The Giro d'Italia, one of the three great Grand Tours.
But why is this brutal three-week stage race so hard?
Why does it create moments like this?
And this?
Well in this video I'm gonna break it down so that we can understand why this race is so iconic
but ultimately so brutal.
Now for this, I'm donning my GCN Italy Giro t-shirt.
Yeah, happy with that one.
The Giro d'Italia was born in 1909
and similarly to the Tour de France, it was there to help promote
a newspaper known as La Gazzetta dello Sport which,
well, literally translates into The Sports Newspaper.
It was the brainchild of a young editor known as Tullo Morgagni
Tullo was committed to making this happen,
but was worried a rival newspaper would beat him to it, the Corriere della Sera.
So, in August 1908 it was announced that the Giro d'Italia was going to go ahead.
So, on the 13th of May, 1909, the first edition of the Giro was going to take place starting from one of Italy's great cities -
yes, Milan. Or, Milano.
The first edition of the Giro d'Italia was 2,447 km long.
It was split up into 8 stages,
starting from Milan, it was then going to head to Bologna
through Chieti, Napoli, Rome, Florence, Genoa, Turin, and ending back in Milan.
The average speed of this race was 28 kilometres long,
and it was utterly brutal!
And this really shows in the number of riders that signed up to the number of riders that finished.
166 riders signed up for this race,
and only 49 made it back to Milan.
And that really shows just how brutal it was.
From the beginning the Giro d'Italia gained a reputation of being utterly brutal,
and this gave it a lot of popularity. More and more people wanted to experience
the Giro, and some say it gained Tour de France prestige in some years.
More and more people across the globe wanted to get their hands on that iconic maglia rosa.
Now there is a good chance you will have heard of the maglia rosa,
or at least seen iconic cycling images of a rider donning those iconic pink colors.
The maglia rosa was invented in 1931,
and those pink colors came about because the newspaper, La Gazetta, was pink
so it could stand up on the shelves, or stand out at least.
The maglia rosa is awarded to the leader of the race.
The rider that completes the whole course, the whole route, in the least amount of time, will win the coveted maglia rosa, the general classification winner.
So why is it so hard? And why is the maglia rosa so highly regarded?
Well if you look at the map of Italy, it's really hard to not notice the mountains -
the Alps, a bigger and taller chain that divides the peninsula from its neighbors: France, Switzerland, Austria, and Slovenia.
These are not small mountains, with some of the highest mountains nearing 5000 meters.
Like that famous climb, the Monte Bianco
Then, there's the Apennine Mountain Range.
It's not as tall, but it's for sure as long as the Alps, and much wider,
dividing the peninsula into two parts.
These mountain ranges are a core part of Italy's landscapes,
Italy's culture, but more than anything else, they are integral to Italy's famous race.
These mountain ranges have become the Colosseum to iconic cycling battles.
With fans of the sport flocking to the mountain ranges to watch their heroes battle it out on the steep slopes,
creating an atmosphere like no other.
This is where the race is won and lost,
where you can gain a lot of time, but on the other hand, you can lose a lot too.
In recent years, the mountain stages have taken up over one third of the entire Giro route
and the big, the most, and the most aggressive mountain stages, like the Queen stages, come at the end of the three weeks.
And that is where the fight for the maglia rosa becomes incredibly fierce.
The weather has also played a big part in making this race a race for the hard men.
Being the first grand tour of the season, falling in May,
there's a good chance that bad weather is going to descend on the riders at some point during the route,
especially when they hit the mountains.
Low temperatures, snow, sleet, even heavy rainfall, is all going to be something that is going to impact the riders when they head upwards.
And how can we forget the epic scenes of the snowy Galibier back in 2013 at the Giro d'Italia?
Isn't this race hard enough without poor weather chucked in?
It's not just tough for the GC contenders.
The maglia rossa, the red jersey, and later, the ciclamino, was introduced in 1966.
It was awarded to the sprinters and based on a point classification system that's completely separate to the maglia rosa.
This created a competition within a competition,
so that flat stages became worth fighting for, meaning no easy days.
And often, those flat days became crazy fast and impossible for the riders to relax.
Yep, no day off, no easy day, meaning this race was on...and on... all the time.
Now I have never ridden the Giro d'Italia, but I know a few familiar faces that have.
So why is the Giro d'Italia so hard?
Right, why is the Giro so hard?
I was actually thinking about the Giro
today, I was looking at the old racebook and I got my old number here, see if I can show you that.
There we go, 114.
I think the reason it's so hard is because the climbs in Italy are just brutal,
they're so steep, the gradient's just unrelenting.
The days at the Giro are so long - the stages are so long, but also the transfers?
I remember some days we were getting up at maybe
getting up at six AM and I remember having dinner at midnight on the same day.
I did the Giro d'Italia five times
and I think that this race, it's so hard because in Italy
we have a lot of long and steep climbs.
The second reason is because in Italy you can find a lot of narrow roads.
In the peloton, you can leave the stress, because everybody wants to stay in the front
just to be safe, and I think maybe for these two reason the Giro is a hard race.
Why is the Giro so hard? I'll tell you, because at the end it is all a big mess.
It is a big show, a big festival, everybody's attacking each other and you never know what is coming up.
The roads are not perfect, and everybody's only waiting for the last week, going to the Dolomites.
Monster stages, 250km long, five mountain passes, and that pretty much every day -
that's the Giro!
It is unpredictable, and that's what makes it so special and great.
Why the Giro is so hard?
Because always it's really long stages and also really long and hard climbs,
second one I think, you know it's the first Grand Tour of the year,
and everyone is really motivated to try to do something good, something well.
The maglia ciclamino is really important for all the riders, it's why they sprint in every line and at the finish try to take a point.
And it's why never we have a really rest.
You know, I think the Giro d'Italia is the harder course in the whole Grand Tours.
I think what specifically made the Giro d'Italia hard for me
was the fact that everybody else in the race was a bit better,
which always makes it harder to keep up, you'll all know that.
But there were a few brutal stages in the first Giro I did in 2009.
There were three that were in excess of 240km, long days in the saddle.
But another one that really stands out in my memory - it was "only" 237km on stage 16
but it was in the mountains, and it was kind of a bittersweet day.
It was sweet because my teammate Carlos Sastre won, shared the prize money,
but bitter because he took seven hours and twelve minutes to win it.
I of course was quite a long way behind in the first of the grupettos on the road,
forty minutes to be exact,
so 7 hours and 50 minutes in the saddle for me.
Believe it or not, there was a second grupetto ten minutes behind me.
And to top it all off, we then had to ride down the mountain to get to our team buses,
and then there was a four hour transfer to the next hotel.
I remember it as being brutal, I've forgotten a lot of the pain, but some of it is still there.
Not an easy race.
So there you have it - the hardest Grand Tour in the cycling calendar?
Let us know in the comments section below, what you think
of this beautiful race.
And I've also got a poll going on the GCN app, so make sure you go over there and have a vote.
What do we think about my Giro t-shirt?
And I hope all my pronunciation went alright, fingers crossed.