Silence. That's what came from Richard Carapaz as he stopped just past the line in Sestrière. Not tears, not anger, not even frustration, just silence.
He pulled up the side of the road, hunched over his bars, and kept his head down in quiet heartbreak. His EF Education-EasyPost press officer offered a comforting hand on his back, and tried to protect his rider from the media scrum forming around him. Carapaz kept his head down, and eventually, the scrum grew quiet too, an eerie pocket of silence amidst the chaos of a stage finish.
At the end of stage 20 of the Giro d'Italia, Richard Carapaz moved down to third overall, and that's almost certainly how his race will end in Rome on Sunday.
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Only 24 hours earlier, Carapaz had been considered the possible favourite to win this Giro. But after a stand-off with pink jersey Isaac del Toro (UAE Team Emirates-XRG), he – and Del Toro – watched the race ride away from them, and into the hands of Simon Yates (Visma-Lease a Bike).
Carapaz, who has been going toe to toe with Del Toro all week, was the first to attack on the Colle delle Finestre, briefly going clear with the Mexican rider, but they were then overtaken by Yates.
They had him in their sights for a long time, but Del Toro refused to work with his rival, and eventually Carapaz also decided he wasn't going to drag the pink jersey back to Yates, and a stand-off ensued.
Neither wanted to work with the other, the pace dropped, and Yates was able to pull out the gap he needed to seize the pink jersey away from both of them. After a week of aggression and attacks, a tactical conundrum undid the riders who might have been the favourites to win.
After a long time with his head in his hands, no doubt beginning to process what happened, Carapaz did spare a few words on what had happened on Saturday.
"Today we could have been the strongest, but it was the most intelligent who won," he said.
A journalist then asked if he felt that Del Toro had been racing more against Carapaz than racing to win the Giro. The exhausted, heartbroken Carapaz didn't have much to say on the matter, and chose his few words carefully.
"Well, finally he lost the Giro," he said curtly. "He didn't know how to race well and the most intelligent won."
'No regrets. Zero'
A kilometre down the road from where Carapaz was slumped over the bike in physical and emotional pain, his team were already beginning to dissect what had happened.
Like Carapaz, the team seemed convinced that the Ecuadorian had the legs to win the Giro, but was undone by a tactical puzzle that they just couldn't get out of.
"To win you need to play like this. The risk is that you can also lose," EF sports director Juanma Gárate told Cyclingnews and Bici.PRO. "They both had the legs, it was down to tactics. We weren't going to ride just to help UAE and finish second.
"Del Toro marked Richie, he tried to drop Del Toro but couldn't do it. So they started playing poker. When Yates got up to them and attacked, Richie closed him down but at one point you have to try to make your rivals close down attacks," he explained.
"In the last 3km we rode to make sure that Del Toro's teammates didn't get back on and could chase in the valley road to Sestrière. It didn't make sense to wait for them because Yates had Wout van Aert up the road. We could only wait and stay on the wheel at that point, it was up to them to chase."
Even in hindsight, it's hard for anyone to say what Carapaz could have done differently, and his sports director was clear that there was nothing about EF's race on stage 20 that they would rue.
"No regrets, not at all. Zero," Gárate said. "We tried as a team to do what we hoped. We rode hard at the start of the Colle delle Finestre to try to hurt Del Toro. We just didn't drop him, he was strong and always closed down Richie's attacks. He seemed obsessed about staying on his wheel."
But, even if there aren't any regrets, there is palpable disappointment from both Carapaz and his team that the battle to win never materialised in the way they'd hoped.
"Richie has already finished in a Grand Tour and we came to the Giro to win it," he said. "We rode to win right to the end of the Giro."
In the end, EF Education-EasyPost will have to settle for third on the podium, the fourth time Carapaz has finished in the top three of a Grand Tour without winning it, following the Vuelta a España in in 2020, the Tour de France in 2021, and the Giro in 2022. Del Toro may have also lost the race, so in a certain way, both teams' tactics worked. But as things panned out, in the tactical racing that played out on Saturday, there was no winner.
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