Filippo Ganna preferred not to speak. That, of course, didn’t prevent a television crew and a delegation of journalists from pitching up outside the Ineos bus after stage 4 of the Giro d’Italia, where Ganna animated the finale with a fierce attack on the Capo Mele.
The Italian had a handful of seconds over the peloton by the time he swooped past the lighthouse on the headland and began the short, fast descent into Andora, perched on the glistening Ligurian sea. He still had that buffer as the road flattened out inside the final kilometre, but his effort would ultimately be doomed by a familiar figure.
Simone Consonni, Ganna’s comrade when they won the team pursuit at the Tokyo Olympics, was a foe here, operating on behalf of Lidl-Trek’s Jonathan Milan, another member of that gold medal-winning quartet. When Consonni smartly opened his lead-out from distance on the Via Aurelia, Ganna’s hopes of fending off the sprinters were extinguished.
Milan duly scorched to stage victory, while a disappointed Ganna rolled home in 97th place after he was swarmed by the bunch. He has yet to leave his desired mark on this Giro, but that was never going to spare him the duty of commenting on the day’s action. Such is the burden of being Italy’s most famous active rider in Italy’s most important bike race.
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Ganna has never been quite as willing to carry that weight as Vincenzo Nibali was in years gone by. By the time the RAI television camera crew arrived at the Ineos bus, Ganna had already climbed aboard, and it was hard to shake off the impression that he hoped they would have gone away by the time he completed his shower.
No such luck. After some gentle entreaties from the state broadcaster, Ganna was eventually persuaded to descend the steps of the bus and offer a succinct account of his day. The final 60 kilometres of the stage followed a path well-worn by Milan-San Remo over the generations. Ganna would have known the road that climbed out of Laigueglia and up the Capo Mele by heart, and he couldn’t resist launching an acceleration with a shade over 3km to race.
The doughiest of softball questions was lobbed in Ganna’s direction for starters – “Filippo, you made a great attack on the Capo Mele” – but he had little mind to take much of a swing at it.
“It wasn’t that great, otherwise I would have won,” Ganna shrugged.
“Are you disappointed?” he was asked.
“Yes.”
A new line of approach was urgently needed. The talk turned to tactical considerations, but still Ganna had little appetite for playing ball, beyond conceding that he might have been wiser to have attacked over the top of the Capo Mele rather than on the climb itself. “No, we hadn’t planned it,” he said. “It might have been better to try on the descent, but I went earlier.”
After the stage, Consonni had unsuccessfully sought out his national teammate Ganna to offer an explanation, if not an apology, for Lidl-Trek’s pursuit here. “In the finale, I didn’t know whether to pull for Milan or slow down for Pippo,” Consonni said. Ganna rightly insisted, however, that no explanation was necessary.
“No, a race is a race, and they rode their race, which is as it should be. In the end, everyone chased,” said Ganna, whose mood lightened when it was pointed out that three of Italy’s Olympic team pursuit champions had been to the fore in Andora. “It would have been nice to see [Francesco] Lamon there too, to see where he’d end up.”
Ganna’s expression tensed all over again, however, when faced with an inquiry about his short-lived presence in the day’s early break. When the flag dropped, he had joined an attack with Stefan de Bod (EF Education-EasyPost), Lilian Calmejane (Intermarché-Wanty) and Francisco Muñoz (Polti-Kometa), but he dropped out of the move after consulting with his team via his radio earpiece.
With Geraint Thomas immediately positioning himself as maglia rosa Tadej Pogačar’s most obvious challenger at this Giro, Ganna might find his freedom of movement a touch restricted outside of the race’s two time trials. That certainly seemed to be the case on Tuesday, though Ganna preferred to channel José Mourinho rather than expand on the strategic decision. “You’d have to ask the team,” he said.
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