giving notice that this might be the year that he perhaps contenders for a Grand Tour. The Slovenian made an attack with about a kilometre to go on the incredibly difficult stage finish towards Trevi, holding off the challenge of a resurgent Adam Yates (Mitchelton-Scott), who must be ruing the fall he took yesterday that has ended his Chances of taking overall glory.
The leader’s jersey was taken by Geraint Thomas of Team Sky, who also managed to put Chris Froome into third on what was a successful day for them ahead of the summit finish tomorrow where they have two serious chances to take stage glory.
Third place on the stage went to Tiesj Benoot of Lotto-Soudal, again showing his fine form after dominating Strade Bianche’s latter stages, whilst Thomas was fourth. There was then a three second gap to Rigoberto Uran, who showed good form to give EF-Education First something to look forward to over the coming days with another strong finish.
He finished in a group with 7 Gianni Moscon (Team Sky), Romain Bardet (AG2R), Wilco Kelderman (Team Sunweb), and Bob Jungels (Quick-Step), all of whom showed good form and can look forward to tomorrow’s stage as a chance for either stage, overall glory or both.
The day was an intense one, with barely a metre of flat road, and it was a surprise that the five-man breakaway of Jacopo Mosca (Wilier-Selle Italia), Nicola Bagioli (Nippo-Vini Fantini), Sho Hatsuyama (Nippo-Vini Fantini), Dennis van Winden (Israel Cycling Academy) and Stepan Kurianov (Gazprom-Rusvelo) managed to head off so early and without much fuss, building a nine minute gap by the time the field had passed 40 kilometres. Bagioli, who had led over the one single climb of yesterday’s stage.
Primoz Roglic holds out on his own to clinch a thrilling victory in stage three of #TirrenoAdriatico
The peloton was always confident about catching them and did not pay much attention to them until later, with the tough terrain giving them a major advantage in their chase, and once they organised and managed to send names such as Stefan Kung, Patrick Bevin and Marcus Burghardt to the front, it became clear that this was going to be a finish contested by the peloton.
When the first ascent of the closing circuit came, there were less than 2 seconds to the break and a number of incidents had taken place behind, including a bad crash for Simon Geskche (Sunweb) and also problems of some sort for Rafal Majka which meant that two of his Bora teammates had to drop back whilst Kwiatkowski led several of his Sky teammates over the first ascent with all the big names well placed. They pushed hard on the descent, and the group was much reduced with Gianni Moscon hitting the front.
They started as one before hitting the final climb, and it was then that Primoz Roglic (Lotto-Jumbo) launched his race-winning bid, initially gapping the Sky riders, and then building a gap of 100 metres before Yates came from the peloton and briefly looked like catching him, although Roglic’s lead was eventually big enough to finish three seconds ahead.
