Elia Viviani, a professional since 2010, is taking away in this Giro those satisfactions as a pure sprinter which for years have been denied him not only due to the excessive power of the foreign sprinters in turns – the various Cavendish, Kittel, Gaviria, Greipel who have hoarded stages and who forfeited this year – but also due to the incomprehensible distrust of the teams with which he raced previously.
The behavior of Team Sky towards him was sensational and almost offensive, as they didn't even summon him for last year's edition of the pink race, betting everything on the fight for the classification with Geraint Thomas and Mikel Landa. It was yet another flop for Team Sky in the Giro. Excluded from the Giro, Viviani hoped at least to have a place in the Tour or the Vuelta under the command of Chris Froome: nothing to do.
At that point Viviani understood that it was better to change the air and jacket. However, the victories in the Hamburg Cyclassics and a stage in the Tour de Romandie remain from his last season at Sky on the very day in which they communicated his exclusion from the Giro. Now on the threshold of thirty years, after many placings but few successes, his career was at a dangerous crossroads. It was Quick-Step Floors who restored his confidence in his abilities and this year chose him to replace nothing less than a sprint giant like Marcel Kittel who passed to the Katusha.
For Viviani it was like going back from purgatory to paradise, ready to repay such esteem from the Belgian team with a series of victories right from the debut at the Tour Down Under where he won the third stage. A few days later he repeated himself on the Dubai Tour obtaining two victories and the final record in the standings. He still wins a stage and the points classification in the Abu Dhabi Tour.
He also won the Drieaagse Brugge-De Panne, transformed this year into a one-day semi-classic. With these successes under her belt, the Quick-Step Floor decides to make Viviani its captain for certain races such as the sprinter stages in this Giro.
And Viviani couldn't have done better with two sensational and winning sprints in the first two stages in line, in Tel Aviv by forcefully recovering Jakub Mareczko, yesterday in Eilat with an acrobat's leap to slip through the Irishman Sam Bennett who, with a change of direction as incorrect as it was risky, he had pressed it against the barriers. It's true that very few foreign fast wheels are seen in this Giro – the only one so far seems to be Bennett, who was also surpassed in Eilat by Sacha Modolo – but this Viviani is proving to be a completely new force of nature.
And his sprint, a mix of courage, class and power – ennobles the third and final stage in Israel, 229 km rather sleepy, with Rohan Dennis always in pink, all in a group in the endless plain of the Negev desert, among dromedaries and dunes destined to remain in the folklore of the history of the Giro, which returns to Italy today and which on Tuesday will restart in Sicily, from Catania to Caltagirone, almost 200 km without a meter of flat land and with a final stretch with gradients of up to 13%.
