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2016 Giro d’Italia Stage 1: Dumoulin nabs opening time trial, first lead

Dutchman takes pink jersey on home soil.

May 6, 2016
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One of the 2016 Giro d’Italia favourites, Tom Dumoulin (The Netherlands/Giant-Alpecin) delighted the Dutch crowd in Apeldoorn by triumphing in Friday’s first stage time trial. Dumoulin rolled the flat 9.8-km in 11:03, 19-seconds faster than his nearest GC rival Vincenzo Nibali (Italy/Astana). It was Giant-Alpecin’s first win of the season.


The 99th Giro began with Etixx-QuickStep’s Italian Fabio Sabatini rolling down the starting ramp inside the Apeldoorn velodrome and heading outside into the sun. He ran the course in 11:49.

Canadian Hugo Houle (AG2R) was fifth out of the start house looking dapper in his national champion’s jersey and posted 11:53.


Svein Tuft was 22nd to start and he came in one second slower than Dutchman Moreno Hofland (LottoNL-Jumbo), who had the early hotseat with 11:28.

IAM’s Austrian Matthias Brändle deposed Hofland with a cracking 11:17. Brändle was 16th in last year’s world championships chrono and once held the world hour record.

Ryder Hesjedal hit the intermediate time check at the 4.8-km mark five-seconds slower than the Austrian before posting a good time of 11:36.


Brändle found himself bettered, as Swede Tobias Ludvigsson (Giant-Alpecin) stopped the clock at 11:11.

As the day went on the wind rose, with a tailwind in the early part and headwind in the latter half of the course. A typical story was Dutchman Martijn Keizer’s: the LottoNL-Jumbo man set the best intermediate time and passed his minute man, but he couldn’t break 11:11.

One rider who didn’t have a second-half fade was Keizer’s Slovenian teammate Primož Roglič, who put Ludvigsson 8-seconds in arrears.

Dumoulin was flying Friday, taking the fastest intermediate time of 5:21 and then forcing Roglič off the hot seat by hundreds of a second.

Of the top three favourites, Vincenzo Nibali had the best time, finishing five-seconds faster than Alejandro Valverde and 21-seconds quicker than Mikel Landa, who had the slowest time of all the contenders.

The last time a rider won a Giro TT by less than a second was 1987 when Roberto Visentini nipped Canadian Steve Bauer.

Sprinter Marcel Kittel (Germany/Etixx-QuickStep) put himself into a good position to take the pink jersey in the next couple of stages with a time of 11:14.

Svein Tuft was top Canadian in 25th with 11:29, Hesjedal seven-seconds back of that and Houle at +0:50 of the day’s winner.

Saturday’s course is the first of two similar consecutive profiles in the Netherlands. Unless winds make things tricky, it should be a day for the sprinters.

2016 Giro d’Italia Stage 1
1) Tom Dumoulin (The Netherlands/Giant-Alpecin) 11:03
2) Primož Roglič (Slovenia/LottoNL-Jumbo) s.t.
3) Andrey Amador (Costa Rica/Movistar) +0:08
25) Svein Tuft (Canada/Orica-GreenEdge) +0:26
41) Ryder Hesjedal (Canada/Trek-Segafredo) +0:33
106) Hugo Houle (Canada/AG2R) +0:50

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