The second time trial and two races today: Filippo Gannas bid to stay in the hot seat for the afternoon and the contest among the GC contenders for the podium and beyond.Stage 13 Review: a third sprint win for Jonathan Milan. With 60km to go the peloton split during the stage and Milan and his team were on the wrong side and forced to chase with Milan himself taking turns but the gap was never big, the problem was just closing the final metres.In the streets of Cento Fernando Gaviria went for a characteristic long sprint, then Milan jumped with 200m to go. Nobody got close. Stanisaw Aniokowski finished second precisely because he was on Milans wheel, there was no point leaving the slipstream of the Italian colossus and riders came in in a line rather than across the road. Both Merlier and Groves were out of the sprint after being caught in traffic, with Groves brushing the barriers and having to ease up. Thanks to this Milan now leads the points competition by over 100 points meaning the closest rider Kaden Groves would have to win two stages and an intermediate sprint without Milan scoring anything for the jersey to change; put another way the threat to Milans ciclamino jersey is gravity in the Alps.The Route: a 31km time trial. It starts with a small climb out of town. There are few secrets to the course but the first half uses more rural roads, these twist and turn, rise and fall a bit, it can interrupt the pacing a bit: do you power over that drag or surrender with a gear shift to keep something for later? The second half is on wider roads before finishing on the shores of Lake Garda.The Contenders: Filippo Ganna (Ineos) blitzed the flat part of the time trial to Perugia last week only to lose out on the climb to Tadej Pogaar. Today theres no climb so its Gannas stage to lose, surely something will have to go wrong, illness or such like for him to be beaten.The question for all the GC contenders is how hard to push it because tomorrows stage is a humdinger. Go big today or keep something back in reserve?GannaWeather: sunny and 21C with a light easterly wind meaning a headwind for the first half of the course.TV: the first rider is off at 1.40pm CEST, Ganna goes at 2.35pm and Pogaar at 4.43pm and he should finish by 5.15pm CEST.Postcard from Desenzano del GardaLake Garda is known for its crystal waters, to gaze into it is to feel thirsty. Its a swanky place where teak-decked motorboats chug between private villas with their own jetties, some even with their own harbours. If youre watching the time trial on TV and see a helicopter shot of a large house with big swimming pools with about 3km to go theres a good chance it belongs to Igor Makarov, the now Cypriot founder of the Katusha cycling team which had its HQ just down the road.Born in Turkmenistan, loyal readers will remember past posts about Makarovs rise. As a racing cyclist hed travel to events and using whatever meagre resources he had hed buy some jeans to take home and sell. One day jeans, another day natural gas. He started piping gas from Turkmenistan to Ukraine in barter deals that saw him repaid in cereal. It made him a billionaire and his business ITERA became a key player in the global energy market. In time hed start the Katusha cycling team.Russia around the turn of the century was a business wild-west. This was something an American investor called Bill Browder discovered, hed backed the Russian energy company Gazprom but found it was selling off assets on the cheap. For example Browder says Gazprom sold 32% of a gas venture called Purgaz to Makarovs ITERA for $1,200. No missing million or billion suffix here, were talking the kind of money you could spend to heat a home for a year. Only Purgaz had 380 billion cubic metres of gas, enough to power Europe for a year. You can see why Browder had concerns and Makarov got rich. Makarov though was hardly fleecing Gazprom, its own managers and others were in on the ruse.Flush with cash Makarov bought a villa in Desenzano on the shores of the lake, other Russian billionaires did too because its one thing to make money in Russia, to keep it better put it abroad. The local press says hes rarely seen in the villa; one article from a few years ago says his Boeing couldnt land at Brescia airport because of fog so it was diverted to Milan.Only these days no more Boeing, you might spot him on an orange-painted Airbus A320 because hes had to travel with budget carrier Easyjet. Many of his assets have been frozen, his private jets grounded, yachts seized. The UK cited him among those supporting or obtaining benefit from the Government of Russia and operating in sectors of strategic significance but hes since been taken off the UK sanctions list. Hes been lobbying hard, even renounced Russian citizenship, quite a turn for the man who bankrolled the Russian cycling project a decade ago.Theres still a cycling connection as hes on the UCIs Management Committee, effectively the board of cyclings governing body. But perhaps real interest is the way his career has told us so much about the changes in Russia over the years whether the economy, energy, business and politics but thats all for someone elses blog or a historian.The post Giro Stage 14 Preview first appeared on The Inner Ring.