In the end, it was the rarest of things, a quiet day on the Giro d’Italia. Amid a race of such untold attrition, Geraint Thomas and the bulk of the gruppo must have been grateful for a small mercy like this on the road to Rivoli on stage 12.
For Ineos, a day where nothing happened must have felt like heaven after the trauma of the previous afternoon, when Tao Geoghegan Hart crashed out of the race with a broken hip, an incident in which Thomas was himself an unscathed faller.
