Cavendish and team Columbia win Giro time trial.

What is the old cycling expression? Something like “It aint’s bragging, it you can ride over 56 km/h.” Yeah, something like that. Mark Cavenish rode in at the head of the Columbia armada and claimed the first maglia rosa in the opening Giro team time trial.

Already the worlds fastest sprinter, Cavensih is also fast developing his racing persona. A cross between vintage Clint Eastwood in the spagetti westerns “dying aint much of a living, boy” and some laid back surfer, “dude, we kinda trained but really we was mostly checking the girls.” We see Cavenish picking up at least three stage wins in the Giro and then every other sprinter in the world giving up and skipping the Tour de France. Uhh, just because, you know.

For Jonathan Vaughters’ Garmin boys it was no doubt a bitter defeat. A mere 6 seconds off the pace after yelling into a megaphone about winning. Vaughters is not the kind of guy to boast so he was obviously pretty confident. David Miller in particular can’t seem to put together that one perfect race day. I suspect Garmin will ride very agressively in the coming weeks. This is a confident team.

It was also a fine day on the island of Lido for team Lancestana, the transition team name while we wait for Lance to financially take over Astana. Lance was riding for free but now it apprears all the riders in the team are riding the Giro without salary. Now that’s team solidarity. They hit the finish line only 13 seconds back. Lancestana should be super motivated for this tour. If they win the overall team competition, that’s 40,000 euros–it may be the only payment they get other than a rubber Kazak check.

Finally, it should be noted that the time trial results largely supported Filippo Simeoni’s outrage. The reigning Italian champion’s team was denied an invite in favor of the Fuji-Sevetto team which finished dead last. No wonder Simeoni gave back the jersey in disgust.