Ivan Basso: “Fortunato, you repaid our trust.”

There’s that feeling of being inside history when you’re lucky enough to experience days like this: in places like these, on climbs like these, with riders like these. And it’s great to tell the story, a stage like this: the arms raised by Covi after a beautiful feat (congratulations), the general classification overturned, the beautiful day of Fortunato who didn’t make it into the breakaway but arrived with the leaders. And meanwhile, we have reached the end of the Giro d’Italia, which will bid us farewell with tomorrow’s time trial. Can one take stock of it? One can try, together with Ivan Basso: hot on the heels of descending the Marmolada, surrounded by beauty.

“We can’t deny one thing: in the last few days we were a bit in pain, and we were not able to seize the important moments and insert ourselves in the race when it mattered. This, in terms of results, penalized us a little bit, and we have to do mea culpa.”

And today, on the Marmolada?
Fortunato showed that he can hang with the best riders on the climbs and he caught an outstanding result, he showed that he ended this Giro on a crescendo, he put in his head and the tenacity that we know. He deserved to prove himself, he deserved the opportunity to come here and try to make the rankings: because it’s part of his growth path.

Of course, we missed the win…
We had our big chance with Maestri and unfortunately we only grazed it. In other stages we were not good at taking advantage of the opportunity: I’m thinking of Naples or Genoa when we went into a breakaway without the right man or with the right man but without teammates to support him.

A balance sheet?
We will do it later. For the moment I say that Lorenzo struggled throughout the Giro, maybe if he had not held on every day to defend the classification he could have hit a partial result. But for sure, he repaid the trust we gave him in a big way.

Maurizio Borserini