Laigueglia, a UAE affair…

59° Trofeo Laigueglia
Laigueglia-Laigueglia (202 km)

Beautiful, what surrounds this race: and Liguria is made like this, able to mix colors and smells, sea and mountains, blue and green. And you’re surprised every time, every time, every time: coming here to run the Trofeo Laigueglia is beautiful for this, but it’s beautiful because you start the Italian calendar and you approach the most important races.

Of course winning here is not easy at all, because the strongest riders in the world try to do it and because those four passages on Colla Micheri are bad and hurt. And because races don’t always go the way you want them to. Today, it happened that coming down from Testico, a breakaway of 22 riders was formed and the UAE was present: difficult to think to recover them, difficult to think that the Emirates team could lose the race. And in fact, the podium was all theirs: Polanc, Ayuso, Covi.

And EOLO-KOMETA? We tried, trying to recover the disadvantage, with Maestri.e Gavazzi together with Fortunato. But up front, they were too strong.

We have to look at what’s to come: that is, other races. Other beautiful races. Strade Bianche, Tirreno-Adriatico, Milano-Torino, Milano-Sanremo. What a beauty, exactly.

Mirco Maestri: “Unfortunately on that descent the breakaway went away, and to say that we weren’t even in a bad shape: we were on the wheel of the Trek men and we never thought that that hole would come out. We tried to make up for it, but it was too late: if we wanted to, we could have avoided it, we could have taken the descent a bit further ahead, but we were the first Professional behind all the World Tour teams. I’m sorry, I tried to make up for it but with a team like UAE with everyone in front it was really difficult. We managed to close the gap a little bit, but we should have been in front. Now we have important races ahead, this was a very selective race and if you make the slightest mistake you pay for it”.

Photo Sprint Cycling