Caleb Ewan again struggled to fight for victory in the Padova sprint, with his Jayco-AlUla team admitting that a number of factors have worked against the Australian in the Giro d’Italia.
Ewan is neither sick nor out of form but is lacking the speed needed to be competitive in the high-speed Giro sprints. He also does not have the dedicated lead-out train of the quality and quantity that is helping Tim Merlier (Soudal-QuickStep) and Jonathan Milan (Lidl-Trek) to win sprints.
Final lead-out man Luka Mezgec abandoned the Giro before the Lake Garda time trial and Jayco-AlUla are also trying to defend Filippo Zana’s top 10 in the overall classification and target stages.
“He's not sick. I think his condition in general is really good but he is lacking a bit of top-end speed,” Jayco-AlUla Director of High Performance and Racing Matt White told Cyclingnews.
Ewan indicated that positioning was again his biggest problem in the Padova sprint.
“It was pretty messy. There was a rush for the corner with 400 metres to go, I was on my own there and got swamped in the corner. I was just too far back again,” Ewan said despondently before riding to his team bus.
The 29-year-old from Sydney returned to Jayco-AlUla in 2024 after his bitter divorce with Lotto Dstny. He and the team were hoping to reboot his sprinting career but his only victory so far is a stage at the Tour of Oman, and then a few placings.
Ewan is sharing sprinting duties at Jayco-AlUla with Dylan Groenwegen, who will ride the Tour de France, and the team have yet to perfect their support for both sprinters.
“Yes and no,” White said when asked if the lead out was a factor in Ewan’s lack of even a top-five result in the numerous Giro d’Italia sprints.
“Obviously they've been pretty hectic sprints, and in some of the sprints you would like to have them dialled in a bit better. But we’ve got one more chance,” White said, perhaps remembering the final stage in Rome, where Mark Cavendish won in 2023 after a similar three weeks of suffering and disappointment.
Ewan has ridden the Giro d’Italia five times but never finished the Italian Grand Tour. White believed that is also a factor.
“We tried some other things, a little bit different way of doing things,” he said of Ewan’s race programme and long block of altitude training rather than racing in April.
“This is the first time he's actually ever tried to finish the Giro. He always used the Giro as a stepping stone to the Tour, which meant hopping off after 10 days, 12 days, and never, getting through the mountains,” White explained.
“Sunday’s 222-kilometre mountain stage to Livigno was the biggest day of his career. Caleb has used altitude training with success in the past, and as I said his condition is good. We're just not sprinting as we would have liked.”
White has years of racing and Grand Tour experience and knows that professional racing is never easy, logical or straightforward.
“The plan wasn't to ride GC with Zana, that's for sure,” White said, mixing sarcasm and realism. “The plan was for Eddie Dumbar to go for GC, Ewan to go for the sprints and Zana to go for stages.
"But we lost Eddie after stage 2 to a nasty crash. Because of his proximity to guys in the top five, Zana hasn't been able to move for the stage win he got last year.
“We’ve been unlucky and stuck between a rock and a hard place. But that’s Grand Tour racing, things rarely go completely as planned. You've always got to be able to adapt and that’s what we're trying to do. The Giro is not over yet.”
Get unlimited access to all of our coverage of the Giro d'Italia- including journalists reporting, breaking news and analysis on the ground from every stage of the race as it happens and more. Find out more.
