Team Carapaz lashes out at Del Toro again in Rome: "Didn't ride the entire stage and then sprint for 9th place"

"To be honest, I slept very well. I am proud of my riders and the attitude Richard showed. We saw things that many cycling fans and I would not understand. But we didn't come to this race to defend second place; we wanted to win. We had clear ideas and executed our plan perfectly."

"No, no, our plan was to really destroy the race. We wanted to make it a man-to-man battle because we saw UAE's strategy on Friday. They kept two men with Del Toro, who blocked the race. On the way to Sestriere, you needed teammates, so we wanted to isolate Del Toro as quickly as possible by letting everyone go all out from the foot of the climb. Then it was 17 kilometers to the top, man against man."

"We didn't want anyone in the breakaway and tried to keep it within seven minutes. That way, not many riders would have been able to stay with them over the Finestre. Unfortunately, we flew out of a corner on a descent, and we only wanted to use Kasper Asgreen to control so we could save the rest of the team for the action on the climb. We didn't have the pink jersey, so chasing with more than one man wouldn't have made sense. It was also good for us to have van Aert up front, right?"

"Normally, Richard would have gone with Yates and also benefited from Wout. But he had tried three times and couldn't drop Del Toro, so we told him to let Yates go. He was 1.20 minutes behind Del Toro, who had no teammates at the front. So that was how we wanted to put pressure on Del Toro. But it didn't work because he didn't ride."

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"We were amazed. How often in your journalistic career have you seen a pink jersey wearer who didn't ride the entire stage and then sprint for ninth place in the results?"

"One hundred percent. But at that moment, I didn't necessarily think we had lost the Giro; I mainly thought Del Toro wouldn't win it. That's a difference."

"That's right. I only let Richard ride at the front for three kilometers, the last kilometers of the Finestre, because I didn't want to let Brandon McNulty and Rafal Majka, Del Toro's teammates, get back. I wanted to put even more pressure on Del Toro towards the valley so that he couldn't hesitate on the way to Sestriere and had to ride. And then we could have dropped him on the final climb, even though it had always been for second place from the Finestre onwards. It's okay."

Bram van der Ploeg (Twitter: @BvdPloegg | email: [email protected])