When two of their riders made the decisive break of 18 during yesterday's Giro stage to Varazze, T-Mobile's tactics were going to a T.
"The tactics were to get at least one of our riders into any breakaway group," said directeur sportif Valerio Piva on t-mobile-team.com. "André and Eric were paying attention at the right moment. After that, we were able to sit back in the main bunch and the other teams were obviously also content to do the same."
Unfortunately for André Korff and Eric Baumann, the long but not overly steep climb of Bric Breton proved to be their undoing, with 31 year-old Korff the best of the rest in the chasing group, taking the sprint for 10th place. Nevertheless, Piva remains satisfied with his performance: "André rode a superb race. But the mountains are not really his cup of tea.
"So when Le Mevel's group broke away on the Bric Breton climb, he couldn't follow them. That left him with 50 seconds to make up on the descent, which was unfortunately too much time to make good," he said.
