There were a number of surprising results in today’s fifteenth stage of the Giro d’Italia, an individual hilly time-trial from Castelrotto to Alpe di Siusi.
Amongst the surprises was the fourth place finish for Sergey Firsanov (Gazprom-RusVelo) who finished 30″ behind his team-mate and stage winner Alexander Foliforov.
However, Firsanov lost time on the climb when he was held up by a Tinkoff team car and looks to have been in a position to challenge for a podium finish as he only finished 7″ on third-placed finisher Alejandro Valverde.
The Tinkoff driver braked suddenly causing the Russian rider to come close to stopping before inching his way past the car.
It’s unclear what caused the Tinkoff driver to stop, but the incident won’t have had much impact on GC as Firsanov sits in 32nd place, over 49 minutes behind race leader Steven Kruijswijk.
Stage 15 Results
1 Alexander Foliforov (Gazprom-RusVelo) 28:39
2 Steven Kruijswijk (Team LottoNL-Jumbo) ”
3 Alejandro Valverde (Movistar Team) 0:23
4 Sergey Firsanov (Gazprom-RusVelo) 0:30
Oleg Tinkov's masterplans at work!#Giro pic.twitter.com/2wv2yvmi8S
— CyclingHub.tv (@CyclingHubTV) May 22, 2016
Hope that result doesn’t turn out to be too good to be true!