Giro d'Italia Daily – Stage 1, Team Time Trial

The Giro d'Italia is one of three Grand Tours on the cycling calendar. It is airing on Universal Sports over the next three weeks and during that time daily recaps can be found here on this blog.

Today's Stage: Short team time trial to start the Giro d'Italia. Team time trial is a race where an entire team works together and the individual riders finish with the time of their team's fifth rider through the finish line unless they fall behind the rest of the team.

Marco Pinotti leads the HTC-Columbia to Team Time Trial Win
Photo Courtesy of Sydney Morning Herald

Who won today's stage: The HTC-Columbia team (pictured at left) won the team time trial for the second year in a row, putting Italian time trial champion Marco Pinotti in the leader's pink jersey (yes it really is pink).

What matters in the GC race: None of the major contenders other than Joaquim Rodriguez lost significant time and Rodriguez of the Katusha team can't time trial to save his life anyway so it's no big deal. The rest are all closely packed together.

Biggest surprise of the day: The unheralded Omega-Pharma Lotto team, a team that doesn't really care about this race and lacks any real time trial pedigree, finished third on the stage after going out on the road first. This very well could be the high point of the race for this team so fans of this Belgian squad should enjoy now.

Biggest Disappointment of the day: Garmin-Cervelo, winner two years ago and second last year in this discipline, finished fifth. Considering the expectations in a discipline that Garmin considers its specialty, this is a horrible performace caused by dropping too many team members too early on the course.

What is coming tomorrow? Tomorrow is a sprint day for certain. This course as a whole is excessively mountainous and there aren't a ton of sprint stages. Tomorrow is one so don't expect a breakaway to have chance at staying away from the sprinters tomorrow.

Any GC changes tomorrow? Mark Cavendish could take the leaders pink jersey from his teammate Pinotti because of time bonuses, but nothing much other than that. The main contenders won't be in attack mode for some time yet and it is too early for a breakaway like the 12 minute gap that got away last year in awful weather to have a chance.