Nairo Quintana is the big favourite to take today’s Giro d’Italia stage despite having had a disappointing Giro so far after he lost time during the big crash on Thursday. He is currently eleventh on GC 2.08 behind Michael Matthews.

"He's got bruises and scratches, today [stage seven] he's sure to be uncomfortable, but hopefully over the next few days he'll be all right" Movistar sports director Jose Luis Arrieta told Cyclingnews at the start of stage seven.

"You can say tomorrow [stage eight] is more suited to him, but every day here is key: just look at yesterday [stage six] and that crash. It's also very important how quickly he recovers from that, too."

"We're still in the first week, and there's a long way to go, even if a lot seems to have happened since Belfast."

Movistar suffered hugely during Thursday’s crash, with damage don to Andrey Amdor, Gorka Izagirre and Adriano Malori.

"It's quite a list, but what can you expect when 60 percent of the peloton goes down?" Arrieta says. "We all saw it coming, too, but when everybody wants to be in the front, there's all that rain bringing out all the dirt and oil to the surface, it's going to be bad."

Arrieta reflects, "It's always better to have an advantage rather than to be down on time, but the margins as yet are not overly worrying. Of course it's difficult and it's an important time gap and we're racing against a former Tour winner here, and one of the strongest teams in the Giro."

"But there's no way we're throwing in the towel at this point, with two weeks left to race. Little by little we'll go on seeing what we can do, and just as he's been unlucky on several occasions, everybody else may have their moment of bad luck, too and we can take advantage of that."

Despite Nairo Quintana slightly criticizing Cadel Evans for riding on during the crash and thus putting a big gap into Quintana and the other GC men, Arrieta believes that what happened was purely racing and that everyone should move on. He didn’t think asking the riders ahead to stop would have been the reasonable thing to do.

"If they'd stopped and waited, it wouldn't have been a bad thing to do, but the rider is probably the last person who will think about it [stopping] under those circumstances, when they're stressed out because there's just been a huge crash, and the race is full on."