Dealing with the Giro d’Italia

Sometimes you have to take some time to get to grips with what happened. If you do them during construction, you always run the risk of having a distorted view. Especially with the Tour of Italy.

By lining up what happened, the following can be counted: a time trial that rewrote the history of the Giro, that of Monte Lussari; a big stage that at times seemed to us to be magnificent and then it was a little less so, but which put the worm of doubt that the race still had pages to write: that of the Tre Cime di Lavaredo; two alpine stages with an exciting finish: that of Monte Bondone and that of Val di Zoldo; a stage characterized by an impressive number, that of Ben Healy towards Fossombrone; one in which both the breakaway of the day and the first in the standings are given: that of Bergamo; three stupendous sprints: in Salerno, Tortona and Caorle, two out of three marked by sensational recoveries by Jonathan Milan; a near miss: that of Alessandro De Marchi and Simon Clarke in Naples; four stages in which the breakaway indulged in making the race exciting: those of Viareggio, Rivoli, Crans Montana and Cassano Magnago; a very uncertain stopwatch that kept us nailed to the screen until the last second because it was impossible to understand the result; a time trial, the opening one, where we saw a show of cycling precision: that of Remco Evenepoel. And a few empty jokes, stages that we imagined could be better, but which instead gave a show that was less than expected.

That’s the problem: expectations. We see the altimetric profiles of the stages and we imagine shots and counter shots, actions from man alone in command even if the shirts are no longer white-blue and their names are not Fausto Coppi. Expectations fail us. It’s always a fight to compare reality with imagination. Because runners aren’t imaginary, they have hearts and legs and lungs like us, even if the heart beats better, the legs are stronger, the lungs larger. It’s also up to them to deal with energy and if the best is always left in the end it goes without saying that whoever has the pink jersey as their goal tries to keep as much energy as possible for the final. We are fooled by expectations also because, deep down, we are convinced that all cyclists are a bit Pogacar and Vingegaard or van der Poel and van Aert and that the 2022 Tour de France can be repeated forever. It is not so. Not that the others, those who were at the Giro, are scarce, they simply aren’t like that and the conditions that were created in France haven’t been reproduced. We had enjoyed it in July. It must be said that this May didn’t go so badly either, all things considered. Because there will be days that we will remember, despite everything. Despite torrential rain, cold and Covid. Starting from the penultimate, when Roglic overturned a Giro that Thomas could have won, which the Slovenian risked not winning due to a chain jump, but who won anyway. We will remember him for the squabbles of Pinot, the sprints of Milan, the adventures of Gee and Healy. And in a few years we’ll say: I saw them blossom at that Giro.

We will especially remember the places that the Giro has passed through, because this Giro has also allowed us to have time to observe where the Giro has moved, the usual wonderful journey into pieces of Italy that we too often ignored. And what is now called boredom, but which boredom is not, is the great gift of cycling: giving us the opportunity to discover what we didn’t know, giving us the cue to make us curious about something.