Stage 15

The road

At the start

Hesjedal back in pink, the sprinters gone

Ryder Hesjedal took the maglia rosa back at Cervinia and leads Joaquim Rodríguez by nine seconds, with Tiralongo at forty-one and Basso at 1:06. Overnight the race lost its sprinters wholesale — Goss, Renshaw, Haedo, Lancaster and Démare are all gone. Today is short, wet and vertical: four climbs in a hundred and sixty-nine kilometres and a finish above Lecco at Pian dei Resinelli.

How it was won

1. 1136 km to go

   Fränk Schleck goes home

   Thirty-three kilometres into a filthy, wet mountain stage, the man who was third at Rocca di Cambio climbs off. Schleck's shoulder has not been right since his collision with Rasmussen, and his Giro ends without a word.

2. 2119 km to go

   Nine minutes for two men

   Matteo Rabottini and Guillaume Bonnafond went clear in the opening kilometres and by fifty they have more than nine minutes. Nobody in the bunch thinks this is a problem. It will be.

3. 375 km to go

   Rabottini drops his companion

   Over the first of the four climbs Rabottini decides Bonnafond is costing him more than he is worth and rides away from him. There are seventy-five kilometres left to Pian dei Resinelli, all of them in the rain, all of them alone.

4. 424 km to go

   Culmine di San Pietro

   At the top of the third climb the arithmetic has turned: Rabottini's lead is under three minutes with Cunego, Amador, Txurruka, Losada and Pirazzi chasing, and a Liquigas-driven peloton three minutes behind them again.

5. 57 km to go

   He falls, gets up, and keeps going

   Seven kilometres from the top Rabottini's rear wheel slides away on wet road markings and he goes down. A spectator hauls him upright. Two minutes is all he has left — and behind him, out of the maglia rosa group, Joaquim Rodríguez attacks and nobody can hold him.

6. 6At the line

   Rabottini beats the man who caught him

   Rodríguez tears through the wreckage of the chase and reels Rabottini in with four hundred metres left, and the day is his. Except that as the Spaniard comes past, the exhausted Italian gets onto his wheel, waits, and comes off it again to win the biggest race of his life in front of a roaring Lecco. To Rodríguez goes the maglia rosa; to Rabottini, everything else.

The result