Stage 2

The road

At the start

Phinney defends nine seconds

Taylor Phinney wears the maglia rosa he took by nine seconds from Geraint Thomas, and today he must hold it over a road stage rather than a time trial: two hundred and six flat, cold, wind-scoured kilometres out of Herning and back. BMC will ride all afternoon around a twenty-one-year-old, the sprinters have had this day circled for months, and a category-four rise in Jutland hands out the first mountains jersey.

How it was won

1. 190 km to go

   The only hill in Denmark

   Balloni, Kaisen and Rubiano have had thirteen minutes since the first hour and have raced nobody but each other. Over the category-four rise at Østerbjerg, Alfredo Balloni jumps and takes the points: the first mountains jersey of the ninety-fifth Giro is settled on a bump in Jutland.

2. 217 km to go

   Bak alone in the wind

   The three are swallowed just past the forty-kilometre banner, and Lars Bak attacks so quickly afterwards that the catch and the counter look like one move. Forty-four seconds is all the peloton ever gives a Dane on Danish roads. They hold him on that leash until seventeen kilometres out, when he understands it and sits up.

3. 38 km to go

   The maglia rosa drops his chain

   Eight kilometres from home Taylor Phinney's chain comes off and the leader of the Giro is standing at the roadside of a road going forty-five an hour. Danilo Wyss drops back for him, then two more BMC riders, and the pink jersey spends thirty seconds and most of what he has left climbing back into a peloton that is already lining up for the sprint.

4. 4At the line

   Cavendish through the hole

   Garmin open the sprint, GreenEdge take it off them, and then a hundred and fifty metres from the line the field goes down behind. What comes out the other side is a handful of sprinters with Mark Cavendish among them, waiting, waiting, then squeezing through a gap that shuts the moment he is past it. Goss is second, Geoffrey Soupe a startled third, and it is the earliest stage win Cavendish has ever taken in a Giro.

The result