Blazin’ Saddles: The final verdict on the 2022 Giro d’Italia after Jai Hindley's historic win in final weekend

On paper, a three-second lead for the best part of the final week seems like a script-writer’s dream. In reality, the tiny gap that separated pink jersey Richard Carapaz and his main rival Jai Hindley dulled the GC battle and made for a sluggish battle of attrition.

One that was exacerbated by the fact that a third man, Mikel Landa, was so assured of a first Grand Tour podium in seven years that he had little inclination to improve his lot. While Bora-Hansgrohe and Hindley turned the race on its head in devastating fashion on the last major climb of Stage 20, the Passo Fedaia, the prolonged stalemate that proceeded this moment of magic will be food for thought for race organisers in the years to come.

If anything, it was proof that reducing time trial kilometres for huge days in the mountains does not always have the desired effect. Ad/> Where, two years ago, the two main protagonists in pink – Hindley and the ultimate winner, Tao Geoghegan Hart – enjoyed a thrilling battle in the final week, sharing three mountain stages between them, Hindley was in 2022 the only GC rider to win a stage, and that came on Blockhaus at the end of the opening week.

Giro d'Italia‘Frightening prospect’ — Van der Poel will move to ‘another level’ after electric Giro3 HOURS AGO Britain’s Simon Yates, of course, won two stages, but he checked out of the GC battle shortly after his TT victory in Budapest after bashing his knee on the way to Mount Etna. Yates’s swashbuckling win in Torino in Stage 14 was not only a refutation of the mantra that mammoth climbs maketh a race, but a reminder of just how much impetus the GC battle lost when the crocked in-form BikeExchange-Jayco rider cracked on Blockhaus.