“On Radio Tour, when they name and group riders — ‘this is the Roglic group’ and so on — Simon Yates was never mentioned. Not even once," Morkov begins his recounting. "And this was while he was sitting third in the GC. It was almost funny how invisible he was. It was absolutely mad."
As mentioned though, in the third and final week, Yates began to force his way into the minds of viewers and experts. "He only started getting mentioned towards the end, but right up until the middle of last week, no one was talking about Simon Yates," continues Morkov, revealing how the fact even became a bit of an inside joke within Team Visma | Lease a Bike. "Among us sports directors, we even joked, ‘Is Simon here?’”
On stage 20 though, everything changed with a brutal acceleration on the same climb that had haunted Yates' Giro story since 2018. "We thought: ‘Okay, this might actually swing our way.’ If they’re going to pull a move like that and only focus on each other…” Morkov says of the much-discussed tactics by Yates' rivals
Isaac del Toro and
Richard Carapaz. “And then it worked — he created a gap and broke free from their battle. They kept attacking one another, and he could just sit back and pick his moment.”