The week-long Swiss stage race was hit from the very start by horrendous weather with an opening prologue marred by some very sketchy corners and later stage routes shortened. Eventually the weather (along with the racing, which had been a bit ponderous up to that point) brightened up with a victory from Simon Yates on stage four.  

Richie Porte ended up swiping the overall win from beneath Yates’ nose, after an impressive final day time trial performance saw him claw back enough seconds to leapfrog the Yorkshireman in the GC. Primoz Roglic rounded out the podium.

Who said there was no such thing as bad publicity?

One has to wonder what it’s like to work in the Team Sky PR department.

Imagine you are Terence, the newly-minted Team Sky PR & Communications intern. You left university with a 2.1 in International Business and French twelve months ago. After spending June getting over your epic grad week hangover and July on the sofa watching the Tour in your pants, your dad got you this job by pulling some strings with some chaps he used to work with at Jaguar. You love cycling. You are delighted to be working at the world’s biggest bike racing team.

You spend August making the tea and getting to grips with the official team Twitter account. And then bam, jiffygate kicks off. All of a sudden it is like you are in the trenches of a horrible never-ending war where, as well as the efforts of your enemies to try and blow you up with their tanks and planes and flamethrowers, your own side keep inexplicably blowing themselves up with grenades each time you think you might be getting a handle on things.

And Matt Lawton will. not. stop. calling. you.

It has been, let’s be honest here Terence, absolutely bloody horrible working in the Team Sky PR department for the last nine months. You didn’t realise going grey from stress was a real thing, but it is a thing, because you’ve aged about a year for every month you’ve worked at Sky. When your dad takes you out for a pint people ask if you’re brothers. Your mum keeps sitting you down and asking if you’re eating enough greens.

Then finally it seems to be cooling off. The dust is settling. The story has run out of steam. Everyone has finally started to forget or at least calm down a bit about that bloody jiffy bag. The team is finally back to winning bike races and keeping its head down. Your searing migraines have almost stopped completely.

And just when the tiny bit of light at the end of a very long tunnel of grovelling apologies is beginning to get a little closer – along comes Gianni Moscon to take a great steaming dump right on the middle of your desk.

All downhill from here

In the midst of all the modernisation that is going on in cycling, it’s nice to see the organisers of the Giro preserving a bit of that ‘make ‘em suffer’ philosophy that made Henri Desgrange such a beloved figure in his time as director of the Tour de France.

Never afraid of a bit of controversy, the brains behind the Giro decided to introduce a new classification to this year’s edition, before scrapping it after it drew a certain amount of criticism for making the race unnecessarily dangerous.

Stopping just short of adding a knife juggling portion of each day’s stage, the race organisers decided that it would be a bit of fun to do a descending classification, the winner of which would have been the rider fastest down ten pre-determined segments spread throughout the race.

Hey, at least the Giro didn’t introduce the downhill competition the same year as that descent with the nets.

— Service Course (@SC_Cycling) May 1, 2017

Quite why the Giro decided to organise this extra bit of competition is unclear; perhaps it was merely a monetisable sponsorship opp (Italian tyre brand, Pirelli, has stuck its name on the classification), or perhaps a means of pepping up the racing, or maybe it was just a way of guaranteeing Vincenzo Nibali wins something at his national race.  

As Service Course pointed out, the Giro has form for sketchy descents too – probably a good job the idea was promptly scrapped, no sooner had it been annonced.