It wasn't to be. Top favourite Jonathan Milan's dream of winning the Giro d'Italia's first full-on stage 1 sprint in 13 years evaporated some 300 metres from the finish line when the Lidl-Trek racer suddenly found himself running on empty.
Milan had a lot at stake on Friday afternoon's slightly uphill sprint in the Black Sea coastal town of Burgas, with a chance not just to take his fifth Giro stage but also his first ever maglia rosa – and the first of the 2026 race, too, in a year when the jersey is sponsored by his home region of Friuli-Venezia Guilia.
Lidl-Trek did plenty of the hard work during the relatively straightforward stage keeping a two-rider break in check and when Milan claimed third place – first from the bunch – in the intermediate sprint at Sozopol, with 57 kilometres to go ahead of Kaden Groves (Alpecin-Premier Tech), it boded more than well for his chances in the finale.
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Instead, as Milan explained to reporters while pedalling towards the team bus, after losing contact with his teammates just as the roads began to narrow dramatically on the run-in to Burgas – it was a big casino [chaos] as he put it – the energy he needed to chase back to the front was the energy he then didn't have for the sprint itself.
"We were up there in the last kilometres doing fine, but we lost contact with one another with five kilometres to go or so, maybe a bit less, I don’t even know how. It was a big casino," Milan told reporters afterwards.
"I was caught towards the back and then had to ride by myself for a kilometre and a half, and that's where I used up a lot of my strength.
"Then when I got there, I got on somebody's wheel, I don't know who, he wasn't a teammate and was waiting for him to launch his sprint. But he never got started."
The sprint itself was brutally affected by a mass crash in the closing kilometre that blocked in a lot of the other riders, but if Milan avoided that and was on the front where he wanted to be, he was already out of the winning equation in any case.
"I didn't hear the crash, what was it, 300 metres to go? [Ed. the crash occurred at just over 600m to go] But I hope nobody was hurt. In any case, when somebody went for it from the left, my legs weren't there."
"QuickStep did a great job in any case, and congratulations to [winner Paul] Magnier."
The sight of Milan's teammate Max Walscheid off the front but patently running out of legs too, in the finale, as Magnier and the other top finishers roared past, neatly summed up the difficult and overly fragmented situation that Lidl-Trek found themselves in during the finale.
But as he reached the team bus and ended his on-the-bike interview with journalists padding alongside, Milan already seemed determined to put his misfortune behind him.
"We'll turn the page and look for the next one," Milan concluded. And indeed after Saturday's hilly finale into Veliko Tarnovo, that opportunity could come as soon as Sunday, on stage 3 into Sofia.
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