It had been, by just about every metric, a quiet day at the Giro d'Italia. For the first two hours of stage 3, there was scarcely an attack worthy of the name, and not even the accidental breakaway of sprinters shortly after the midpoint had raised much of a stir on a subdued afternoon in Piedmont.
The quiet even extended to the RAI television commentary team, who joined a 24-hour strike by journalists at the state broadcaster on Monday. The industrial action was called in the wake of the recent censorship of the writer Antonio Scurati, whose planned anti-fascist monologue for the Festa della Liberazione public holiday last month was abruptly pulled from the schedule, apparently amid pressure from the far-right government of Giorgia Meloni.
The day's muted tone was broken 21km from the finish, however, as the gruppo trundled towards the intermediate sprint in Cherasco. Suddenly, the maglia rosa of Tadej Pogačar zipped to the front as he scrambled to contest the bonus seconds. Ben Swift, working on behalf of Geraint Thomas, denied Pogačar the full quota of three, but even without running commentary, the policies of the would-be dictator of the 2024 Giro were abundantly clear.
Pogačar continued in a similar vein in the finale. When Mikkel Honoré (EF Education-EasyPost) accelerated with a shade over 3km to go on the last rise before Fossano, Pogačar decided to follow, and his presence compelled Thomas to join in. Pogačar propelled the trio towards the finish with intent, and he was deep into the finishing straight before he was eventually swept up by the bunch.
His exuberance provided an exhilarating finale to a listless stage, but when the dust settled, Pogačar's generous efforts had yielded a meagre return. He increased his overall lead by a second over Thomas and two over everybody else, but at this point in the Giro, energy saved is often more a valuable commodity than seconds gained.
On Sunday, UAE Team Emirates director sportif Fabio Baldato grinned broadly when asked for his most important advice to Pogačar on this Giro. "To be conservative, but it's hard to tell him," Baldato laughed. "I don't want him to minimise his effort, but I want him to keep the effort for the moments when he's really alone and when he doesn't have teammates to use."
By Baldato's reckoning, Pogačar had heeded that guidance on the opening day in Turin, holding his fire until the final kick up the Bivio di San Vito and again at Oropa on stage 2, when his acceleration 4.4km from the finish was carefully coordinated with his team.
Pogačar's playful cameo on Monday, however, seemed to suggest that his own default setting of all-out attack doesn't entirely align with his team's preference for a more measured approach to managing the race lead.
Speaking to Cyclingnews at Oropa, UAE sports manager Matxin Joxean Fernandez suggested that his team had planned the opening week of Pogačar's Giro much like an American football team runs a set script of plays on its first offensive drive.
"We've had a plan from the start and it's quite clear," Matxin said. "We've defined the stages where we can attack and where we can give the responsibility to the sprinters' teams and so on. And when you make a plan, you make that plan with the riders too, which is as it should be."
Matxin had indicated that stages 3, 4 and 5 would be days where his UAE team would yield control of the race to the sprinters' squads. Pogačar being Pogačar, of course, he couldn't help but call an audible in Fossano. No matter, Matxin maintained that the next pivotal block for the Slovenian would start on stage 6, with its gravel sectors en route to Rapolano Terme, followed by Friday's time trial to Perugia.
"We want to try in the gravel stage because it's an important stage," Matxin said. "It's going to be critical and it's going to be nervous, and then the time trial. Then after the time trial, we'll take decisions depending on where we are and on what the gap is. But we have a very clearly defined plan. We have certain stages where we want to be to the fore."
While there is little doubt about Pogačar's own strength, it remains to be seen how much protection his UAE Team Emirates guard can provide from here to Rome. In Turin on the opening day, after all, Pogačar was left relatively isolated far sooner than anyone could have anticipated, with Rafal Majka effectively forced into a double shift to offset subdued displays from his teammates.
"In the end, Majka was really very good, he did the other guys' work for them and then Tadej attacked in the last 5km as we had planned, so he didn't do anything different to what we had talked about," Baldato said.
"Maybe if he had the support of one or two extra teammates, then Majka might have lasted half of the final climb and Tadej could have saved his effort for the upper part, but it was always going to be hard to drop Jhonatan Narvaez on a climb like that."
Matxin, for his part, downplayed the idea that Pogačar's supporting cast at this Giro was notably weaker than the team that will accompany him at the Tour de France in July. He maintained, too, that Pogačar's teammates were already back at full efficiency on the climb to Oropa on Sunday, where the Slovenian's stage-winning attack began at the preordained spot, 4.4km from the summit.
"I'm happy with the team, and they all know that it's all for Tadej," Matxin said. "If he hadn't crashed at Itzulia, Jay Vine would have been here and that would have given us an extra climber. But now we have Vegard Stake Laengen for the flat, which means Domen Novak and Mikkel Bjerg will work a bit more in the climbs, together with Majka and Felix Großschartner."
So far, this Giro has run according to the expected script, right down to Pogačar's inevitable bouts of improvisation. The favourite already holds the pink jersey with almost three weeks of racing still to go and with few obvious flaws in his armoury.
But if Pogačar's overwhelming strength leaves him without peer in this race, it might also leave him without allies, as Vincenzo Nibali pointed out to Cyclingnews before the Giro got underway. At Fossano on Monday, for instance, Thomas was more concerned about holding Pogačar's wheel than in helping him gain ground on their common rivals.
"I think Vincenzo is right, but on the other hand, the moment the riders in second or third have an advantage on the others, they might look to hold what they have, so they could become an ally," Baldato said.
"In any case, on the flat days, there'll be a lot of teams working to keep the race together because there are so many sprinters here. And then, when you get into the last week of a Grand Tour, you have lots of teams willing to work for different goals, like the team classification or the podium or the maglia ciclamino."
So far, of course, Pogačar has the look of a man who solves every problem by himself at this Giro. And, as ever, he seems to be riding with few obvious thoughts to saving his energy for later in the race, and far less with an eye to his first tilt at the Giro-Tour double.
"Since the start of the Giro, we've been talking only about the Giro and not thinking about what comes afterwards," Matxin said of Pogačar's approach to the corsa rosa, though he stressed that there were still limits to his rider's sense of adventure.
"Even so, this isn't a one-day race like Strade Bianche, where you can attack from 80km because you know you're not racing the next day. This is the Giro, and we know it's three weeks long."
