Was the Giro’s start in Ireland just a step too far?

Don’t get me wrong, it’s good that Grand Tours start in other countries. It’s also great to take races like the Giro to places where cycling isn’t mainstream.

It spreads the word and lets people experience a bit of what cycling fans like about this wonderful sport.

But can you take things too far? I think so. The Giro’s start in Ireland was a case in point.

It probably cost Marcel Kittel his chance to collect a hatful of Giro stages, and rattle Mark Cavendish’s cage before the Tour de France even starts.

Pro racers are fragile things, like all top endurance athletes. Okay, they somersault over road furniture, crash into barbed wire, scrape skin to the bone and regularly break themselves, but they almost always carry on.

“Put me back on my bike.” So Tom Simpson never said moments before his death. He said something similar but it didn’t scan, so a journalist stepped in, transposed his meaning, and the words live in spirit in the soul of every cyclist to this day.

Give them pain, discomfort and they just keep going, but expose them to a cough bug, a stomach virus or the flu, and they fall like a felled ox.

That’s what happened to Marcel Kittel in the Giro. The day after he turned himself so far inside out to win his second stage that you could see his kidneys, Kittel sat in a stuffy airport for hours before getting on an even stuffier plane.

A plane where the only air you have circulates around and around with all the nasties people breathe into it. It’s like living in bacterial soup.

Exercise lowers everybody’s immune system, and boy had Kittel been exercising. Normally he’d be wrapped up in cotton wool after each stage, only to be unwrapped and told to go the next day.

Cleanliness is paramount in cycling teams, with everyone drilled to wash their hands, wash their hands and keep washing them after they do anything.

There’s antiseptic hand-wash on every table and placed in every room.

Teams have nutritionists who are fascists about food hygiene, some teams have their own chefs who are the same. Dirty hotel kitchens are a thing of the past.

Anyone in any team who has a cold or stomach bug is quarantined. Get the flu and you get sent home.

Normally the riders cope well, they are fit, young and strong, and so they should be. But anyone’s defences can be overwhelmed and I reckon that’s what happened to Kittel.

Dublin to Bari was a long time to be outside a controlled environment, and down Kittel went.

It’s a shame. Not for me personally, because fellow Yorkshireman Ben Swift has a way better chance of winning a stage now, but we will be deprived of seeing any more of Kittel 2014 in this race, and he had been spectacular.

His Dublin sprint was a thing of beauty, if raw power and desire can be called beautiful.

We’ll probably have to wait until the Tour de France to see it again, a race where I thought Cavendish would reclaim the sprint throne, but now I’m not so sure.

Cavendish may not have an answer to what I saw in Dublin. If Kittel takes that form to Leeds it’s possible that there isn’t an answer. If Cav can come up with one, he really will be the greatest sprinter ever.