Stage 2

The road

At the start

Nine kilometres across the Danube

Mathieu van der Poel wears the first maglia rosa, four seconds up on Biniam Girmay and six on Pello Bilbao. Today is barely nine kilometres, across the Danube and up a 1.3-kilometre ramp to the castle that opens at ten per cent. This Giro has the fewest time trial kilometres in sixty years, so what little there is counts double — and Jumbo-Visma have brought Tom Dumoulin and Tobias Foss to take them.

How it was won

1. 12 km to go

   Fastest on the flat, too

   The opening 7.9km along the Danube is meant to be Van der Poel's and Dumoulin's ground, but Simon Yates goes through the checkpoint quickest of all — less than a second up on the Dutchman, but quickest.

2. 2At the line

   Yates flies up the ramp

   The 1.3km kick to the castle looks like the Via Santa Caterina at Strade Bianche, and Yates absolutely flies up it. Dumoulin is already through and celebrating a possible win when the Briton takes five more seconds out of him on the climb alone.

3. 3At the line

   A statement in Budapest

   Yates wins by three seconds from Van der Poel, who keeps pink. Behind, the damage is real for less than 10km of racing: Kelderman and Almeida concede seventeen and eighteen seconds, and Carapaz — strong on the flat, ragged on the climb — loses twenty-eight.

The result