It may be true that Cadel Evans found his almost one minute advantage over closest rivals in the general classification laying on the roadside, or more particularly on the slippery roundabout three days ago. However, first two mountain stages of the Giro d’Italia 2014 edition proved that the Giro del Trentino winner is not only in his top disposition, but surrounded by incredibly strong BMC team, as Steve Morabito emerged as quiet hero on both occasions.

Following yesterday’s stage, the Giro d’Italia leader was full of praise for his key gregario, as the Swiss rider managed to set a pace fierce enough from a bottom of a penultimate climb to discourage other overall classification contenders from going for early attacks, and still managed to cross the finish line in 20th position.

After recovering from such a huge effort, Morabito admitted that it was never BMC ambition to get the pink jersey for Evans so early in the race as they have preferred the stage to be decided from a breakaway, but the situation on the road forced them to implement different scenario.

"The plan was to let a group get away and after the group had gone, we had no aim of getting the pink jersey," Morabito told a small group of reporters. "With 10 guys away and one of them at 3-50 [overall] it would have been easy to give them the jersey, but the other teams went flat out and we had to try to respond to that."

"But it's nice to have Cadel in pink, too, and it was good to be the last guy with him."

"Maybe when [BMC team-mate and fellow climber] Samuel Sánchez comes back [recovers] from his crashes, we'll have an even more solid team to defend the jersey. We're all ready to do as well as possible in this Giro d'Italia."

Even though first mountain stages gave some indication of a distribution of strength in leaders’ group, Morabito pointed out that they won’t draw too forward-looking conclusions as riders are still recovering from Thursday’s crash. However, BMC will use a rest day to decide their strategy for upcoming stages, aware that the toughest test are yet to arrive.

"Today is not the best reference [point], everybody is still finding their place. We'll see what happens tomorrow as well and then work out from the two stages what we will do for the really difficult days," he said.