Simon Yates has had a tough day in the saddle on stage nine, conceding valuable minutes to some of his biggest rivals at the Giro d’Italia.
The 2018 Vuelta a Espana champion, who noted ‘blocked legs’ at the finish, dropped three-minutes and 11seconds to stage winner Primoz Roglic (Jumbo-Visma) and two-minutes six-seconds to Vincenzo Nibali (Bahrain-Merida).
“I had a bit of a stinker,” Yates said. “I was going OK on the flat section there, but when I tried to step on it once we reached the climb, I just didn’t have anything.”
“It’s one of those things. We’ll have to come up with a new plan now, a new strategy and go from there.”
“We’d only done one effort before and that was in the prologue [in Bologna], all the other days have been flat and in the wheels. I’m looking forward to getting more and more in the mountains to see what we can do.”
