Bernal now has two problems - Yates and Caruso and while Yates has the potential to gain much more time in the mountains he is:
a) himself not very consistent and could just as easily get dropped as drop others
b) probably the same tier TTer as Bernal meaning he needs to gain maglia Rosa before the final TT
c) further back
I'm personally not that much convinced about this supposed Yate's inconsistency in this Giro... Of course we know he's not consistent by definition and we could have every right to expect him to crack any moment in the future, but let's break down his performance on this Giro so far.
The stages where he lost time to Bernal (not counting boni seconds):
stage 4 -
11s
stage 6 -
17s
stage 9 -
12s
stage 11 -
26s
stage 14 (Zoncolan) - 11s
stage 16 (Cortina) - 2min30s
stage 17 (Sega di Ala) - gained 53s
Until the stage 11 Yates was very consistent. He lost 11-26s to Bernal on every single MTF. He was always in the main group at the finish (usually at the back of it ofc), no major problems. However, I'd not focus so much on this first part of the race, as we didn't have any serious mountains there nor any significant gaps between GC riders.
The first important test was stage 14 - Zoncolan. As we know, Simon attacked first on the steep part. Bernal followed him, eventually counter attacked ~300m before the finish and gained 11s. Great performance from Yates, 11s at the finish is almost nothing.
Second test - stage 16, Cortina d'Ampezzo. Yates lost
2min30s - this is
74% of his current time loss to Bernal.
BUT, we know how the weather conditions looked like. Let's assume this was the
main reason for his very poor performance. Why can we assume that with quite a high level of confidence?
Test number 3 - stage 17, Sega di Ala.
2 days after Cortina, beautiful sunny day, the hardest climb of this Giro. Yates put 53s on Bernal, even more on other riders, who also were ahead of him in Cortina. Actually, comparing to Bernal, he was just flying up this hill.
Then, for me in this Giro, Yates seems to be a very
consistent rider, whose form comparing to others, is gradually improving, who had just
one bad day, caused most likely by poor weather conditions.
Of course we can say that he can still repeat Giro '18 in one of the upcoming stages, but I just can't see it to happen. This time he hasn't been killing himself from day one like on that year. Quite the opposite. He's been riding very conservatively (maybe even to much) and looking at his yestetrday's performance (but also Zoncolan where he was almost as good as Bernal) I'd say that in terms of climbing performance he's at the same level as Bernal if not even slightly better now.
I expect Yates to gain more time on Bernal in those 2 upcoming MTFs (for now weather is supposed to be good, only some rain possible on the Saturday's afternoon). Anyway, I don't think that's gonna be enough to win the Giro (assuming they will ride the TT more or less equally), unless Bernal is going to be as weak as yesterday (which I don't expect to happen but don't also completely rule it out). Also the remained climbs are not as hard as yesterday's Sega di Ala. The time loss from Cortina stage might be just too big.