After a frustrating opening to the Giro d`Italia, during which he was stripped of stage victory in Orbetello and placed second on two other occasions, Elia Viviani (Deceuninck-QuickStep) looked to hit the reset button during Monday`s rest day in Riccione. `My Giro starts now,` he told Il Corriere della Sera. A year ago, Viviani`s sparkling Giro was garlanded with four stage wins and the points classification. This time out, his race has been pockmarked by near misses and disappointment. Slender are the margins in the sprint game, but Viviani had a chance to dream it up all over again in the second week, where the flat run from Ravenna to Modena lent itself most obviously to the fast men. When the 1949 Giro visited Modena, the novelist Dino Buzzati explained the torpor of that transitional stage by describing the flatlands of Emilia as `unsuited to battle.` While there was a meandering opening to stage 10 of this Giro, there was no such détente among the sprinters in the frantic closing kilometres in Modena.ADVERTISEMENT A crash inside the final kilometre saw maglia ciclamino Pascal Ackermann (Bora-Hansgrohe) and Matteo Moschetti (Trek-Segafredo) come down, but Viviani still had to contend with Caleb Ewan (Lotto Soudal) and Arnaud Démare (Groupama-FDJ) in the inevitable bunch finish on Via Emilia. Viviani parked himself on Ewan`s wheel in the finishing straight, but though he had the speed to come around the Australian, he was unable to match the power of Démare. He had to settle for second place, his third of this Giro. Sitting on the steps of the Deceuninck-QuickStep bus in Parco Enzo Ferrari afterwards, Viviani was magnanimous in his praise for the stage winner Démare. `It`s another second place but I`m calm about it because Démare did a great sprint and he beat me,` Viviani said. `When it`s like that, there`s nothing to complain about. We know that Démare is a quality rider. He´s here with the objective of winning a stage and taking home the maglia cicla ...
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