"Close but no cigar" - Corbin Strong denied a first Grand Tour stage win by Mads Pedersen in bike throw on stage 3 at 2025 Giro d'Italia

Corbin Strong has never managed to win a stage of a Grand Tour, and the New Zealander probably won't get much closer than he did this Sunday afternoon on stage 3 of the 2025 Giro d'Italia. In the end though, despite Strong's best efforts, he was beaten on the bike throw by Mads Pedersen in a dramatic finale.

"It was a close sprint," smiled Strong in his post-stage interview afterwards with Cycling Pro Net. "I’ve always had confidence I can take it to these guys in the sprint if I have a good run. And today, I had a lot of confidence after Stage One. I got unlucky with a crash in the final 5 km. I had confidence I could go for the win."

Strong had done well to recover from getting dropped on the stage's big climb, after Lidl-Trek had done their best to raise the pace in order to drop Pedersen's sprint rivals. "It was really hard - I had to fight a lot on the climb. But the season hasn’t gone the way I wanted to, so I was hoping I was going to bounce back with a big win. Yeah, close but no cigar," Strong reflects. "But we’ve got a really nice team here, and I think we can take confidence from today and hope we can achieve some stage wins later on."

"I lost a bit of confidence on the descent, and I probably dropped before the top of the climb. I also took longer to come back on the descent, just ’cause, you know, on these roads — for some reason at slow speeds — I was feeling really unconfident," he continues his recap of the battle to get back in touch. " So it took me a while to come back, but thankfully Fuglsang was there with me. For sure it took a bit of energy, but when I was chasing back on, I knew I had good legs. It probably wasn’t ideal, but in the end I was there with a chance to win, so I’m happy."