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Giro d'Italia Giro d‘Italia 2024 Stage 15, Manerba del Garda-Livigno (Mottolino), 222 km

Page 11 - Get up to date with the latest news, scores & standings from the Cycling News Community.
Honestly, this could turn out to be the easiest 5000+ altitude metres stage ever.
I'm camping just below Passo del Foscagno, after a *** week, the weather now is literally perfect. Over 10°C at 2100m, not much wind, bit of sun, bit of clouds. They also have tailwind for the majority of the stage.

After cycling around a bit yesterday, the Foscagno really really isn't hard, despite the altitude. The 7 or 7,5% sections didn't feel like that and the upper parts has some super shallow sections that almost felt flat. I still believe Pogacar can get a gap here but only because he's so far above the others, otherwise this would be a sure thing that nothing happens before the final 3km.
 
Honestly, this could turn out to be the easiest 5000+ altitude metres stage ever.
I'm camping just below Passo del Foscagno, after a *** week, the weather now is literally perfect. Over 10°C at 2100m, not much wind, bit of sun, bit of clouds. They also have tailwind for the majority of the stage.

After cycling around a bit yesterday, the Foscagno really really isn't hard, despite the altitude. The 7 or 7,5% sections didn't feel like that and the upper parts has some super shallow sections that almost felt flat. I still believe Pogacar can get a gap here but only because he's so far above the others, otherwise this would be a sure thing that nothing happens before the final 3km.
Whats more frustrating is I saw a webcam of the top of the Gavia and it's clear... Just imagine if the Gavia was in this stage.
 
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The points on Giro mountains are now insane.

They used to be the stingiest mountains categories in the world, I mean Matty Lloyd and Fabian Wegmann both won the GPM with 56 points back in the day.

Admittedly neither were elite climbers or anything and won from BOTD exploits, but still, the scale has gone from almost no points available to crazy high values.

Used to be:

cat.3: 3 2 1
cat.2: 5 3 1
cat.1: 10 6 4 2 (later 10 6 4 2 1)
an MTF: 15 10 6 4 2
Cima Coppi: 20 15 10 6 4 2

This did tend to mean a bunch of uncategorised uphill finishes, or overvalued puncheur finishes, but it's still so wild to now see 40 or 50 points for a single summit after the re-scaling of the classification and seeing people like Koen Bouwman win the classification with 294 points, when back on the old system it was super hard to even break 100 - this only happened 3 times between the system being introduced in 1983 and the recalculation (Fredy González with 100 exactly in 2003, José Rujano with 143 in 2005 and Emanuele Sella with 136 in 2008).

The new system has been in place a decade now and it still seems weird to me :laughing: