Friday 20 May 2011 at 00h47

A last stage for sprinters ... won by a sprinter. Mark Cavendish (Team HTC-Highroad) to me more precise. The rider who saw 5 opportunities to win a stage in this Giro d'Italia 2011 was able to seize 2 out of these 5.

The summary of the 12th stage of the Giro d'Italia 2011: Castelfidardo > Ravenna

A new stage with a flat race route, a new stage made for sprinters.

After yesterday's victory for John Gadret (AG2R La Mondiale), who started the pursuit for Joaquin Rodriguez (Katusha Team) in the last 400 meters, today was a new stage where a breakaway group had little chances to continue until the finish.

Miguel Minguez (Euskaltel-Euskadi), David Ricci Bitti (Farnese Vini-Neri Sottoli), Stef Clement ( Rabobank) and Michal Golas (Vacansoleil-DCM Pro Cycling Team) decide to give it a try anyway after 5 kilometers in the race and they see their gap growing up to 4 minutes before it stabilises around 3 minutes.

Up until 50 kilometers from the finish, they manage to maintain the gap around these values, but it starts to descend progressively from there on, going down to 56 seconds at 20 kilometers from the finish. Being led by the sprinters teams, the peloton gets back on the 4 leading riders at 11 kilometers from the finish.

The riders than start to wait for a bunch sprint and it is thus not surprisingly to see the Team HTC-Highroad's train being set up, with Mark Renshaw as the driver of passenger Mark Cavendish. Finally, only Davide Appollonio, winner of the 4th and last stage of the Tour du Limousin last year, seemed to be able to prevent the English rider from winning. Despite his big effort, the Italian rider doesn't manage to get over him and ends up with a beautiful second place, ahead of Alessandro Petacchi (Lampre-ISD).

Tomorrow the Giro will go back to the mountains ... to stay there until almost the end of this Giro d'Italia 2011 and this was thus for Mark Cavendish, just like Alessandro Petacchi and Danilo Hondo the reason to step out of this Tour of Italy 2011 after this last opportunity for sprinters. Indeed, these riders prefer not to take any risk in the mountains and to make sure they'll be able to get in shape for the Tour de France 2011 !

Mark Cavendish's comments

Mark Cavendish, who took his 4th victory in 2011 today, commented his second victory in this year's Giro in quite a similar way as two days ago: Winning today was really important, my team-mates had worked all day with no help at all from any other squad and I wanted to thank them for it by winning

They did an incredible job. Then I started up my sprint with 200 meters to go and I managed to get it.

I'm really pleased, the Giro is a very important race for me, there aren't any more sprint stages in this year's race and I really wanted to get another win here.

The summary video of the stage

If you'd like to see the images of the 12th stage of the Tour of Italy 2011, please check out the video below:

door Thomas Vergouwen
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this publication is published in: Giro d Italia | Giro d'Italia 2011

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