🎥 James Shaw and Robbie McEwen trade blows as bottle-gate 'feud' continues at the Giro

The first day of school can often be hard! The Giro d'Italia had barely started — and we'd already identified our 'blunder of the day award'. It can take a few days for a rider to achieve a degree of sharpness in a Grand Tour, and that was evident for EF Education-EasyPost's James Shaw.

Third time lucky is normally how the saying goes, but for Shaw even three attempts wasn't enough as he rode through the feed zone. The British rider wanted to grab a bidon, but failed to take one on three separate occasions. Let's hope a teammate was generous enough to hand over one of theirs.

The blunder caught the eye of former sprinter and TNT Sports commentator Robbie McEwen, who wasn't forgiving in his analysis of Shaw's bottle skills on the live broadcast. Little did he know it would create a Giro 'storm' in a teacup (or should that be bidon?).

Shaw's mistake was brought up again on the Breakaway, TNT's post race show, after McEwen criticized the rider harshly on the live broadcast. As Shaw dropped his third bottle during stage 1, McEwen spat "honestly, that should not happen at this level".

Fast forward to the start of stage 2, and Shaw was again defending himself after McEwen gave the rider an impromptu bottle grab lesson live on air. Despite the dressing down, Shaw took the ribbing well, claiming to be more embarrassed by being mistakenly coming from Derby, a close rival city to Shaw's home town of Nottingham.

You would think that the joke would end there, but it seems both the TNT team and Shaw himself were keen to keep it going. When asked at the start of stage 3 if he had anything to say to McEwen, Shaw decided to bring up one of the Aussie sprinters more embarrasing stats.

"What's his ratio of bottles dropped to the amount of race starts that he missed?" asked the Nottingham-born (not Derby!) rider. Cut to the studio and McEwen being forced to explain the dig. "I reckon it's 3:1", said McEwen. "I will say it myself, I was pretty good at getting a bottle. But I was not as good at being on time. I've missed 3 race starts. I once couldn't find the start town of a French race, and I never made the start," McEwen admitted sheepishly.

We'll call this one a draw. Stay tuned for more bottle-gate updates as they come in!