Dani Martínez has promised that he will not settle for second overall in the Giro d’Italia if an opportunity comes to attack race leader Tadej Pogačar, although the Bora-Hansgrohe leader warned, “Right now, maybe he is unbeatable.”
Pogačar currently leads the Colombian at the top of the Giro GC rankings by 2:40, with Martínez a further 18 seconds up on his former Ineos Grenadiers teammate Geraint Thomas.
For Martínez, such a high placing is his best-ever performance in ten Grand Tours to date, with the 28-year-old previous top finish fifth in the 2021 Giro, when he was Egan Bernal’s key climbing wingman.
But rather than race overly conservatively, Martínez said he was keeping all options on the table, promising on the first rest day to reporters that, “For sure, if I feel good, I will try to attack Pogačar. But even if I’m not feeling so great on some days, I still want to do my best in this Giro.”
Martínez recognised that his position as GC leader in the Giro for Bora-Hansgrohe, for whom he signed over the winter, represented a very big opportunity in his career, particularly after several difficult Grand Tours. In 2023, he had to pull out of the Tour de France because of a concussion, then in 2022 illness late in the Tour’s first week blighted any chances of a top result that July.
“These are the kinds of opportunities you have to grab,” Martínez said. “They always come at the time they should do, and right now, we’ve got two weeks of racing left to do as well as we can. So we’re taking things as calmly and seeing what happens.”
Asked to compare this Giro to his previous Grand Tour participations, Martínez replied, “That is very hard because the first week of stage races has not always been my best. This year is different, though, I have really good legs and I’m excited to be here.”
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With so much Grand Tour experience in his career already, on Monday, the Colombian made a point of insisting that he wasn’t just considering Pogačar or the other GC riders as the only obstacle in his battle to do well overall.
“Pogačar is maybe unbeatable right now, but perhaps the biggest rival of all in any case is myself, with all the doubts and the thoughts I can have. And then the rivals I have to face in the race are UAE, Ineos, AG2R…they are all very strong.”
While Bora have had a great first week with Martínez, not everything has gone their way as Florian Lipowitz, the promising young German racer who took third overall recently in Romandie, was already forced to abandon because of sickness.
“We had been hoping Florian would have had a key support role in the mountains for Dani, so now we’ll have to adjust our strategy,” Enrico Gasparotto, the team’s head DS at the Giro, told reporters on the rest day.
“That role could be taken up by [Max] Schachmann, but he crashed on stage 9, so it could be we have to look to other riders. We’ll have to be creative.”
Gasparotto said that he was not in any way surprised by Martínez’s strong performance so far, given that he had been riding well at the start of the season, where the Colombian beat no less a star than Remco Evenepoel (Soudal-QuickStep) on both summit finishes of the Volta ao Algarve.
“For now, sitting second in the GC is the best we could achieve; it’s pretty difficult to do something against this kind of Tadej Pogačar. But it’s also a fact that in the two summit finishes we’ve had in the Giro here, we’ve had two second places with Dani, too.”
“His strong time trial” – taking eighth in Perugia, 1:48 back, and moving ahead of Geraint Thomas overall – “is not a surprise, either, he’s already [twice] been National Colombian champion,” Gasparotto pointed out.
“So we’ve handled the key stages pretty well so far, and that’s why I’m happy about how we are doing.”
As is the case with Ineos Grenadiers and Decathlon-AG2R La Mondiale, Gasparotto said that they were not just looking for a top overall result, but also stage wins. Danny van Poppel is Bora’s man for the sprints, taking fifth in Naples, while Schachmann, too, has been on the hunt both on stage 1, finishing second, as well as claiming fifth in the TT.
As for Pogačar himself, Gasparotto said that the Slovenian clearly had a strategy that was not just designed for the Giro d’Italia, but with the Tour de France in mind as well.
“I am definitely impressed because he’s super-solid,” Gasparotto said. “It’s clear that he’s going for the Tour de France as well, so we expected him to want to kill the Giro in the first week and then control it in the second and third.”
“So that’s nothing new, but our dream is to bring the GC battle closer to him. It’s still a long way to Rome,” he concluded. “If we see Tadej suffering we should be ready to use this opportunity.”
Schachmann himself agreed that while Pogačar was going to be very hard to beat, even if the teams opted to join forces against him, neither Bora-Hansgrohe nor the other teams were going to throw in the towel as a result.
“It would be very hard for an alliance to work because he’s such an impressive rider,” Schachmann told reporters on Monday. “For years, let alone weeks, he’s not shown any major weak points.
“When it’s a 10% gradient on a climb, you can make as many alliances as you want, but it won’t make it slower or faster.
“Still, in two weeks in a Grand Tour, things can change, and he has had bad days in his career. So if we feel that could be happening, we’ll certainly go for it – and we won’t be the only ones, either.”
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