Grand Tours can often be won and lost on a single, seemingly innocuous, moment – and that may have been the case in Wednesday’s stage 17 of the Giro d’Italia.
Sylvester Szmyd, the Polish climbing domestique from Liquigas, will never win a Grand Tour; the 34-year-old’s best days are passed him and he’ll probably never win a stage.
In fact, Szmyd – who is currently 26 minutes off the pace in the Giro GC – will struggle even to finish within a few minutes off the top at the conclusion of any major mountain stage.
It’s not because he can’t climb; he can, excellently. It is, indeed, these high mountain stages where Szmyd’s true worth comes into play.
Szmyd is paid handsomely by his Liquigas team precisely for his climbing ability – and yet he is not expected to ever pick up a win, let alone finish in touch with those who do take the spoils.
You see, Szymd’s furious pace-setting is integral in team-mate Ivan Basso’s bid to win a third Giro title. He is is paid to crack Basso’s rivals – and essentially, he is paid to crack himself.
If Szmyd is still riding on the front underneath the ‘flamme rouge’ with one kilometre to go, then he will have failed. For if he is able to still ride, then so to are the men whom Basso is trying to beat.
Much like a sprinter relies on a lead-out man to help propel him to the line, Basso needs Szmyd to take enormous turns on the front and set him steady. Szmyd is Geraint Thomas to Basso’s Mark Cavendish – except that sprints occur in the final metres of a race, whereas Szmyd’s job can go on for hours.
And so when Liquigas led the peloton onto the Cat.1 Passo Giau on Wednesday, 27 kilometres from the finish at Cortina d’Ampezzo in the next valley, you can imagine the alarm bells sounding when Szmyd vanished without a trace.
Liquigas has set a ferocious pace on the previous climb and descent, blowing apart the peloton and shedding bodies until there were just 25 in a leading pack.
Of those 25 riders, four wore the familiar lime green shirts of the Italian team. This was their moment; the scene was set for Plan A.
An exhausted Damiano Caruso dropped back moments after the start of the gruelling climb, his job for the day done.
The next Liquigas rider due to fade was Eros Capecchi. But it wasn’t the young Italian who suddenly halted and threw up an arm on the front of the peloton.
It was Szmyd, Basso’s not-so-secret weapon. The Pole had suffered a mechanical problem at the most inopportune moment. One seemingly tiny detail undetected my most – but something with potentially huge ramifications.
Imagine the build up to the most amazing football goal, only for the potential goalscorer to miss out because the player with whom he was meant to make the killer one-two was suddenly forced to tie his shoelaces, whereby allowing the opposition defence to get back in time and mop things up at the back.
Capecchi tried his best to improvise and act as a willing replacement, but he didn’t last longer than the first hairpin bend. By now there was less than a dozen riders ahead as Capecchi waved Basso on with his one hand, and presumably crossed both fingers with the other.
Basso had to pull out Plan B, which involved him setting the pace much earlier than he had expected. It was a cruel blow for the Italian double Giro winner, who with Szmyd could well have delivered a decisive blow to many of his rivals.
You see, Basso had now dropped everyone apart from five riders: the pink jersey Joaquim Rodriguez (Katusha), second-place Ryder Hesjedal (Garmin-Barracuda), reigning champion Michele Scarponi (Lampre), young mulleted Colombian Rigoberto Uran (Team Sky) and diminutive stage eight winner Domenico Pozzovivo.
None of these men had a team-mate and each of them was equally isolated. Had Smyzd been there, who knows what kind of damage could have been done.
Uran and Scarponi, certainly, were riding on the edge – and both men were distanced when pocket rocket Pozzovivo upped the tempo towards the summit.
Rodriguez, too, looked in some trouble without his Katusha team-mate and compatriot Daniel Moreno. Better suited at short and sharp climbs, the Spaniard has a tendency to taper off in the third week of Grand Tours; Szmyd could have been the essential ingredient to see his reign at the top come to an end.
As it is, Rodriguez won the stage – his second of the race – and maintains a 30-second lead over Canadian Hesjedal, who has emerged as the favourite for the overall win after Sunday’s 30km ITT in Milan.
Basso is still third in the GC, 1:22 down, but his time trialling ability is not as strong as that of Hesjedal. Which is precisely why he will be hoping Szmyd has no mechanical issues on the two remaining mountain stages of the race – Friday’s stage to Val di Fiemme (five classified climbs) and the race’s queen stage on Saturday, which finishes atop the highest peak of any Grand Tour, the Stelvio (after three minor climbs and the ghastly Mortirolo, being attacked from the opposite side for the first time in Giro history).
Both stages are fearsome enough as they are – but spare a thought for Szmyd; it’ll be his job to suffer more than anyone else, and then hope that Basso has the legs to overturn his deficit.
Of course, the above is just my take on things. Perhaps I’m talking complete codswallop. Perhaps Szmyd cracked and disguised it as a puncture. Perhaps it was all intentional. Perhaps I’m reading way too much into things.
But that is the joy of cycling. And the joy of this particular Giro is that the conjecture and the excitement are going to go on right until the end.
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