Another ordinary result for Jai Hindley. I am beginning to wonder how he managed to win the 2022 Giro? He was superb then, now seems relatively ordinary. I know its early February but I would expect him to finish ahead of riders like Bilbao, Arensman and McKnulty.
Sometimes riders who are strong on recovery and get better as long races go on will have better results in three week races than they have in one week races. Steven Kruijswijk, for example, has more top 5s in GTs (four) than he has in all other major WT stage races (three - two at the Tour de Suisse and one at the Volta a Catalunya). Enric Mas, despite actually being a decent one-day racer, has never hit the podium of a major one week race unless you count his win at the Tour of Guangxi, yet he has 4 podiums at the Vuelta. Carlos Sastre managed 15 GT top 10s including of course winning the Tour, but has next to no comparable results in one-week races.
Hindley may be similar; though he has secured a few decent stage race results in the last three years, he only has one podium, that being Tirreno-Adriatico last year, to go with his two Giro podiums (the win and the 2nd in 2020). While 2020's result could be written off as being a bit of an outlier because of the weirdness of the 2020 season and the multiple GTs being crammed into a short period of time, Hindley was demonstrably at his strongest in week 3 and, even though he won on Blockhaus on stage 9, I think a fair case could be made that given the main decisive stages coming late on and Bora being the ones at the helm to drive the very few interesting stages in the 2022 Giro, suggesting that Hindley was feeling good on those days, the same was the case in that Giro too. And he has shown that while maybe his performances were a step below 2022 the last couple of seasons, he's far from being a Tao Geogeghan Hart or a Mikayla Harvey, riders whose performances during the immediate post-pandemic season showcased a level that they simply haven't been able to replicate or even really come close to replicating in subsequent years, suggesting that the uneven impact of the pandemic on different locations and training opportunities may have meant that they were performing at a level relative to competition that they'd not be able to sustain once normalcy resumed.
With this being the first time he's realistically turned a pedal in anger this season, he may just not be up to pace yet. We're a long way from sounding the alarm. Also, with regards to that 2022 Giro - that was a pretty tamely raced edition (as seems to be the norm at the moment), with his team being the prime architects of what little action there actually was. In a conservative race where most act to preserve what they have, it may only take a couple of good days and not cracking like an egg elsewhere to get into that mix, if others do not take advantage of your bad days, which leads to closer but less interesting races. I think back to Michele Scarponi talking of seeing Ryder Hesjedal suffering on the back of the group on the bigger climbs in the first week of the 2012 Giro, but that the riders up top like himself, Basso, Rodríguez etc. didn't take action to drop him even when he had the maglia rosa after Roccà di Cambio, because they felt he would drop away over time on that basis and were saving themselves for later in the race... only for Ryder to ride himself into form, and still be in close enough contact when those big mountains did arrive, to take advantage when those others had their bad days and fell away.
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