Stage 18

The road

At the start

Twenty kilometres, all of it uphill

Nibali leads Evans by 1:26 and Urán by 2:46, and this is where those numbers get tested: a mountain time trial from Mori up to Polsa, twenty and a half kilometres with eleven hundred metres of climbing, no flat to hide on and no wheel to sit on. Movistar have won the last three stages. Nobody is expecting a fourth.

How it was won

1. 118 km to go

   The hot seat changes hands in the rain

   Steve Cummings sets 47:08 as the seventeenth man down the ramp and sits in it a long while. Then Capecchi by thirteen seconds, then Cataldo by forty-five, then Clement by five more. Meanwhile the rain gets heavier and the mountain gets no shorter.

2. 211 km to go

   Nibali's 20:29

   The maglia rosa flies the first half of the climb and goes through the intermediate check in 20:29. Michele Scarponi, second best at that point, is thirty-one seconds away from it.

3. 311 km to go

   The Giro is decided at the check

   The two men who have to answer are already broken. Rigoberto Urán is 1:19 down at that same point and Cadel Evans over a minute and a half, and neither of them is going to find any of it in the second half.

4. 45 km to go

   The last kilometres to Polsa

   Twenty kilometres and change of nothing but climbing, into driving rain, on a road that never lets a rider settle into a rhythm. Nibali does not slow down.

5. 5At the line

   44:29, and the Giro all but won

   Samuel Sánchez is second, fifty-eight seconds down; Damiano Caruso third at 1:20. Urán is sixth on the day, Evans twenty-fifth. There is one mountain stage left, and there is nothing on it left to take.

The result