Editor's note: Since initial publication, the race organisers have revised the results and given the KOM jersey to Tao Geoghegan Hart.
Brandon McNulty (UAE Team Emirates) expressed his surprise and slight amusement at finding himself in the blue jersey after the opening stage of the Giro d'Italia. Closer inspection would suggest he was well justified, with timing errors giving him a false lead in the mountains classification.
According to the official results for Saturday's stage 1 time trial, McNulty placed eighth on the stage, 47 seconds down on the winner Remco Evenepoel. However, he was listed as covering the 2.8km climb at the end of the course in 3:51, the day's quickest by a margin of 12 seconds, and a figure that seemed too good be be true.
As it turned out, it was, with the race organisers making a U-Turn and putting Tao Geoghegan Hart into blue shortly before the start of stage 2 on Sunday.
With the 19.6km TT course divided into three timing segments, the climb at the end of the otherwise flat route counted towards the mountains classification, with the fastest time over that final 2.8km taking the maximum three King of the Mountains points.
"It was quite surprising to me, honestly," McNulty said after pulling on that blue jersey as KOM leader. "They said after I was out of the hotseat that I had to wait around for the KOM jersey, so I was surprised but it's nice to have a jersey.
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"I knew I had to pace well and go hard on the climb but I didn't expect to be the fastest," he added, laughing. "It's funny."
A closer look at the results sheet would indicate a clear error in timing.
To begin with, the official results have McNulty down in 103rd place for the opening 9.8km segment, some 1:17 down on Evenepoel's top time there. To reach the finish line just 47 seconds down, that would mean pulling half a minute back on the second half of the course, a preposterous idea given how the Belgian smashed all opposition.
Looking back at the broadcast, the error is even clearer. McNulty is seen passing Andrea Pasqualon (Bahrain Victorious), the rider who started a minute before him, just past the half-way mark. Pasqualon is listed on the results as being three seconds faster than McNulty in that first 9.8km, when in reality he'd almost lost all of his one-minute head-start.
7km at 61.1km/h
The official timings for the middle segment of the course, from km9.8 to km16.8, look equally dubious. McNulty is listed as the fastest, covering 7km in 6:52 for a near-impossible average speed of 61.139km/h. That's supposedly 13 seconds faster than Evenepoel and 15 seconds faster than Filippo Ganna, whose historic 4km individual pursuit world record last year 'only' clocked in a shade over 60km/h.
The next on-screen timing for McNulty came at the second checkpoint at the base of the climb and the start of the final 2.8km uphill segment, with 17:44 flashing up (versus 18:15 in the results). With a finishing time of 22:06, that would be a segment time of 4:22, some 31 seconds slower than his KOM-winning time of 3:51 given in the results. It would have put him outside the top 28 for the segment, and well out of blue jersey contention.
One question is to what extent the under-estimation of McNulty's time in the first part was balanced out by the overestimation in the second - not fully, it would seem.
Looking back at the broadcast, it took Evenepoel 27 seconds from the first checkpoint to the exact point where McNulty passed Pasqualon. At that point, the live on-screen timing graphic for McNulty read 10:48, so even if he rode that small stretch at the same pace as Evenepoel, it would give him a time of 10:21 for the opening section - so around one minute quicker than credited in the results. If McNulty's KOM time was correct, it would mean his time in the middle section was around minute slower than listed in the results, which would put him way off the pace of anyone else in the top 10. So it's fairly safe to deduce that the over-estimation continued into the KOM segment.
In short, while McNulty's overall finishing time may be accurate, the three separate segments do not add up, and not to a blue jersey. If the rest of the timings are to be believed, that blue jersey should be on the shoulders of Tao Geoghegan Hart (Ineos Grenadiers), who went up in 4:04, half a second quicker than Joao Almeida (UAE Team Emirates).
UAE Team Emirates confirmed to Cyclingnews on Sunday morning that McNulty is still set to start stage 2 in blue.
The whole thing may be fairly inconsequential. Geoghegan Hart will likely not mind about the blue jersey, which is likely to change hands anyway on Sunday's opening road stage. But it's nevertheless something of an embarrassment for such a major race, which this year replaced its timing supplier, swapping Tissot for Tudor.
