Italian Wikipedia can only think of four times the Giro came here, and only once before 1986 (in 1930). Obviously the city’s history as an economically depressed and culturally distant corner of Italy had a role in dissuading the Giro from coming here. Also Geraint Thomas being among the favorites throws a wrench in a few riders’ plans to take this stage cautiously.ĭid You Know? For a regional capital, Palermo has seen just a few Giri roll through. But it is a course for the powerful riders, and the little climber types will want to limit their losses as much as possible. Not because I think people will fall off the side of a straight, somewhat modest descent (fingers crossed), because we are so bloody far from Milan that it’d be foolish to put too much into this stage. Significance: Minimal, I think, although moderately treacherous for anyone who shows up in less than a fully focused state. The 15km course might not take much more than 22 (? 24?) minutes for the stage winners to master. Then it gets super straight and boring - a good test for the power brokers and sprinters who can keep the pace high for the 10km of flat racing. The course starts up near the Monreale Cathedral and drops down into the center of Sicily, making for a flashy, urban course that won’t be without its challenges.Įyeballing the descent, it looks to be about a 6% gradient with just a couple hairpin bends to get through. Photo by Camillo Balossini/Archivio Camillo Balossini/Mondadori Portfolio Stage 1: Monreale - Palermo, 15.1 km ITTĭetails: The Giro starts with a prologueish, downhillish time trial that, when it was first announced, set of a small round of outrage in the name of rider safety. Let’s dive in ASAP before the bloody race kicks off. Nothing is quite what it was right now, so if the Giro comes close to capturing its usual beauty, then I’m good.īy way of a preview and breakdown, I’ll do one post a week having some fun with the upcoming stage. Hopefully the riders involved will ramp up all of our passions with their exploits, the snow will hold off in the high mountains, and the Giro will be the Giro, more or less. This edition, like most others, will invite - nay, insist - on some sort of action. ![]() The Giro remains a showcase of Italy, a wonderful landscape of cycling roads and fans and stories of legend. The point of the exercise was to sit around imagining the Giro and how exciting it all is, even while it wasn’t happening. It was an assemblage of actual Giro stages, notable for their route and their real-life impacts to Giro lore since 2000. watching the Giro.Ĭase in point: back in May, I passed some of the time (OK all of it) by putting together a make-believe Giro course that was designed to be the percorso di tutti percorsi, released in. While I may not have had time to prepare myself mentally for the Giro, and while I have some doubts about the racing being memorable, I. Pile the Worlds on top of that and it’s all deeply, strangely anticlimactic to be heading to Italy right now.īut hey, I don’t make the rules, I just follow them blindly, led along by the promise of good coffee, colorful scenery and the Processo Alla Tappa. The post-Tour exhaustion is the opposite of what we are used to feeling at the Giro, which keeps building on top of the classics and shorter stage races that precede it. ![]() Tirreno just happened but going up against the Tour it was hard to pay much attention to. ![]() The Giro doesn’t feel like the sun is coming out if anything, it’s setting. ![]() The Giro d’Italia is about to start, with no notable run-up of Romandie or spring racing. The Tour felt like the Tour.Īnd none of that is happening now. It all happened with a reasonable build up and little distraction. Races were raced well, fortunes were made and lost, and the stories of the Tour blotted out the sun for three weeks. WIth the just-concluded Tour de France, the experience of watching, and apparently the riders’ experience as well, turned out to be surprisingly normal. Huh, so I guess it’s Giro time! This is getting deeply weird.
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