May is the fastest of months. The time of the Giro d’Italia

It always ends up like this, year after year. You don’t have time to realize that March has arrived and with it the time of the classics, whether they are of the sea and anticipating spring or of stone that sometimes lead back to winter, it makes no difference, which is now May. And once May is already June, because May is the shortest of months, which goes as fast as a bicycle descending the Stelvio. No car can go faster than a bicycle down mountain passes, at least those with switchbacks. May flows as fast as the Tour of Italy. And the Giro is in no danger of going slow. Of course, maybe sometimes the pink race is dozing, always dozing sooner or later, usually more sooner than later, but then it goes straight and fast which is wonderful.

And it’s already June.

And it’s already been three weeks and your eyes and head are empty of future thoughts, of reckless and imaginary challenges, and full of memories. Memories will begin to form on Saturday from Fossacesia marina. They will end on Sunday 28 May in Rome. And then it will really be June. And the Giro will be just over eleven months away. Curse May, rushing by. What a beautiful May, which brings the Giro with it.

It is useless to look at the Giro d’Italia when they present it, it is useless to study it, delve into the stages, imagine how it could or could not end up. The pink race always has its own mind. He arrives, drinks May from us like a thirsty person empties a bottle of water, leaves us there with the idea that it could have gone differently. Sometimes the best, the strongest wins. Sometimes not. To such an extent that it is not clear how it was possible. Cycling is one of the least mathematically exact of all mathematically inexact sports. Adding watts and vams and other similar swear words rarely comes up with the right result. Especially at the Giro. The Tour de France has better calculators, the variables are many, but some less. In Italy the variables tend to infinity and there is no way to understand anything. If there aren’t legs, you won’t go anywhere, of course, but if there isn’t shrewdness and ability to adapt, neither will you.

He noticed Jacques Anquetil: “I won the first Tour de France at the first attempt. I lost the first Giro d’Italia that I competed in (it was 1959, ed) because I made a mistake on the descent down from the Col de la Forclaz, to return I did a little over-rev, I threw away the pink jersey on the Piccolo San Bernardo. You have to learn to manage the stress of the Giro”.

It will be said, it was another cycling. Real. Nothing has changed. Primoz Roglic this is how he commented on his first Giro d’Italia disputed as a man of the classification, that of 2019 (he finished third): “In the last week, when I could, should have, made a difference, I began to understand that I was exhausted. Not of legs, of head. After more than two thousand kilometers in which you can’t be distracted for even a minute, you find yourself faced with very tough climbs, narrow streets where you can pass four bikes at the most. And then curves, curves, curves”. And if the head crashes, the legs are worse.

Primoz Roglic’s May will curl up in the Italian cycling May after four years. The goal is the same as then: to win. No rivals, all different. There will be no Vincenzo Nibali, there will be no Richard Carapaz who paraded in the pink jersey inside the Verona Arena. Of the top ten then there will be only Bauke Mollema and Pavel Sivakov. The first will try to mess up on the run, the second to help Geraint Thomas and Tao Geoghegan Hart.

There will be though Remco Evenepoel, designated favorite, the Elected ready to go down from Belgium in pink to show miracle. Italians have only experienced one May, in 2021. But he was 21 years old, less than a year earlier he had fallen off a bridge in the Giro di Lombardia and it was already a long time since he was at the start. Two years ago everything changed. Above all, he has changed. He became a man, first winner of a Vuelta, then world champion. Above all, he learned to run concentrated, he understood how he pedals weighed down by pressure. He has legs, and crazy ones, he also seems to have shrewdness and intelligence. He knew very well that he didn’t have the experience and maybe still the ability to follow Tadej Pogacar and Jonas Vingegaard for three weeks, he chose to race elsewhere, away from them. There are too many Elected in this cycling and too little place inside a yellow jersey. Also because May has been much less exciting than July for a long time, certainly less rewarding much less.

Evenepoel and Roglic are the ones chosen to compete for the pink jersey. At the time trial they could delude themselves that this Giro d’Italia is really their business. And maybe it would be better this way, that in head-to-head you can’t wait, you have to move the pedals and detach your opponent. It is when there are many, too many roosters in the henhouse that one begins to stop, to evaluate what to do, to doze off in the Italian May.

May goes fast and the Giro will also start fast. Time trial, sprint, trying to exploit hills that become mountains, which exceed two thousand meters up to Campo Imperatore, the first uphill finish, the first big peak after seven stages that require a refined imagination to understand them. They seem easy, the endings even trivial, but first you go up and down, up and down again, you put meters in altitude in your legs that become kilometers. And then curves, curves, curves. This is how Italy works. This is how the Italian May works. This is how the whole Giro works. Which arrives in May and disappears in May. Fast, too fast.