Ivan Basso has enjoyed something of a renaissance over the last 9 months after he looked good for a strong top 10 placing in the Vuelta last year before pulling out on a day when awful weather struck and he was hit with hypothermia. And so far in the Giro, he sits 10th ahead of the first mountain stage and has hardly put a foot wrong. He is 2:06 of Michael Matthews but less than 2 minutes behind the first real GC man Cadel Evans but Basso is unsure if he can keep pace with the other GC candidates on the stage.

“We’ll see, we haven’t done this kind of climb in the race just yet,” Basso told Cyclingnews in Frosinone on Friday. “Like if I’ve said from the start of the Giro, I don’t feel like I’m at the same level of the best riders. I still haven’t felt the sensations that you need to be up there with the best riders but I hope that will improve as the days pass.”

Basso fell during Thursday’s stage but suffered no major injuries but had to fight as hard as he could to rejoin and then hang on with the rest of the GC favourites on the final climb.

“I actually didn’t feel good because I started the climb from a long way back, I had to go hard from the bottom and it wasn’t easy to make up ground. I suffered a lot,” said Basso, who felt Evans was well within his rights to take advantage of the carnage behind.

“It was 11 kilometres from the finish, and I think that in a situation like that you can’t do anything other than race. It’s happened a lot of other times in the past and I think it’s all a bit of a pointless debate really.”

Basso is riding his ninth Giro and has wins in both 2006 and 2010 but says he has never experienced an opening week quite as difficult as this one.

“We’re only in the first six days. It’s a very difficult and demanding Giro. Nobody expected that first part of this Giro to be quite as difficult and complicated in terms of weather. It’s really been durissimo,” Basso said. “It’s a Giro that’s been a lot more complicated than we might have expected up to now.”

Basso has survived so far where some of his GC rivals like Arredondo, Rodriguez, Martin and Roche have fallen and if he is still there going into Monday’s rest day he may need to be considered for something more than a top 10 placing.