Will Barta thinks we won't see another alien-like performance from Tadej Pogacar in second time trial: "There’s just not that opportunity for him this time"

For Will Barta, the main mission at this Giro d'Italia is to help his Colombian leaders Einer Rubio and Fernando Gaviria as well as he can. Ideal, the American says, would be to land Rubio in top 5 in final GC and win a stage with Gaviria. However if an opportunity presents itself, Barta won't turn a blind eye to it. And one such opportunity could appear in Saturday's time trial.

Barta would normally take last week's time trial as a reference point to gauge his effort on Saturday. Had he not crashed the day before. "The crash meant there were not too many lessons to learn from the first time trial; it was just a bad day," said Barta in an interview for Cyclingnews.

He adds: "But the second time trial is a bit more rolling in its first section so that part does favour me a little bit more than the first part of the last TT. Plus, there’s no late climb, either. So we’ll see what we can do on Saturday."

"I don’t think it’ll be like the last one because he made so much difference on the final climb. Maybe he’ll pace it differently, but you could see in the splits that everybody was a lot closer and then, in the last section, Tadej went incredibly fast. This time around, there’s just not that opportunity for him," Barta thinks about Tadej Pogacar's performance.