In the Jutland wind the first time trial mini-stage of 8,7 kilometres, won as expected by the American Taylor Phinney, said that Ivan Basso is there. In the ranking detached from the possible final candidates to win the Giro, the leader of Liquigas, who arrived in Herning as full of hopes as full of unknowns after a troubled start to the season, lost only three seconds from Roman Kreuziger while in a specialty that is not his he even earned 20 on the Luxembourgian Franck Schleck, 24 on Damiano Cunego and a good 29 on a disappointing Michele Scarponi, who rode in the pink jersey having won the 2011 Giro by default. The first “real” pink jersey ended up on the shoulders of one of the the best promises of world cycling, the twenty-one-year-old Phinney, step by step father Davis, winner of two stages of the Tour, and mother Connie Carpenter, women's cycling Olympian in 1984 in Los Angeles. Whether it's a new Lemond or Armstrong is too soon to say but it has all the potential to be a protagonist in this pink race. Meanwhile, thanks to his success in the prologue, Phinney enjoys the pleasure of having conquered three jerseys: the pink one for the general classification, the red one for the points classification and the white one for the youngsters. First of the Italians, fourth at 15” behind the stars and stripes specialist, came Manuele Boaro, a professional since last year, on whom Bjarne Riis' Saxo Bank, orphan of Alberto Contador, is betting a lot.
Basso, at the end of the time trial, repeated the classic "I'm happy" but asked himself, as an intelligent rider, for more conclusive checks. If he's here at the Giro, it's because he's convinced he can be competitive. He would have preferred to get there without all the injuries he's had, but Ivan isn't the type to feel sorry for himself. “It's the desire to race that drives me, as well as the trust I feel around me – said Basso at the punching before the start. It will be a very open Giro, both for the route, hard and intriguing, and for the riders with whom I will have to measure myself. I don't see anyone superior to the others, but many excellent athletes each with their own strengths. Scarponi, Kreuziger, Schleck, Cunego, Rodriguez, Gadret and more. There will be twenty-one stages of maximum concentration”.
The Giro will stay in Denmark for another two days. First with a circuit of 206 km. from Herning to Herning, then on Monday another 190 km from Horsens to Horsens: the only danger was the wind on the routes, with Mark Cavendish a great favorite in the predictable final sprint, which couldn't be flatter than that. Technically insignificant tracks, so much so that even today there are many who wonder why a start at these latitudes. In the 103 years of its history, the Giro d'Italia had already started nine from abroad, but almost always to celebrate an anniversary, as in 1996 from Athens (centenary of the Olympics), in 2002 from Groningen in the Netherlands (then touching the other 5 founding countries of the EEC), in 2006 by Seraing in Belgium (50 years after the tragedy of Marcinelle, in which 136 Italian miners died). Discarding historical reasons and recurrences, it is clear that the choice to start from Jutland, the northernmost point ever touched by the Giro and Tour, ends up leading to purely economic reasons.
It is no coincidence that Herning is the birthplace of Bjarne Riis, team manager of Contador's team, the Saxo Bank which is financed and bears the same name as one of the major Danish banks. When at the beginning of February the Tas of Lausanne banned Contador for suspected doping, depriving him of victory not only in the 2010 Tour but also in the Giro which he swept in 2011, it was a bad situation for the organizers of the Giro: they could no longer disassemble the start of the Giro, but they knew they had to go to Denmark, to the home of Saxo Bank, the main sponsor of the Danish choice, with a classification redone at the table, with Scarponi in the pink jersey, without even a shadow of Contador, the champion on whom the Saxo Bank has invested tens of millions of euros. But the celebration with which Herning, illuminated by an unexpected but auspicious sun, welcomed the Giro took away much of the embarrassment accumulated in these weeks before on the upper floors of the Gazzetta.
