The 2025 Giro d’Italia route was finally unveiled in a long presentation but since we’ve been waiting since December what’s an extra two hours? It’ll take place between 9 May – 1 June and has few time trials and few summit finishes but remains mountainous.
Here’s a stage-by-stage look with all the profiles on one page and some thoughts on each day and more.
Stage 1 – Friday 9 May
The start in Albania was confirmed and announced already so a note yesterday’s presentation. It was long and at times seemed more about geopolitics than sport. It had presentation saw the Albania’s prime minister on stage, sporting white shoes, a sign the grande partenza matters to him. He was joined on stage by two ministers from the Italian government. Political? You bet, and Albania is holding parliamentary elections on the same weekend as the race visits.
Stage 1 starts on the coast to project images of beach resorts before heading inland and it’s mountainous, the mountains point at Gracen is a long climb and sufficient to eject some sprinters before crossing to the Qafa Koxhalites, qafa is the local word for a mountain pass. Then come laps in Tirana with more climbs. Wout van Aert in pink?
Stage 2 – Saturday 10 May
A time trial in downtown Tirana, the capital city. It’s big bulevardi as they say in Albanian and the climb mid-stage is a bigger boulevard still.
Stage 3 – Sunday 11 May
This passes around Mount Çika, the highest peak and takes in the Llogara pass. The stage sets the scene for the 2025 Giro’s course design with big climbs often an hour the finish.
Stage 4 – Tuesday 13 May
After the ferry to Bari, a day for the sprinters to Lecce in the heel of Italy.
Stage 5 – Wednesday 14 May
Matera is back. This featured more recently in 2020 when Arnaud Démare supplied one of his best wins in the uphill sprint. The difference this time is the sapping climb to Montescaglioso, a much hillier approach.
Stage 6 – Thursday 15 May
A start in Potenza, the town that’s so hilly they use giant escalators as public transport and it’s uphill via the unmarked climb of the Valico di Monte Romito. It could be enough to launch a breakaway but the course flattens as the race returns to Napoli for the fourth year in a row.
Stage 7 – Friday 16 May
Plenty of familiar roads with a start in Castel di Sangro to climb to Roccaraso and a day in the Apennines with 3,800m of vertical gain. Tagliacozzo says the finish but this is towards Marsia on the slopes of Monte Bove above the town. Squint at the profile above and you can see the final 3.6km are steep, it’s a real summit finish… one of only two.
Stage 8 – Saturday 17 May
3,500m of vertical gain so almost as much climbing as the previous day but this time scattered throughout the day with unmarked climbs and surprises, for example the last 4th category climb is a brute of a ramp. Castelraimondo is a regular haunt for Tirreno-Adriatico and the finish here uses plenty of twisty backroads.
Stage 9 – Sunday 18 May
The gravel stage with sterrato from the Strade Bianche and some shared sections with Monteaperti and Pinzuto in the finish (but not le Tolfe) before climbing into Siena and a finish on the Piazza del Campo. As ever this a crucial stage because of the fear something can go wrong.
Stage 10 – Tuesday 20 May
This comes after a rest day. There are the hills on the horizon but they stay there as this sticks to the flat for a 28km time trial in Tuscany. With this stage done that’s it for the time trials. 2025 will see the fewest amount of time trials across all grand tours for 50 years or in modern day course design.
Stage 11 – Wednesday 21 May
Away from the beaches and into the Garfagnana to Alpe San Pellegrino which despite the name is the highest village in the Appenines, not the Alps. Either way it’s a brute of a climb with 14km at 8.7% average and the upper part with long ramps at 12-13%. The rest of the stage is hilly but not as steep and the 12% section for the final climb, perhaps in the inside of a hairpin bend?
Stage 12 – Thursday 22 May
A day for the sprinters and not just on the plains of the river Po but on its banks.
Stage 13 – Friday 23 May
A ride into the Veneto and the highlight if the finish is in Vicenza, the graphics above omit to mention it is on the Monte Berico climb, and tackled twice here. Philippe Gilbert won ahead of Alberto Contador here in 2015, it’s that kind of finish.
Stage 14 – Saturday 24 May
Sprinters’ day with a visit to Slovenia. If you want to troll an Italian call this the “wine stage” because of the Slovenian vineyards around Nova Gorica. But the climb at Saver is sharper than it looks and so this isn’t a Giro for the dragster sprinters.
Stage 15 – Sunday 25 May
Monte Grappa and the Asiago plateau. The key word here is “plateau” because there’s a 28km section across the top to the finish for the longest stage in the race. It’s very similar to the 2017 stage won by Thibaut Pinot where Monte Grappa featured but the finish saw a frantic chase across the plateau where Nairo Quintana extended his overall lead by a few seconds over Tom Dumoulin the day before the final time trial.
Stage 16 – Tuesday 27 May
A big day in the Alps yet without any big climbs, 4,900m of climbing but without little time spend above 1,000m altitude. The San Valentino pass is just long at 17km and most of the time a steady road up to the pastures high above Lake Garda.
Stage 17 – Wednesday 28 May
The Mortirolo stage. First comes the Tonale, a big transport artery and a steady climb. Next the Mortirolo is climbed the “easy” side from Monno but that’s relative, it’s still a very hard climb and the descent to Grosio means the larger road and not the toboggan run to Mazzo past a Pantani memorial.
Then it’s the long valley road up to Bormio but the route turns off this to climb to Le Motte, an old fort and as you might imagine this sits high above the valley, it’s a proper climb for a final sort-out.
Stage 18 – Thursday 29 May
One for the sprinters? Yes but by now a tired peloton might have more of a struggle, especially as desperate teams launch moves to try and salvage a result.
Stage 19 – Friday 30 May
The tappone with 4,950m of vertical gain, the most in this year’s edition. Alas last time the Giro visited the Aosta valley things turned to farce. In 2023 the peloton was worried about the state of the road on a climb in Switzerland later in the stage and the compromise was to skip the first climb in Italy… while still tackling the Swiss one. The story is longer but the missed start infuriated local politicians, minutes from council meetings recorded this. But the Giro is back, presumably a sweetened deal on the hosting fees. We get a tour of the region with the second-only ever ascent of the very tough Tzecore, the sort of climb you can ride up and think you’re on a bad day but it’s actually just the relentless pitch. Then two more steady climbs in Saint-Pantaléon and Joux familiar to riders who’ve done the Giro… Ciclistico della Valle d’Aosta, the U23 stage race held every summer. Once again the climbing eases before the finish with ride over to Champoluc.
Stage 20 – Saturday 31 May
The Finestre to settle things. A ride out of the Aosta valley first and then across the Canavese foothills where the late Gianni Savio would home his latest imports. The Colle del Lys looks small but it’s a proper Alpine climb even if there’s time to recover for the Finestre.
This climb is a 21st century addition to the Giro, first used in 2005 after it was partially paved. The gravel gets the headlines but it’s road-bike friendly, don’t expect lengthy “gravel tech” articles on the morning of the stage. The Finestre is almost 19km long and averages over 9% making it an hour long ascension and one of the toughest in the Alps all around. It’s packed with hairpins, 30 in a 3km stretch which matters for the concertina effect, being just a few places back can cause whiplash and cost energy, just ask Simon Yates. Once over the top the descent is paved and the route picks up the main highway to Sestriere.
Stage 21 – Sunday 1 June
A fixture now, the stage to the coast and back via the Eur business district before laps around the city of Rome.
The Verdict
The route was known – it’s been shared with teams over a month ago – but if we knew the start and finish its what’s in between that counts. Especially this time.
Last year’s route was explicitly eased twice to tempt Tadej Pogačar: reduced vertical gain of 43,000m and shortened stages averaging 172km per day (excluding TTs and the Rome stage), down from the 50,000m or more and 190km days. This year’s climbing jumps back up towards the norms but the average distance only goes to back up to 179km so its as mountainous as ever, or even than ever on a per kilometre basis and has few time trial kilometres.
This year’s route has not been created for Wout van Aert – he is not going to win overall – but the opening week is perfect with the hilly sprints and the time trial too, stage wins and the maglia rosa await.
The curiosity of the course is the lack of summit finishes, there are just two and neither Stages 7+16 is big either. Will riders make long range moves before, or sit tight? Precedent in recent years says the preference is to wait for as long as possible and hope others fall away but the answer partly depends on the rider…
The Contenders
Confirmation today that Jonas Vingegaard won’t be riding. This is arguably good news as it leaves the rest of the field more balanced, nobody starts today as a five-chainring pick. Primož Roglič is the headline name and will find the course suits, he can clean up time bonuses from a small group as he bids to become the oldest winner of the Giro but his win rate is easing. He might prefer more time trial kilometres to keep the pure climbers away. Likewise Juan Ayuso who gets grand tour co-leadership at UAE and can hope to get a lead on colleague Adam Yates in the Albanian TT. Antonio Tiberi is another who’d like more time trials but keeps progressing. EF hired Richard Carapaz as a GC contender and want him back in this mould, the open sections of road from mountain passes to the finish are just the terrain for him. We’ll see how Simon Yates fares with Visma-LAB, the team has Van Aert and Olav Kooij too a GC bid a shared ambition rather than a priority.
Thanks for this.
Let’s hope that someone can challenge Roglic – Ayuso the most likely? But Adam Yates should go for it as well.
Doesn’t Stage 20 also count as a summit finish, albeit not a steep-looking one?
To beat Roglic, the best tactic is to go long – sprinting uphill is his speciality, plus he showed in last year’s Giro that he has his weak days. Perhaps the course organisers realised that Roglic would be the likely favourite (Pog and Vin were never likely, and RCS may well have had prior knowledge of that, particularly as payments are sometimes involved) and thus chose not to have many summit finishes.
Stage 20 is uphill but it’s hard to use the summit finish label, it’s just a long gradual climb up, 16km at 4% and 5% for the last 3km.
For tactics it’ll be interesting to see which teams come with a lot of strength and the plan to control the race, and then to see how much other squads look to them to do this.
Thanks – I didn’t realise it was quite so easy a climb.
Seems an odd choice for the final climb of the race: a strong team will want to keep their domestiques up with their leader in order to pace him up that. Could lead to conservative racing (although it would be up to others to attack on Finestre.
Presumably, Sestriere paid and so it had to be this.
A very hard climb (not any climb) followed by an easier one, possibly even a false flat, is a course design which tends to reward with great racing, for a long series of reason I can’t detail now, but let’s just say that historical records support this theory (broadly shared among people who are interested in course design).
Throw in a 50km time trial and a 20km stage around a flooded park somewhere and who knows, maybe WVA would have been a contender?!
Roglic will probably do one of his usual stealthy rides and be up there but time is marching on. Hopefully we’ll see a new generation shake things up rather than leaving it to the Yates brothers.
I’d love to see a cyclocross stage as part of a GT. And I don’t mean a ‘gravel stage’, I mean an actual cyclocross race!
Riders swap onto specialist bikes for TTs, so why not have one stage where they swap to cx bikes & knobbly 33mm tyres; gridding determined by the GC…an hour long cross would create bigger time gaps than any other stage in the race!
Interesting, but expensive.
It’s an intriguing route, and will be interesting to see what kind of racing it creates…we tend to think of summit finishes as being the key to exciting racing – the set pieces that are preordained to deliver thrills. But they often turn out to be underwhelming. So perhaps this route will incite some more spontaneous racing, and deliver something unexpected…?
Interesting take. It’s a balanced route, perhaps too balanced, bordering with “mild”. I might like the idea of some giant climb far from the finish, but the insistence this time gets close to an obsession. At least a couple between Sassotetto, S. Pellegrino in Alpe, Grappa, Mortirolo (you could even add Tzecore) could be placed a little closer to the finish line – I’m not even speaking of an uphill finish, just, dunno, being crossed within the final hour of race, be it only for… TV reasons. Most of the above are 90 to 100 kms from the line.
It’s a bit like when in a given edition we were given, besides the normal flat sprint stages, lots of sprints with a long easy finale after a quite hard first half of the stage (very nice to watch sometimes), but in that edition you had no stage with that entertaining final hill which forces a chasing rush. Then, a different edition goes all in for the final bump and ejects the other kind of “complicated” sprint stage!
(Now sprint stages have been actually nailed on, a great mix indeed where we could finally get to see some prime sprinting duels which had felt a bit lacking for several season now.)
Or the year we had lots of hard uphill finishes (most of them eventually becoming no contests), then the year with few or none consecutive serious climbs…
So in 2025… there’s this new obsession involving the route!
I simply can’t get why things don’t get mixed up a little more 🙂
All that said, the main mistake of the 2025 course is the same as in 2022 and 2023. The final couple of GC stage are that much above all the rest, and the second week is so weak, that there’s a serious risk of top GC contenders just holding back to give it all only at the very end. Then everybody will be enthusiast with the “uncertainty until the end” (rolling eyes) but we might end up adding a third boring Giro to the dire couplet of 2022 and 2023. The Giro’s got a trademark hard 3rd week, but it doesn’t mean that the penultimate weekend must be this modest, nor does that mean that putting the hardest stages on the final two racing days is the best way to do that. Actually, a middle mountain stage as the very last chance to turn things around tends to offer an even better show.
One thing we await is the relative strength of teams. If a climb is ridden hard then having numbers going over the top and for the valley 20-60km section to the finish can shape so much. A rider can go solo over a climb if they have team mates to mark or respond behind, similarly the team with numbers has many more options to the point where being the third rider on a team like UAE (Del Toro?) or Red Bull (Hindley/Martinez) might work out better than being a sole leader like Carapaz or Tiberi could be, there’s a path to victory if events play out.
But we could just see riders huddle until the final days in the Alps and the Finestre, think of Hindley vs Carapaz and Landa in 2022 etc.
Would like to see more in the second week too, the Apennines offer plenty of a tough days but San Pellegrino is so far from the finish.
This idea of a mix of second string riders taking some chances and seeing where they get to early in the race is appealing to me. The joker card, not the ace. We could see some Kuss-like activities as teams struggle to make their hierarchies work.
But otherwise I don’t know what to make of the route, and there doesn’t seem to be much consensus across the media – I’ve seen headlines highlighting all the climbing and how it will make it a tough route, and opinions bemoaning the lack of summit finishes and how it’s not such a tough route.
Perhaps this lack of clarity will carry over to the team cars and we’ll see a wild race with lots of conflicting strategies. It’s the Giro, and anything can happen.
We can hope so anyway.
+1
One thing to add to the mix is the weather. If it’s miserable throughout the first couple of weeks the action could be pretty minimal, at least for the GC favorites. If the conditions are good, I could see a bit of the 2024 Vuelta in this race. Obviously, Roglic will have his team do anything and everything to avoid that. You can roll your eyes all you want, but I would be happy to see uncertainty in the final week. I just hope it’s not because the big contenders keep their powder dry until then. You never know until the racing happens, but nothing in the early part of this route screams “big gaps” to me. Maybe Carapaz will play the BOC role and make it interesting…
I’m rolling my eyes because the uncertainty to be appreciated is having tight, hard fought duels, or, even better, multiple reversal of fortune (in the sense of results, not sheer luck).
But if you try to “build up” an artificial uncertainty just making hard for anyone to get a serious gap until the last two days (this -> “nothing in the early part of this route screams ‘big gaps’ to me.”) that’s just poor and leads essentially to a race which is boring 90% of the time.
Or, at best (not this Giro), what inrng called tapas cycling, a 10 minute (literally) snack in the form of uphill sprints every odd day. But even the Vuelta moved away from that, as it really wasn’t effective in terms of audience.
Personally exciting, as Stage 9 goes right past the villa we normally rent in Umbria (sadly not this year) and travels down roads I’m very familiar with, as well as stage 10 between Lucca and Pisa.
Slightly adjacent question: I’ve not been following cycling much the past few months, so I wonder if Roglic’s participation in the Giro essentially a concession that he will not really have a chance of contesting the Tour? Or does he seriously think he can do a double?
I think it’s more the former. He’s arguably only missing two races, the Tour de Suisse and the Tour de France. He won’t do Suisse this summer so that can wait for 2026 but the Tour looks like a tall order but he’ll go in as a team leader. If he’s had a good Giro then he can feel relaxed about July and hope for the best. Red Bull would surely sign for a Tour podium today especially if they could have a great Giro and after last summer’s mishaps.
Thanks. That must be a hard admission to make to oneself, even if it potentially comes with another grand tour victory.
I get the impression that Roglic made his peace with this several years ago. And it helps that Pogi is a genuinely nice guy, and super-respectful of Roglic so that the two of them have a good relationship. And Roglic genuinely understands how extraordinary a talent Pogi is (which makes his defeats in 2020/2021 easier to swallow).
Unless some disaster befalls Pogacar or Vingegaard at Tour, seems the realistic best chance Roglic or Remco have is 3rd place.
Remco’s “car door crash” has had severe consequences, with reports of shoulder or upper-body, motor nerve damage. Such injuries are slow to heal, and sometimes never return to 100% — hopefully it’s not the latter.
The secondary Tour drama could be the race for 3rd.
Marisa > Marsia
When you thought the Giro route cannot get any worse then in the previous years, here comes the RCS and says hold my beer. It’s absolutely unbelievable how they destroyed this beatiful race. Putting Monte Grappa and San Pellegrino in Alpe in the middle of a stage followed by nothing is just pathetic beyond extent.
Are they trying to make a Rome finale a thing now? If they insist on putting all the big alpine stages at the end, wouldn’t Milan make more sense? At least from transit, carbon footprint, and tradition perspective.
It’s disgusting how they do this. I applaud TCP who refuse to travel from up north down to Rome for the finale for this very reason.
The TdF does this with Paris, and the Vuelta does this with Madrid.
True, but that doesn’t make it a good thing.
The traditional place to finish was Milan. It is very recent that Rome has become the place to finish, partly because Milan isn’t that interested in hosting the finish anymore.
Indeed, but I also really liked the “moving finish town” concept as it someway mirrored how Italy is made of a lot of cities which at some moment in history were capital cities of something (and Italy itself had Turin, Florence and Rome). The country always struggled with centralisation and it’s actually not a bad thing.
Remember even Milan-Sanremo doesn’t start in Milan these days so I can’t see the city bidding for the Giro.
One issue with the Rome trip for logistics is all teams drive there… and then back, it’s not on the way to any team HQ, likewise for RCS’s fleet. They had a system for the media to book a train this last year, a wider version of this where teams also travel and take reduced resources (eg no team bus, no food truck) could be an idea but teams invested in the sprint might complain.
The one thing with Rome is that it has seen politicians take a closer interest in the race, on all sides, it seems to be back on their radar because it is under their noses… or could just be that a very wealthy guy who owns newspapers and TV channels now runs it so they can’t afford not to notice it 😉
All spot on.
I’d add that we’re seeing many symptoms of the current transition where public money – still available – is more concentrated than before in some more specific places, institutions, areas, structures.
Hence, you need to keep very close to where the money is.
Plus, private money (already very important of course) is becoming more and more relevant for GTs, even if it means affecting the route design.
In general, the relative strength of races, even the biggest ones, is slightly declining. Let me stress again – in *relative* terms, not absolute ones.
My understanding is that except for the Grande Depart, the host cities/towns no longer pay very much for the stages. The main issue is finding somewhere actually willing to host the races rather than how much money they pony-up. I suspect this can have quite a large impact on the race-routes that get chosen.
PS. The Tour de France is starting/finishing in small villages much of the time nowadays. It is difficult to believe that they would be able to pay much money for hosting rights.
For the small towns at the Tour, the hosting fee is the same but we see the different layers of regional government paying. So a big town or city might pay for itself but it can also get some regional/departmental funding. But the opposite is true for a tiny town, it can’t afford it but the wider area will pay, the idea is the area gets publicity for the day (or a regional politician is from the village/small town etc).
By the way, very nice route for the Giro Donne.
The men version, to me, still lacks a bit of… dunno, emotional impact.
I hope that such a factor will be granted by WVA and MvdP if they were both at the start as it’s beginning to be rumoured.
This Giro looks a great and well due “gift” (in the good sense) to WVA to get again some psychological momentum in order to regain his place among the absolute greatest in present cycling.
WVA and Mads Perdersen will grant a huge duel on this course. Crossing fingers for MvdP, too, but I’m starting to see that as more complicated. If they also bring Hirschi/Alaph and Pidcock, the stages might turn into true Classics, which I prefer to the little 20-or-so-men racing represented by the typical break day.
I was glancing at the route for the famous climbs and there are not many, just the Mortirolo and that’s in the middle of the stage. Feels like I can enjoy the racing later but right now there’s not much to stay in the memory, no Stelvio or Gavia day.
Agreed with the general point, a bit what I was hinting at when I said the route (as such) lacked emotional impact, yet Finestre although a relatively new one (“only” 20 yo), is already famous enough, I’d dare to say, and deservingly so, among other things because the race has produced memorable fireworks every time the Giro faced it – barring only 2011.
“This” Mortirolo is nothing special as it’s going to be climbed from the “easy” side, even if it’s rumoured that the definitive version in May might include some little surprise. Same for Monte Grappa.
San Pellegrino in Alpe and Santa Barbara even if rarely tackled are extremely renowned among fans because they’re really impressive climbs from a technical POV.
I guess we can thank the UCI Calendar plus my friends Salvato and Hansen if climbs over 2,000 m are going to disappear from the Giro. I guess that as in Australia you can only drive up to Mount McKay at 1,849 m, no cycling race should be allowed to race over that figure.
It’s not the altitude, it was the rain. Similar with Aosta the previous year for the lack of communication too and Hansen and the CPA picking battles to win (they do a lot more behind the scenes in hours of committee meetings but like much of politics there needs to be some visible battle to win). Stage 18 starts in Morbegno and like Aosta I wonder if this was gifted by RCS to rebuild bridges after the non-start to the stage there in 2020?
Of course, but I had already spent the “in Australia it doesn’t rain” joke 😛
Besides, no joke really catches the spirit of deciding you won’t race only because it rains without temperature also being especially low (as they did in 2020).
On a more serious note, several local authorities are less interested to invest in cycling because of political reasons, both in Italy and in Spain.
Plus, the money coming from Europe with the various post-covid programmes has not been distributed in a uniform way through different municipalities, regions etc. because it might depend on how proactive several institutional layers locally were (partly we can even say “rightly so”, but at the same time already disadvantaged areas received less or none precisely because the sociopolitical structure isn’t effective).
As a result, the races need to keep better relations than ever with those specific subjects who are still well willing to invest.
Even more so because it’s not only about money. To make an extreme example, as a race you may decide that you live on sponsor and TV money so you offer some start and finish to the corresponding towns for free – but they might still refuse if they consider that it’s going to have a negative impact on their population’s perception rather than the other way around (it already happened in Milan’s case or for smaller towns which the Giro was going to cross).
You may still have a queue of bidders, but their now patchier distribution makes it more complicated than before to build up a route.
Just check how through all the three GTs transfers generally skyrocketed, despite Vegni’s long-lasting commitment to reduce them or ASO’s short-term “green” declarations.
The Stelvio is famous but it’s just not used very often, five times this century, eight last century but that’s been sufficient to make it so famous. The Aosta valley stage 19 doesn’t have the famous climbs but it is hard.
The Finestre should be famous but it is relatively new. It’s the only climb about 2,000m, one thing not touched on above is how this isn’t an altitude Giro, the race doesn’t spend much time above 1,500m.
The Giro has moved forward slightly in the calendar over time. It used to be held in late May into early June (overlapping with the Dauphine). Backloading the climbs, so they occured in early June meant the higher climbs could be usually be used. Moving the race a week-or-two earlier means that the climbs are now often impassible in late May, and badly affected by the weather. These 10-days or so make a big difference at this time of year.
Re: stage 16, the official climb profiles were published and apparently San Valentino isn’t exactly steady… it is, sort of, until Brentonico, but then it’s a very different sort of beast. Long stretches well over 10% mixed with “easier” ones at 8-9% and some flatter or even short downhill section which account for an average gradient which doesn’t tell the actual story. Mind, I never climbed it from this side, only from the SE side of San Giacomo (quite hard), but the altimetry is quite impressive, as I said.