Di Luca wants Vuelta invitation

Just days after finishing second in the Giro d’Italia, Danilo Di Luca is making his case about racing the Vuelta a España later this season.

With his LPR team already overlooked for the spring classics and the Tour de France, Di Luca is pulling out all the stops in a bid to gain an invitation to the season’s third grand tour.

“After a Giro like this, I deserve a chance to race the Vuelta,” Di Luca told La Gazzetta dello Sport. “If they invite us to the Vuelta, Petacchi would race as well, and we would give them a spectacle.”

Di Luca backed off guarantees of disputing the overall, but promised he would light up the Spanish roads in preparation for the world championships, set for Switzerland just a week after the Vuelta concludes.

The hilly and demanding Mendrisio course is ideal for Di Luca’s style of aggressive racing, so much so that Italian national coach Franco Ballerini has all but guaranteed Di Luca a shot at leading the highly stacked Italian worlds squad.

“The Vuelta is an important race to fine-tune the condition ahead of the worlds,” Di Luca. “I’d like to race (the Vuelta). I’ve always delivered the times I’ve raced.”

Di Luca was referring to his two Vuelta stage victories, first in Alcoy in 2002 and a second in La Covatilla in 2006.

“The Killer” also said LPR would bring Italian sprinter ace Alessandro Petacchi along for the ride. Petacchi has won 19 career stages at the Vuelta and one points jersey.

“Petacchi is almost as well-known and admired in Spain as he is in Italy. He has the same customs as the Spanish,” Di Luca said of Petacchi, who speaks fluent Spanish. “But, above all, I think we deserve a spot in the Vuelta because we demonstrated in the Giro that we have nothing to envy from squads that are theoretically at a higher category.”

LPR manager Fabio Bordonali is already holding conversations with Vuelta organizers about securing a spot for the team among the 21-squad lineup for the August 29 start in Holland.

The Vuelta, however, is now partially controlled by the Amaury Sports Organisation, organizers of the Ardennes classics and the Tour, the major events to which Di Luca’s team has not been invited.

Di Luca said if the team wasn’t invited to the Vuelta, it would race events in Italy and Poland to prepare for the worlds.

FILED UNDER: News / Road / Vuelta a España TAGS: Vuelta a España