With Garmin-Cervélo chief Jonathan Vaughters currently wrestling with the team’s Tour de France selection, Irish climber Dan Martin put in a strong claim for a place on the team when he won yesterday’s Giro della Toscana in Italy.
Martin picked up his first victory of the season in the 1.1-ranked race, beating Mauro Santambrogio (BMC Racing Team) and Miguel Angel Chavez Rubiano (D’Angelo Antenucci Nippo Corporation) to the line in Arezzo.
It followed on from four wins last season, namely a stage plus the overall classification of the Tour of Poland, the Tre Valli Varesine and the Japan Cup, and underlines once again that Martin has a big future ahead.
It also shows that his current condition is good, two weeks before the start of the Tour. He said afterwards that he would have to just wait and see if the result earned him the nod from Vaughters. “Obviously it shows I am in good form, but he has also been talking to me about leading the team at the Vuelta. It depends on what his ideas are for the Tour team,” he told VeloNation, just before taking a flight back to Spain.
“Obviously we can’t send nine guys to try to win stages, we have to have some helpers thrown in there as well. I still could help the guys in the mountains, though. Anyway, he has got the master plan, so I have to just wait and see. For now, I am just going to focus on the [Irish] nationals and try to get the jersey back…I’m feeling good.”
As Martin told VeloNation in a long interview published the day before his win, he had allergy issues in the Critérium du Dauphiné. As expected by him, these settled down and he rode strongly in Italy.
His sensations were initially sluggish, but he then settled in and got stronger as the kilometres passed. “I felt a bit lethargic at the start, I didn’t feel too fresh at all,” Martin told VeloNation. “It was a really hard race. We wrote the first 30 kilometres at just 30 kilometres an hour on the flat..it was a total Italian race, just riding along talking, yet I think the average was still over 40 kilometres per hour at the end. So it really sped up, it was just full gas for most of the day. That shows with only 30 finishers.”
Martin’s Garmin-Cervélo team-mate Tom Peterson got into an early break, then when they were brought back, Martin clipped away. “I attacked solo with one lap to go. I got a decent gap, but the legs were not good enough to go to the finish. I ended up getting caught by ten or twelve guys. Then Christophe [Le Mevel] went away on the last climb.
“He almost ended up winning, but we caught him with 400 metres to go. I was blocking like crazy behind, trying to let him win, but that left me quite fresh for the sprint.”
Santambrogio jumped hard for the line, but an attentive Martin grabbed his wheel, then kicked strongly to come around him. He won by a bike length, throwing his arms in the air to celebrate the win.
Now it’s a question of waiting for the announcement. Martin has never ridden the Tour, and at 24 years of age he’s keen to do so. Other team-mates are also going well, though, and so Vaughters will have to mull over the list and work out which riders to take. These include Tom Danielson, who was fifth in yesterday’s final time trial in the Tour de Suisse and ninth overall, as well as Ramunas Navardauskas, third in the Ster ZLM Toer.