New York Times reporter Juliet Macur has the latest on the Giro d'Italia, one of Europe's great cycling races. Today's stage was an individual time trial. Macur tells anchor Lisa Mullins about some of the elements that make this year's Giro a particular challenge.
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LISA MULLINS: The twelfth stage of the Giro d'Italia is now complete. The Giro is one of the great European cycling races. Today some of the world's best cyclists competed in an individual time trial. New York Times reporter Juliet Macur is in Riomaggiore, Italy.
JULIET MACUR: This is the hundredth anniversary of the Giro so they've made the course especially difficult and especially, from my point of view, especially beautiful because it hits all the cool regions of Italy. Right now we're in Riomaggiore overlooking the sea here in this really rotten pressroom that we have. Yeah it's a pretty special race. And of course Lance Armstrong is in this race for the first time.
MULLINS: I know you're following this every step of the way and you're even twittering or twitting about it as well. How's Lance doing?
MACUR: Lance is getting better day by day. At first, it was a little slow. I think another cyclist had described it as sort of an old diesel engine trying to get moving. You know once it gets moving it goes pretty fast but it takes a little while to get up to speed. And the last couple days in the mountains he had lead the group, which is really difficult because you have to be at the front of the group and you're cutting through the wind to make it easier for the people behind you. So it's really tough to do that. So I think he's been impressing people day by day.
MULLINS: Hey Juliet who said the Lance Armstrong was like an old diesel engine? Was that an Italian?
MACUR: It was another rider who just happens to be an old diesel engine himself. His name is Jens Voigt. He's on the Saxo Bank team.
MULLINS: Yeah because it's not something we often hear about Lance. Now you mentioned that the route itself has changed a lot. That it's really beautiful and very tricky and because it is so tricky it's been kind of dangerous for at least one rider. Tell us what happened.
MACUR: The race organizers wanted this race to be special because of the hundredth anniversary and it's been a fine line between dramatic for TV and way too risky for the riders. The first couple mountain stages ended in these really dramatic descents where they went downhill very quickly and some of them had really sharp turns, some hairpin turns, and unfortunately a Spanish rider had obviously taken a turn too quickly. His bike had crashed against the guard rail and flew over the guard rail and fell more than 250 feet down a cliff basically. And he ended up having multiple injuries but he's lucky that he didn't have any head injuries. So that's obviously an extreme of how risky this race could be. But everyday riders are crashing left and right because you know the course is just really tricky. I think one rider was clocked at going 73 miles an hour down a hill that was slippery and also had turns on it. So you can imagine how quick that is. One of the team directors has a good saying about that saying, if you fall at that speed it's basically like being thrown out of car at 73 miles an hour wearing just your underwear. So it's not something that's pleasant for those guys.
MULLINS: Well that brings us to today's race, the twelfth stage, which is now complete. It was all about speed.
MACUR: Well yeah. I mean they finish 37.6 miles trying to go as fast as you can which is usually pretty simple in an individual time trial because most of the time it's flat. This race however, as the race organizers had decided was going to be more interesting than that, they put in two pretty big climbs and a lot more descents. Just more difficult. Made it 30 minutes longer than a usual time trial course so it was the longest time trial course a lot of these guys had ever seen.
MULLINS: Before we let you go Juliet, tell us what else you've been writing about and twitting about.
MACUR: Yeah I mean this race is 21 days long and we started out trying to cover just the first 10 days to see how Lance Armstrong would do but as it turned out the race winner might be Levi Leipheimer who's an American. He's originally from Montana. Lives in Santa Rosa, California now. He's in third place overall, just 40 seconds out of first. So, we might stay to the end because an American might win for only the second time in the history of this race. It's going to be pretty spectacular.
MULLINS: Alright. Thank you very much. New York Time's reporter Juliet Macur reporting form Italy, in fact it's Riomaggiore, Italy on the Giro d'Italia cycling race. Thank you so much.
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