When the Giro d’Italia is a fantasy game

The best moment of Tour of Italy (and any other major stage race) arrives the night before the Giro d’Italia starts. At that moment, and only at that moment, the certainty is imprinted in our minds that the moment is very, very close, to the moment in which the wheels of the runners will begin to move, making the following three weeks full and exceptional. And in that moment and only in that moment does hope flare up in us, sometimes the conviction, that everything will be wonderful, that the Giro that awaits us will be the best of all the others we have seen.

It’s fantastic the night before the start of the Giro d’Italia.

It is a triumph of great escapes and great chases, of Apennine and Alpine solitudes, of men who do not give a damn about the will of the group, which is always stillness, of storms and pedal storms that hit and upset the status quo. There are surprises and certainties that break away and come back without interruption and make the Giro an incessant flow of images that leave you breathless, if not enough for a wow liberating.

The real Giro d’Italia, the one that will run through our local roads for three weeks, never really ends like the Giro of the evening before the start of the Giro d’Italia. But so be it. It’s the beauty of fantasy. The fantasy that the bicycle gives us in handfuls every time we get on it and take it for a stroll.

The real Giro d’Italia always goes differently than the imagined one. It must be said, however, that sometimes it leaves us the same wow liberation of our personal Tour, which we almost always never have the courage to tell others.

Because cycling still knows how to grant extraordinary surprises, it still knows how to speak to our imagination.

Like Marco Pantani’s shots on Fedaia, towards Plan di Montecampione, on Galibier and all the others, all; like Franco Ballerini’s Paris-Roubaix; like Vincenzo Nibali up and down the Poggio towards Sanremo; like Chris Froome’s wandering through the Piedmontese Alps; like all the Tour de France a year ago; like Tadej Pogacar’s Tour of Flanders. Like who knows how many things we couldn’t see because we weren’t born yet or we had chosen to do something else.

The evening before the start of the Giro d’Italia is the moment in which nothing is written yet and therefore everything is possible, even that the loves of the past and current passions find themselves side by side, in that strange unraveling of the time that cycling still, who knows how, grants.

The evening before the start of the Giro d’Italia is a strange moment. A moment that every year comes and goes in an instant, which gives way to those three weeks that we have been waiting for every May for an entire year.