Nibali’s presence adds intrigue

Manama : If an Italian rider wins Milan-San Remo, Sean Kelly once put it, then he can sit back in the easy chair for the season. 

Bahrain-Merida’s leader Vincenzo Nibali became the first Italian winner of La Classicissima since 2006 with a lone raid over the Poggio last week, but rather than rest on his laurels, the Sicilian is taking a leaf out of Kelly’s own, unrelenting approach.

On Sunday, Bahrain’s Nibali will make his Tour of Flanders debut, and that evening, as Kelly habitually did in the 1980s, he will board the last flight from Brussels to Bilbao in order to line out for the opening stage of the Tour of the Basque Country on Monday morning.

Officially, Nibali’s principal mission in Flanders is to acquaint himself with the demands of racing on cobblestones ahead of stage 9 of this year’s Tour de France, which brings the peloton over the pavé of Paris-Roubaix, but there are clearly less extreme ways of doing so. Movistar, for instance, sent Mikel Landa to E3 Harelbeke last Friday, while Nairo Quintana and Alejandro Valverde are slated to start Dwars door Vlaanderen in midweek.

Nibali, by contrast, will perform his testing beneath the bright lights of De Ronde itself, and, for all that the Tour’s jaunt over the cobbles inspired his decision to compete in Flanders, it is clear that he will line out in Antwerp on Sunday morning with ambitions that far extend beyond seeing and being seen.