Today’s is certainly not as historic as yesterday’s, but it is still a first. Alberto Dainese, in fact, claimed the first Italian victory in this Giro d’Italia. We were starting to get worried. Here we are at the halfway mark of this Giro Rosa and we still hadn’t seen the Tricolore waving. But today came good news for the Italian movement, not only because one of its riders finally won, but also because it is a young and talented one.
Alberto Dainese, born in Padua in 1998, is one of those riders who has a motor but has yet to find a way to properly show it off. As an U23 – he grew up with the Dutch SEG Racing Academy team and became European champion in 2019 – he had established himself as one of the up-and-coming sprinters to watch out for most once he turned pro, but his apprenticeship was longer than anyone expected. In the first two years of his career he had only achieved one success, in Australia back in January 2020, so it was a good 833 days since the young Padua native had raised his arms to the sky.