'We're all hunting for stage wins' - Lacking a GC bid, XDS Astana move into crunch time at Giro d'Italia

As the Giro d'Italia moves fully into its second week, the stage hunters are coming to the fore - meaning that while other WorldTour squads are looking at GC opportunities, XDS Astana's exclusive focus on stage wins will now be put to the test. 

The Kazakh squad has come to the 2025 Giro with multiple and very diverse types of racers. Riders like Diego Ulissi, winner of eight such transition stages like the tricky finale in Matera, and Wout Poels, who has taken mountains stages in the Tour and Vuelta but never in the Giro, say they are both ready to be in the thick of the action.

While Ulissi is hoping to feature strongly in Matera on stage 5, exactly the kind of finish at which he's excelled in the past, other challenges for Astana include defending Lorenzo Fortunato's mountains classification lead and seeing what all-rounders Nicola Conci and Cristian Scaroni can achieve.

Both Conci and Scaroni, together with Ulissi, were in the front group of stage 1 of the Giro, showing strong underlying form, while Fortunato was on the attack on stage 3. But as Poels told Cyclingnews at the stage 4 start, doing his 24th Grand Tour without a single leader was something he found particularly appealing and innovative.

"When I had a leader going for the podium, it was also good to work for that," the 37-year-old pointed out. "But now I have a little bit more of a free role here, and that's nice too.

"At Astana, we don't really have one leader, which makes it fun to really race more, try to go for breaks, and try to go for a stage, so personally I really like doing that."

"It's better that way [without GC leaders] because each of us got our own kind of stages and we can try to enjoy it day by day," Ulissi added.

"There are so many top riders, you never know what can happen, but there being so many GC contenders here this year maybe helps the breaks stay away, which is good. And the Matera finish does look good for me."

Of all the 2025 Giro peloton, Ulissi is the one who's raced the Italian Grand Tour the most, with 12 editions, including this one. But even though his last Giro stage win of eight dates from 2020, he insists his motivation to claim another remains as high as ever.

"It's always the same, I'm here, I'm in good shape and I will try to enjoy it the best I can," he said. "I've got the condition, now I just have to find the occasion."

Matera seems like one clear opportunity for XDS Astana to test out their stage win strategy, but throughout the entire race, it will be interesting to see how a team who have built previous Giros around GC bids like with 2016 winner Vincenzo Nibali and former podium finisher Miguel Angel López can fare. After an interim period going for bunch sprints with Mark Cavendish in 2023, where the Briton won the final stage into Rome, it seems that Astana now settled on a new strategy of going for stage wins of all types. 

With a very successful spring already, Poels pointed out, the team's morale is strong, so that helps them stay sharp and ready to try for more wins in the Giro too.

"It's going really well, also we're performing well so that step into the Giro was really easy to make," he told Cyclingnews.

"We have a good atmosphere, good morale, and also in the Giro we're going really well. Of course so far it's only just started, three days, but still, that's good.

"Fortunato being in the mountain jersey makes it another nice goal. A lot of opportunities are coming in the next few days, so we have to start going for them."

Subscribe to Cyclingnews for unlimited access to our 2025 Giro d'Italia coverage. Our team on the ground will bring you all the breaking news, reports, analysis and more from each and every stage of the Italian Grand Tour. Find out more.