Strong ride by Liberty Seguros-Würth

In today's first hilly stage of the Giro, Liberty Seguros-Würth rode solidly, placing five men in the lead group of around five riders Scarponi, Caruso, Osa, Serrano and Abeja). Scarponi was the best placed of these, coming across the line in Saltara in 10th position, 20 seconds behind Rik Verbrugghe. Also, Liberty's Sergey Yakovlev was one of the riders in the long break during the 236 km stage.

Although today was tough, tomorrow will be the first real mountain top finish of this year's Giro, and everyone is sharpening their knives for it. "I believe that tomorrow's stage will make important differences, because today will pay," said team director Marino Lejarreta. "It was a very hard stage it will be difficult to recover. A stage like this one in the Vuelta a España would have undoubtedly been the queen stage.

"Today we could see Di Luca starting to fail, even though it might only be the effect of the change of pace, and Rujano, though in his case he was affected by gastroenteritis, like almost the whole Selle Italia team. Nevertheless, among Liberty Seguros-Würth, even though we stayed in the same hotel as the Italo-Colombian team, nobody suffered intestinal problems.

"Another piece of good news is that Unai Osa did not experience his knee problems again, which seems to indicate that he will be able to play his cards in this Giro until the end. Dani Navarro, on the other hand, suffered two crash today, although he only had superficial wounds and could finish without major problems."