Scarponi said:
A Giro d'Italia win is a Giro d'Italia win. The Gavia wouldn't have changed a thing regarding his victory IMHO. It only would've increased its value in a deserved degree!
Did not mean it in any disrespect. Any three week tour winner deserves it. I’m pretty sure Ryders had the Stelvio Pass[/quote]
Yea, Ryder's had a lot of big climbs. The problem was the complete ceasefire by anybody on it. Scarponi even said after the race that they'd seen Ryder struggling to hang on the back early in the race and thought he would fall away, but that meant that when he rode himself into form in the second half of the race, they hadn't distanced him by enough. The same goes for Froome's win last year - it was more aggressively raced, at least by Yates, so Froome had more of a deficit than Ryder, but that just meant Froome had to pull out something pretty spectacular to win it, which Ryder never did, he just bided his time, as the only person who seemed to want to gain time was Purito, and Purito was only trying to do it 1-2km from the summit of every MTF and nowhere else, so was only gaining it incrementally and not by enough to put Ryder out of contention. Even Ryder himself didn't really do anything to try to win the race per se (just sit in for the TT, then pull out a far above his usual level one, people seemed to rate his TT during that race like he was a much better TTer than his actual career results suggested, but he pulled out that level when it counted), and only really Thomas de Gendt tried to win it, and that he nearly succeeded is testament to how badly raced that Giro was by the other contenders.