Giro Jot del Giorno - 5/10/2012

If you ever look at official notices for the stage in a Grand Tour, you will see, along with the medical reports, abandons, and non-starts, the list of infractions assigned to the riders and team staffers, plus the monetary amounts. The fines are always assessed in swiss francs, not euros, and before the creation of the European Union, not in the currency of the race's host country. The reason: the UCI, professional cycling's governing body, has its headquarters in Aigle, Switzerland. Switzerland is not part of the EU, so it still maintains its own currency.

Giro Jot del Giorno - 5/9/2012

In honor of today's team time trial, we have a couple of relevant Italian phrases.

cambi corti e regolari (KAHM bee KOR tee eh reg oh LAHR ee) - "Changes short and regular." This describes riders taking turns with short and regular pulls.

perdere le ruote (PEAR dehr ay lay ROW tay) - "Lose the wheel" means getting dropped.

Via Pez Cycling

I Guess That Wasn't Fair Trade

FT Alphaville » The 6am Cut London: Robert Stiller has been stripped of his chairmanship of Green Mountain Coffee Roasters after a margin call — triggered by a very steep fall in the company’s share price — forced the sale of 5m of his shares in the company in violation of internal trading policies, says the FT. Stiller remains on the board.

Giro Jot del Giorno - Rest Day

After 3 furious days of racing, we need more racing, right? Not this year. The teams needed an extra day because of the long transfer from Denmark to Italy, which will make the next rest day, 12 stages from now, seem like an eternity. Usually, a Grand Tour is like 3 regular Tours strung together, with a rest day occurring after about a week of racing. But coming up, the riders will have almost two weeks of racing before a break. This will be interesting to see how the teams deal with fatigue and injury. I predict more breakaways succeeding as the GC teams refuse to help the sprinter teams bring the escapers back.

Giro Jot del Giorno - 5/7/2012

There was a bit of confusion in the crash-marred finale of today's stage, as the maglia rosa holder crossed the finish line in the back of an ambulance, but still came out for the podium presentation. According to the 3 km rule governing crashes in a flat stage, those caught up in a crash or behind it, are awarded the same time as the eventual winner. The general rule for any stage racer is that the athlete must cross the finish line under his own power, otherwise the athlete is deemed to have abandoned the stage. But under the 3 km rule, those caught in the crash, because they are automatically awarded a finishing time, do not have to physically cross the finish line. Here's official word from Team BMC and Taylor Phinney:

Podium Appearance Important 

After remaining on the ground for several minutes, Phinney was helped into a rescue squad and his right ankle bandaged. Though he was not required by race rules to physically cross the finish line (since the mishap occurred in the final three kilometers), Phinney said he was feeling better and wanted to make an appearance on the podium. "I wanted to show the fans and the public and my family watching at home that I was OK," he said. "I felt like it was important to do that, to come back." BMC Racing Team Assistant Director Fabio Baldato said Phinney will join the rest of the team on a charter flight Monday night from Denmark to Italy. "Team President Jim Ochowicz and our race doctor, Dario Spinelli, will go with Taylor to a hospital in Verona tonight and we'll have an update afterwards," Baldato said.

However, those merely caught behind the crash, and uninjured, must still cross the finish line to establish a placing for the race record.

Giro Jot del Giorno - 5/6/2012

Even though the race is called the Giro d'Italia, the first 3 stages of this year's Tour of Italy is in Denmark. Denmark is not known for being very hilly, so it is not surprising that the first King of the Mountain points was awarded on a 4th category climb. The highest point in Denmark is only 173 meters, but today's "climb" at Osterbjerg was at an airy 47 meters. The third stage features the toughest climb during the Danish stages: climbing to 159 meters.

Giro Jot del Giorno - 5/5/2012

This blog has a regular feature during the summer called Tour Tidbit du Jour, which is about finding one interesting thing (at least to me) per day at the Tour de France. Only in the last couple of years has there been regular live (or semi-live) coverage in the USA of the Giro d'Italia. During those last few years, I have been watching the Giro, but without the quality of the live coverage at le Tour, I never felt I could find something to say every day.

That changed during the last year, as there is now a licensed live broadcast of the Italian feed in America. Universal Sports, during its cable broadcast, only shows the last two hours of the RAI broadcast, so there really isn't much analysis for a two hour show, or a multiple hour glut of feet turning over a pedal television shots. So, meh.

This year, after switching from DirecTV to AT&T U-verse, Universal Sports channel was a casualty of the change-over. Before, I could even take the digital broadcast over the air and plug it into my receiver box, but AT&T doesn't play nice with that, and with the huge broadband pipe I have, why pay for an additional standalone DVR? Nowadays, I have to pay a la carte for my Universal Sports coverage, and that suits me just fine.

Let's see how the Giro Jot goes then. I have to tell you, it took forever to come up with that phrase, since I couldn't  think of an alliterative equivalent to Tidbit. I needed that "juh" sound to match Giro and Giorno. Well, I got so hung up on latin and italian, that some other word for atom, component, or little bit never struck me until I thought of the greek iota, and the english bastardization of jot followed.

So, with only the third American to wear the maglia rosa with Taylor Phinney, the others being Andy Hampsten (the only American winner of the Giro) and Christian Vande Velde, we have your Giro Jot del Giorno for Stage 1.