Cycling: Today's stage before the last rest day of this year's Giro was tough: An extremely difficult mountain stage in the middle of the Dolomites with a mountain finish in Madonna di Campiglio awaited the peloton. In the end, Astana pro Mikel Landa wins - Contador is third and gets more seconds on fourth Aru. After Porte, Uran is probably the next overall favorite to say goodbye today.
A small breakaway group quickly formed today that showed no fear of the tasks ahead in the mountains: Giovanni Visconti, Benat Intxausti (both Movistar), Ilnur Zakarin (Katusha), Brent Bookwalter (BMC), Francesco Gavazzi (Southeast), Hubert Dupont (Ag2r), Diego Rosa (Astana), Sergio Paulinho (Tinkoff-Saxo) and Konstantin Sioutsou (Sky) made up the group of 9. Unfortunately, Simon Geschke (Giant-Alpecin) missed the jump to the escapees, although the Berliner could have used the mountain points today in his hunt for the maglia azzura. His biggest competitor, Intxausti, rode in the leading group mentioned for quite a while, but he gave up before the first mountain prize.
After 130km, the Passo Daone finally claimed two prominent victims: Richie Porte (Sky) and Rigoberto Uran (Etixx-QuickStep) could no longer keep up with the pace of the field in which Contador and Aru were also driving and were left behind on the sometimes extremely steep pass. What followed afterwards is probably best described as "Contador vs. Astana". The Kazakh team showed a really impressive team performance and worked constantly with five, later with four drivers for their classification driver Fabio Aru. Contador was largely isolated - so it was all the more astonishing how well the Spaniard was able to ward off the attacks from Astana and was not impressed for a single second by the sky-blue superiority. He even managed to secure two bonus seconds in the intermediate sprint.
The brutal final up to Madonna di Campiglio ended up being a four-way battle: Mikel Landa, who had worked for his Astana captain Aru for a long time, Aru himself, Contador and Yuri Trofimov (Katusha) offered a gripping fight for the day's victory. In the end it was Mikel Landa who took the stage win ahead of Trofimov - Aru had no chance against Contador who extends his overall lead to 2:30.
Final result of stage 15, Giro d'Italia 2015
[easy table th=“0″]1.,Mikel Landa Meana,SPA,Astana,04:22:35
2.,Yuri Trofimov,RUS,Katusha,00:00:02
3., Alberto Contador, SPA, Tinkoff-Saxo, 00:00:05
4.,Fabio Aru,ITA,Astana,00:00:06
5.,Steven Kruisjwijk,NED,LottoNL-Jumbo,00:00:38
6., Andrey Amador, CRC, Movistar, 00:00:42
7., Leopold Konig, CZE, Sky, 00:01:00
8.,Tanel Kangert,EST,Astana,00:01:10
9.,Alexandre Geniez,FRA,FDJ,00:01:49
10.,Damiano Caruso,ITA,BMC,00:02:13
[/easy table]
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