Sastre tuning up for Giro

2008 Tour de France winner Carlos Sastre is still honing his form after getting a slow start to the year due to a bout with the influenza virus in February. He finished the Castilla y León in 40th place overall, 6:24 behind Levi Leipheimer. The Cervélo TestTeam rider was happy to finish the race, which he was using as preparation for his first major goal of the season, the Giro d'Italia.

"The stage today was, like the rest of the stages, very fast paced with not one minute of truce in the peloton," Sastre said after the final stage to Valladolid on Friday. "Even though it was windy, the stage was quite fast on sometimes hard, narrow roads, producing a fairly large crash 70 km from the finish line which I had the good fortune to not be involved in."

"I've been improving slowly, which is what I expected from this race. Now I expect a tough week of training before tackling the GP Miguel Indurain using it as another step to reach top condition."