Coming into the last weekend of this year’s Giro d’Italia 2021, the rerouted Stage 19 with its summit finish was always going to be a tense affair with (we hoped) aggressive riding. And that is exactly what we got. With Deceuninck-QuickStep, all in for Joao Almeida, and Bike Exchange, all in for Simon Yates, alternating putting down the pain, it was definitely a day of reckoning. By the end of the stage, it was Yates who took the solo win, with Almeida coming second, and maglia rosa Egan Bernal rolled in third, limiting his losses to 28sec. Yates is now 2.29 behind Bernal, but only 20sec away from Bahrain’s Damiano Caruso‘s second step on the podium. The GC top 10 stays the same.
