Visma | Lease a Bike feels the impact of being understaffed: "Especially in such a large breakaway group"

With the withdrawal of their two main players – Cian Uijtdebroeks and Olav Kooij – the Giro d'Italia has become a different kind of race for Visma | Lease a Bike. This means that the Dutch team is now mainly focusing on attacking, something we have seen them do frequently in the past few days. In the wall stage won by Julian Alaphilippe, the team also chose to go on the offensive, this time with Attila Valter. 

"It's the first day I realized how difficult it is with only four of our guys left in the race," says the Hungarian champion, who ultimately finished 44th, in an interview with Eurosport. "When there is such a large breakaway group, it's much better to have more guys at the front. That has become a lot harder for our team. Nevertheless, we are not giving up."

"If you feel good, it's doable, of course. But I think I lacked the experience to figure out how to handle it alone in such a large group," Valter continued his honest assessment. "Edoardo (Affini, ed.) was also there for a while, but he was in the breakaway the day before, which had cost him a lot of energy, so he had to drop back pretty quickly. When the important split happened, I couldn't keep up with the riders in front."

Finally, Valter acknowledged that he had hoped for support from others, but that did not turn out to be the right plan. "That's disappointing. I also noticed that in a wall stage like this, you focus a lot on the walls themselves, but you pay less attention to other important things. But hats off to Alaphilippe and his fellow escapee Mirco Maestri. We didn’t get any closer to them and it was a long attempt."

In a press release published on the team’s website shortly afterwards, Valter also spoke out. He of course continues his reasoning explained above, though he also talked more about his attempt to be in the break of the day. "I felt that my shape was good today. It was a crazy and fast stage. I tried to follow my instinct at the beginning of the stage. I knew that the first breakaway attempt would not be the right one. I ended up in a strong group, but maybe that group was a little too big."