Giovanni Visconti

[trevim]

Kreuziger is boring, so he is a doper. A nasty one.

He's getting better this year, Amstel and Suisse yesterday. I'm a fan though so my opinion may be useless

 

[gooner]

Kreuziger is boring, so he is a doper. A nasty one.

Exciting rider or not, their link to Ferrari is no different to one another.

 

[Fearless Greg Lemond]

He's getting better this year, Amstel and Suisse yesterday. I'm a fan though so my opinion may be useless

Lol.

Exciting rider or not, their link to Ferrari is no different to one another.

Do you know when exactly Visconti worked with il dottore? At Vini?

 

[Libertine Seguros]

Visconti is out of contract this year, I believe.

The motivation is strong in this boy.

Rumoured to have already re-signed at Abarcá.

He was already 10th or something at Lagunas de Neila last year. May not be much but still better than anything previously? Will never be a climber, but can certainly climb.

First signs of climbing talent was two top 10s in the two mountain stages of the 2006 Brixia Tour. 2nd in the Trofeo Melinda is pretty decent too.

3rd in the main mountain stage of Tirreno 2007 is pretty useful but was from the break. Any kind of stage race climbing otherwise eludes him for a while. However top 10s in San Sebastián and Lombardia don't tend to go to climbing scrubs. You'd say his climbing goes backward in 2008 though as he clearly focused in other areas, and the defending of the maglia rosa for a week caps the season really.

2009 doesn't really show much for climbing either, although the group he comes in with in the Sassuolo stage of Coppi e Bartali (him, Cunego, Evans, Giunti and Kiserlovski) suggests that medium mountain course was raced quite hard that day.

I haven't seen the profile for this stage but it suggests a pretty tough day in the saddle. The top 10 of Tre Valli Varesine is the first sign in a few years that the ability to climb that put him in the top 10 of Lombardia is returning, I'd say.

2011 is when the climbing legs appear, I'd say. Though it's not the best of fields, 4th on Jebel Akhdar is a sign of intent. Still, guys like EBH outclimbed him and if EBH was to win a mountain top finish on Galibier the forum would go ballistic. The performances in the medium mountain days in Coppi e Bartali (especially to Gaggio Montano) are worthy of notice, but not as much as the 2nd in the Giro di Padania, entirely thanks to his 2nd in the queen stage; he also returns to the front of Il Lombardia.

2012 was a weird year for him for me. I thought the move to Movistar was a bit strange anyhow, but his results are a bit scattergun. Winning Amorebieta can't be done without climbing skills though, 8th at Lagunas de Neila and 7th in the Giro dell'Emilia are good.

Visconti is doubtless doping. But I don't think he's "suddenly become" a climber. He's definitely ramped up the climbing side of his style and improved it notably, but he's always had the ability to win stages with decent length mountains but where things come back together a bit, and his 2nd stage win at the Giro was absolutely out of the Giovanni Visconti playbook. Gio can climb, definitely. However, when he started going for the GPM at the Giro I thought it was a strange folly and would end up, if it were to be successful, being like Wegmann's gutsy performance to win it in 2004. Certainly the early parts of high mountain stages would imply that to be the case, where he was sprinting away to take the points on cat.3 climbs, but on the bigger climbs he was being left late on by better climbers who didn't want to let him outsprint them at the summit. Just before his attack to win the stage on the Télégraphe, he'd been dropped by yet another Pirazzi attack and had had to ride back so was seemingly the weakest of the group. He's probably luckier that the racing in the bunch behind was tame, otherwise that ride would probably have come under a lot more scrutiny than it did, because that looked pretty unexpected for a guy like him (Ironically, the one point lately when people have thought to directly question him about the past was the one point when he won something that WAS within his remit before). Then again, terrible weather also factors into things - after all, Alessandro Ballan once won a Vuelta mountain stage solo by minutes. Ballan wasn't really questioned that day as the bad weather meant who was toughest came into it as much as who could climb best out of that break. Gio is probably as clean as Ballan was in 2008.

 

[gooner]

Do you know when exactly Visconti worked with il dottore? At Vini?

I don't think we ever got that disclosed when he got his ban. Other than the usual lame excuse that he only had conversations on an advisory and training role(more or less along the lines of Kreuziger also) he never addressed the period in question if memory serves me right.

 

[roundabout]

Krvavec was an MTF.

Ballan was ridiculous, but I don't remember who he had for company that day.

 

[Kokoso]

Kreuziger is boring, so he is a doper. A nasty one.

Maybe Fearless greg Lemod is boring. Kreuziger is controversial, that's not boring.

 

[Gugashwill]

Crashed out today.
Maybe the discussion shook him.

 

[Big Doopie]

I like Visconti so I am pretty sure he does not dope, he only visited Ferrari for training plans.

Rotflmao.

Tx FGL.

The amount of freakin times we've heard that one. As Betsy said everyone, even the wives knew that when you went to the great mabusi there was only one reason:

To dope.