"There's a lot of the Giro ahead": Guillermo Thomas Silva bids farewell to pink jersey but looks ahead to new opportunity to win a stage

Guillermo Thomas Silva managed what no other Uruguayan cyclist before him: win a Giro d'Italia stage, take the pink jersey and make the sports magazine headlines across the world. It's been a remarkable journey of the 24-year-old cyclist who was still an amateur three years ago, and now was in the spotlights of the cycling's biggest scene.

But even fairy tales do come to an end. When Silva moved into Giro's lead, the question in place was immediately "how long can he keep the jersey?" with most experts looking towards stage 7 with finish on Blockhaus as Silva's inevitable swan song, while stages 4 and 5 would already be a challenge for the XDS Astana rider.

And while Tuesday's first stage back on Italian soil seemed like a relatively defendable position with a major summit 40 kilometers from the finish line, Movistar Team had other plans, reducing the bunch to just 40 riders under a hellish pace for their versatile sprint option Orluis Aular. And that pace was too much for Silva:

"The truth is that at the beginning the pace was very fast," Silva told Cycling Pro Net in an interview at the finish line. "At that moment, my legs weren't at their best and I couldn't keep up with the front."

The Uruguayan didn't even try to hide that today was not his day and backed off the peloton soon after sprinters Paul Magnier or Jonathan Milan, bidding farewell to the pink dream he has lived the last three days as he crossed the finish line 12 minutes behind stage winner Jhonatan Narvaez.

"I just think it wasn't my day, but the Giro has only just begun. It's the fourth stage, which means there's a lot of the Giro ahead, so we'll keep fighting."

Silva then reminds that his goal, coming into this Giro, was to fight for stage wins, not ride general classification. There'll be a good opportunity to do just that already in tomorrow's stage 5, but Silva will certainly look forward to stage 8 as well: "Now let's get down to business, right? In search of stage wins, there's a lot of luck in play," he reminds.