Villa di Villa, Italy – Adrien Costa posted a season-best, fifth-place result and Axeon Hagens Berman teammate Neilson Powless was sixth Monday at Giro del Belvedere.
Alexandr Riabushenko of Belarus (Team Palazzago Amaru) won the 166.6-kilometer Italian race in a three-man sprint after the trio broke away on the second-to-last climb of the finishing circuit. Lucas Hamilton (Mitchelton Scott) was runner-up and Matteo Fabbro (Cycling Team Friuli) finished third.
Seventeen seconds after Riabushenko crossed the line, Daniel Savini (GS Dilettantistico Maltinti Lampadari Banca di Cambiano) out-sprinted Costa for fourth. Powless finished alone, six seconds later.
"The second time up the first climb on the circuit, the race really split to pieces," Axeon Hagens Berman Sport Director Koos Moerenhout said. "The race was really fast today, even before the circuit. We did 11 laps of a 12-kilometer loop so there were a lot of attacks. But it always kept coming back together."
Tuesday, the same five-rider roster of Costa, Neilson, Eddie Dunbar, Rui Oliveira and Logan Owen lines up again in another Italian one-day race, G.P. Palio del Recioto. At 143 km, it will shorter but somewhat similar to Monday's race, Moerenhout said.
"The final 40 kilometers, on paper, look really hard," he said. "So that will be a big deceiver of the race."
Moerenhout said Oliveira, who crashed Saturday while competing with the Portuguese national team at ZLM Tour, was bothered by his injuries but is expected to start on Tuesday.
Header photo courtesy of Giro del Belvedere.
