Andre Greipel’s idea of a ‘lunch ride’ is very different to ours. While we might go for a pootle around London’s Regent’s Park, the Lotto-Soudal rider has more important matters on his hands – winning a stage of the Giro d’Italia.
The German sprinted to victory on stage five of this year’s race and uploaded the GPS file to Strava afterwards, adopting the default name of ‘lunch ride’ – come on, Andre, you’re not doing yourself justice there.
The Strava upload gives a brief insight into what it takes to win a sprint at the end of a medium mountains stage of the Giro. Greipel might be known as a bulking sprinter but stage five was decidedly lumpy and required Greipel to scale a succession of climbs, peaking at 783m and accumulating nearly 3,000m of ascent on the 232.9km stage before sprinting to a comprehensive victory.
Still, that didn’t stop Greipel clipping along at an average speed of 41kph (25mph), with a top speed of 88.9kph (56mph) on an arrow-straight section of road at the beginning of the descent of the final major climb. As a testament to Greipel’s climbing, his main sprint rival, Marcel Kittel (Etixx-QuickStep), who won stages two and three, finished nearly four minutes back on the day.
Greipel hasn’t revealed his heart rate or power data – not that would be interesting – so his Strava file doesn’t tell us much more, other than that he nabbed seven leaderboard top tens and two KOMs along the way to securing his four career Giro d’Italia stage win and first of the 2016 race. Oh, and it was a toasty 28c in southern Italy.
Giant-Alpecin’s Tom Dumoulin leads the race overall with a 16-second advantage over Etixx-QuickStep’s Bob Jungels. The race really heats up on stage six with the first summit finish – an 18.8km ascent to 1,572m.
Check out Greipel’s full Strava upload here.
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