Riccardo Verza, a man on the breakaway
The search for breakaways has always been an asset within the Kometa-Xstra Cycling Team when it comes to putting up a fight and letting yourself be seen in all the races in which you have competed. All the members of the team have been involved at some point in these skirmishes, but from day one, and almost from the first kilometre, the Italian Riccardo Verza has been one of the most prodigal in these adventures. Verza has competed in this atypical season over more than 2,900 kilometres spread over twenty days of competition and has shot almost 700 of them in the lead. Verza, in addition to all the work he has done for his colleagues, has also been a boy on the break.
The Contador Foundation’s continental team made its debut at the end of January in the Challenge of Mallorca, a race in which they participated for the first time since the project was born. On the first day, the Ses Salines-Campos-Porreres-Felanitx Trophy, the rider from Este completed more than one hundred kilometres in a breakaway. The Mallorcan race was his first contact with the new category, once his jump to the 2020s had been completed.
The Veneto rider would once again be the protagonist of the skirmishes in the Vuelta a Murcia. In the second stage, on his fifth day of competition with the Kometa-Xstra Cycling Team in 2020, he took part in different movements for more than 70 kilometres. The good prospects for the Istrian Spring Trophy quickly evaporated when it was suspended at the last minute due to a crisis caused by the COVID-19, which brought the season to a standstill until the end of July.
In the Vuelta a Burgos Verza, he was one of the protagonists of the breakaway in two of its five stages, and was also considered the most combative rider in one of them. On the route to Villadiego on the second day he completed 153 kilometres in the breakaway. And on the penultimate day, together with his teammates Alejandro Ropero and Diego Pablo Sevilla, he was part of one of the great moments of the team’s season where he added up 135 kilometres outside the discipline of the peloton.
Verza would also look for the escape in the Circuit of Getxo, where he added another more than 120 kilometres escaped in the company of other seven cyclists. And in Hungary, finally his last competition of the course, he also stayed away from the big group for another hundred kilometres.
We ask him about Which was the most fun escape, the one that was the hardest to consolidate and the one that left Riccardo with the most bittersweet sensation: “The most fun breakaway was the first one in Burgos, because it also included the Nippo-Delko rider Alessandro Fedeli, who is a very good friend of mine. The one in Murcia was the most complex, without a doubt, there was not the slightest margin to relax and in the end Ángel Madrazo and I managed to make a fugue out of the fugue. And the one that saddens me the most was the last one, the one in the Tour de Hongrie, because I think we were really close to being able to reach the finish”, he concludes.
? Ciclismo González (1), Atila Madrona (2), Gutiérrez (3).
(automatic translation, sorry for mistakes)
