Evenepoel - you can't just gatekeep or compare the impact of crashes. We don't really have a way of measuring the impact, unless we literally take Evenepoels T1 split as his pacing plan. Having said that, if we take a look at the takes he would win the Giro very comfortably and look at the underlying assumptions - which IMO was basically something along the lines of "It's just like Catalunya but Evenepoel will climb better than Roglic, and nobody else will come to play" then we can at the very least dismiss the latter part of that assumption. If we take a look at Catalunya itself, they actually lost an MTF to Ciccone, put a total of 15 seconds into the field on La Molina and then on Lo Port Almeida was as close to Evenepoel as the latter was to Roglic. They only really incraesed the GC gap much on the final circuit which is just prime Evenepoel real estate and where they didn't get chased that well. It's also not like Roglic or Evenepoel were completely invulnerable in UAE or Tirreno. I think it's a very big stretch to just say "if he peaked he would have won by a minute today" when he hasn't done that in any TT of such competition, or on any big climb for that matter.
Roglic - very solid. That first time split had me worried today, but I'm not gonna lie he looked very much in control of his effort yesterday and if it had finished on the top there I think he puts seconds into TGH and Thomas. His TT may be a little underwhelming compared to a few years ago but that still may partially be due to the flatness of the TTs, the Cervelo not being as good compared to other bikes as it used to be, or due to shoulder injury. He may be best he's ever been in absolute terms.
Thomas - very strong, especially considering how underwhelming his stage 1 ITT was and his TOTA was. Still, I'm not sure how confident we can be he's better than in the Tour last year, which I firmly believe he'll need to be to win
TGH - Very strong, obviously, and there's basically one GT to base any predictions on for him, which is the 2020 Giro, when he was basically a similar level to the best of Hindley maybe? Maybe he can be a slight bit better.
Now who can win it? I'm fairly sure Evenepoel faces a really uphill battle and that he needs to be 100% by Friday, and I'm pretty sceptical about that right now. This TT win was closer to Suisse 2022 than anything else, in addition to that I was sceptical about his monster stage climbing to begin with. For Geraint Thomas I'm sceptical because he looked solidly worse than TGH on I Cappuccini yesterday and he should simply be taking more time out of the latter in a 35 km ITT. I'm 90% sure TGH is gonna finish ahead of Thomas. I think it's 80% between Roglic and TGH, and I favor Roglic there. Ineos have the better team, but none of their domestiques should drop Kuss on the big climbs, and as I think Roglic is also the best descender and sprinter out of the lot, I think he's simply in the drivers seat right now.
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