It’s the rest day and Daniel Friebe and Lionel Birnie have been in Abruzzo staying at a vineyard with a pair of jacuzzi pools in the garden.

Rest assured, the press conference episode was not recorded in the jacuzzi. We tackle some of the questions sent in by listeners and we also hear the accounts of the opening week of the Giro d’Italia from our three diarists in the peloton – Pavel Sivakov of Ineos Grenadiers, James Knox of Quick Step and Ben Zwiehoff of Bora-Hansgrohe.

Our Giro d’Italia coverage resumes with stage 10 on Tuesday.

Amaraterra provide our theme song, Cozze, and other music for The Cycling Podcast’s coverage of the Giro d’Italia. Their Bandcamp page is here: https://amaraterra.bandcamp.com/

To order the Selezione Simpatica, head to DVine Cellars.

Supersapiens is a continuous glucose monitoring system that helps you make the right fuelling choices. See supersapiens.com

For 25% off all your SiS products, go to scienceinsport.com and enter the code SISCP25 at the checkout.

This episode is also supported by NordVPN. Go to www.nordvpn.com/tcp or use the promo code TCP to get a big discount off a two-year subscription to protect your data when you’re online at home or abroad.

The Cycling Podcast has a new collaboration with MAAP. We will be launching a MAAP + The Cycling Podcast jersey later in the summer but before we reveal the details of that see: maap.cc

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