Naples has been attracting visitors for 2,500 years, and nobody ever leaves the place unmoved by what they see. For most, the eye is drawn upwards to the dramatic vista of the bay, Vesuvius shimmering off in the distance. For Geraint Thomas on stage 9 of the Giro d’Italia, the gaze was directed downwards to the bumps in the road beneath his wheels.
The Giro’s visit meant that the southwestern corner of the city was free of the notorious excesses of its traffic for the afternoon, but that only meant the substitution of one form of rolling chaos with another. On the rugged old carriageway that rises and dips through Pozzuoli, 162 cyclists were now scrambling for position instead of the usual flotilla of scooters and taxis.
Thomas, already a faller with a shade over 58km left to race, admitted afterwards that he could have done without the hassle. The Welshman came home in the main peloton to remain third overall, 2:58 down on Tadej Pogačar, but as he warmed down by the Ineos bus on Via Caracciolo, his thoughts were for the conditions rather than the classification.
“We were bouncing all over the place. People are going on a lot about safety at the moment and that’s definitely not safe,” Thomas said. “Just clowns in the circus, aren’t we, sometimes?”
Complaints about Naples’ road infrastructure are not new, of course, and not restricted to the pro peloton, which has now visited the city in three successive editions of the Giro. The image of sinkholes forming in the city streets of the 1970s is a key motif in Nicola Pugliese’s classic novel Malacqua, after all. Thomas acknowledged, too, that members of the Giro gruppo bore their own share of the blame for the tension in the finale.
“Obviously, the chain was jumping everywhere, which is not very nice,” Thomas said. “It’s pretty scary when you’ve got guys pretty desperate and bouncing underneath you, and you’ve got massive holes everywhere. I was just glad to get through that stage, to be honest.
“That final couple of descents, with the holes in the road, it was just absolute chaos. And we don’t help ourselves. I tried to give myself a bit of a gap so I could see the holes for safety. But as soon as you let a gap go, some idiot’s divebombing you to get in the gap. It was just absolute carnage.”
Thomas’ anxiety in the finale was perhaps amplified by his own crash earlier in the stage, though he confirmed that he had sustained no injury in the incident beyond a graze to his elbow. He explained that he had been unable to avoid crashing when Max Schachmann (Bora-Hansgrohe) tumbled in front of him, but he quickly rejoined the peloton after a bike change, paced by Ben Swift, Connor Swift and Tobias Foss.
“I haven’t crashed this year, so I had to get one out of the way,” Thomas joked of the incident. “I changed bikes after the crash and I chased back on, and it was a bit more sketchy then.
“In the final, it was chaotic, big time. But the boys like they’ve been doing all week, they looked after me really well, so I was in a perfect place most of the time.”
A below-par display in the Perugia time trial aside, Thomas has been well placed throughout this Giro to date, limiting his losses at Oropa, tracking Pogačar at Fossano and finishing within sight of the maglia rosa at Prati di Tivo on Saturday. Thomas has steadied himself over the 49 hours since that setback against the watch, but he knows, of course, that Pogačar is operating on a different plane to all-comers on this Giro.
Ineos will hope Thomas’ powers of endurance can level the playing field slightly in the third week, even if they are already relying on a collapse from Pogačar to take the maglia rosa. “To be beaten, Pogačar has to have a bad day – a really bad one,” coach Dario Cioni told RAI this weekend.
As the Giro breaks for its first rest day on Monday, meanwhile, Thomas admitted that he was simply glad to put his Neapolitan story behind him. “I’m just happy to get out of this peloton away from everyone, to be honest,” he said. “I’m a grumpy old man now.”