It’s not easy doing recon rides at the moment in Europe. It’s -11°C in Gavarnie and -10°C in Cari right now so those days of the Tour and Giro can wait until spring or even better, summer. But Stage 11 of the Giro was completed last weekend.
The route takes an predictable course along the coast before turning inland for a late climb to spice things up. Finding the exact route for this took a moment and if the climb is tricky, more so the descent.
Glance at the profile and you can see the finale where the route goes through Sestri and to Lavagna and then takes the climb to San Bartolomeo before descending to San Salvatore and then a flat run to the finish in Chiavari. So which roads to ride?
Here’s a screengrab map from Google above and you can see San Bartolomeo to the north of Chiavari up on the top left. It should be somewhere up there and back down, right? Only go back to the altitude profile and the road is supposed to reach 334m above sea level and the roads around San Bartolomeo there only reach 220m. So it’s probably not that way.
Let’s turn to the Giro’s own map as seen above. It shows the race route heads for the hills to the north-east of Chiavari instead, although it still says San Bartolomeo too. Trace the Giro’s loop and the race goes via the SP34 up to Cogorno, not San Bartolomeo. The mystery, if we can call it that, is solved because on the road up to Cogorno there is another, different small place called San Bartolomeo. You won’t know it by riding through as there are no signs but this smaller San Bartolomeo is marked the IGMI maps of Italy, the national cartographer. Keep going up to Cogorno and the top of the climb sits at 330m. That’s a match.
Conspiracy? Probably not. The myth goes that the Giro was infamous for surprise climbs, a bump on the profile that turned out to be a wall, a modest categorised climb on the map marked a brute of a mountain pass. Only examples are hard to find. But it was still possible to catch-out the peloton by venturing onto new roads that only a handful of locals knew and where maps and the terrain were less familiar. Today that’s impossible as cartography software means every metre of the course is known to teams; they’ve already got the GPS tracks of the Giro as it happens.
Moral of the story
A tale of competing maps and race organisers who are not locals and so grab labels as they pass by or trace the route on a map. The less local the race, the more it happens. Hopefully no spectators wait in vain at the other San Bartolomeo.
It’s very notable in the Tour de France where the “Côte de [Placename]” formula is rarely used by locals and can sometimes mask the real name of a small mountain pass.
Recon notes
So what’s the finish like? The final climb is 5.8km at close to 6%, nothing much on paper but on tarmac this was worth the visit. The previous climbs of the day are more traditional mountain passes that help traffic cross from one place to the other, they’re more even and gradual. This one is just a series of roads linking villages in the hills that twists up past olive groves.
Coming in the second week of the race this ought to be a breakaway day and this final climb should be decisive. It’s steep for a moment out of Lavagna in a way the profiles don’t pick up and an early move here could work as the bendy road all the way up means a rider be out of sight even if they have 15 seconds.
The hardest part comes at the top with sustained double-digit percentages for the final kilometre, anyone who has managed the climb well and has some punch left can make a move as there’s less than 10km to go and little time left to chase.
There’s a short balcony section over the top and then comes the descent. This could be the real story on the day. The route down even goes via a place called Breccanecca which sounds funny in the moment, a brecca ya necca descent right?
Only riding down wasn’t a laugh as it’s steep with tight, blind bends and off-camber corners. It briefly triggered thoughts of an email the organisers or the CPA because it was beyond “technical” in places. It is still a normal road used daily by locals, it’s just going to be awkward to rush down under pressure but the surface at least is alright which helps. Hopefully it’s a breakaway day, the sun is out and the final climb is selective so we won’t see a group barrel down to Chiavari with riders jostling for position. There’s only a few kilometres of flat to reach the finish on the sea front and deducing from the map, no late surprises.
It’s too early for a preview but one small piece of news today is that Michael Valgren (EF) is down to ride the Giro and if he can returning to winning ways he’s the archetypal rider for a day like this, if not then Jan Christen (UAE), Lorenzo Fortunato (XDS-Astana) and Thibau Nys (Lidl-Trek) come to mind.
This is what I LOVE about Pro Cycling – You get to see the terrain and hypothesise on what might happen, but due to a vast number of reasons the race might not turn out like you had expected. With very few exceptions, race routes always change year on year AND us amateurs/fans are able to experience them if we wish. It’s hard for me to relate to an F1 pilot or ski jumper for example because I am so far removed from the experience and likely will never get to try.
Totally +1! Adding the “reverse effect” when the pros get to race on your home turf, with that mix of expectations based on detailed knowledge of the course (often wrongly placed but whatever!) and then seeing how “your” roads look on tv. Moreover, being able to place some famous race actions on a personal mind map makes them even more memorable ex post.
I’ll never get tired of insisting on how much all this makes cycling so different from a lot of POVs, including business modrl! (Though I suspect that most might be tired of listening it 😉 )
Re: F1, hugely different, but I suspect that part of the charm of urban circuits is being developed in “real life” spaces. Not that you’ll easily share any part of the experience in, ssy, Madrid, maybe the safety car moment when you’re in a slowly moving traffic jam or the start at red lights.
Hah, it’s certainly quite humbling when a local ‘mountain’ near you doesn’t even get classed as a hill in a pro race 🫠
Plenty of variables even when the course is known. For example everyone expects Pogaçar to attack on the Cipressa again but we’ll see if the wind is blowing in the right direction on the climb and then on the Aurelia coastal road etc. Or see the Tour of Flanders which has the same route but the weather can play a part, even if it is getting a bit predictable. And that’s the big detail, you can go right down to small things like road surfaces changing from one season to the next etc.
Thank you for the notes! I am looking forward to watching the Giro already.
There’s a blog post to do soon on the Giro media rights. If anyone has seen a Eurosport advert lately they might have seen it shows the Tour de France and Vuelta on it… but no Giro. In short we don’t know what channel it’ll be on outside Italy right now.
Oh boy. Having negotiated the Eurosport —> TNT move fairly economically and painlessly last year, I’m not keen any Balkanisation of cycling rights. But surely it will happen. And no doubt the potential Netflix take over of TNT will mess things up further.
Will appreciate any insight, nonetheless.
I wonder how the people who for the last decade-plus have been saying that cycling needs more money coming into it feel about this ‘progression’.
Money doesn’t make sport better. It makes the big teams much stronger and calcifies that. And at the same time, many of the public are priced out of watching. It has happened in many other sports, so it’s baffling that people were seemingly unaware that it would happen in cycling.
The only response from fans is the one I take – don’t pay.
@inrng
This was no conspiracy and your interpretation above is spot on, but the Giro being “smart” when producing their cartography for teams and athletes is far from being a myth. There are many examples, including what part of the finale you include in the “detailed view”. Same for “small” changes applied later in the Spring. Detailed GPS cartography has limits and anyway only works when you know the course, which is often released to teams only little time before actual racing starts.
And it’s as much about selecting a roster as about having an impact of sort on daily racing.
Close planimetry (road width, “exact” angle of turns, type of hairpin even, as in corkscrew vs. flat curve, etc.) might be as important as altimetry, by the way, and it’s not as easy to sort out even with great software, especially as it would require an amount of work which many teams won’t throw in, ahem, for the Giro. The TDF is obviously different. Some teams have a specialised figure for this, often an athlete or ex athlete who loved this aspect, other teams… just don’t!
One big change today is Veloviewer and the way teams can zoom in for detail on the course, rather than the average gradient per kilometre there is detail every, say, 50 metres. Some race profiles still show a flat kilometre on a climb when in fact it’s a descent and then a steep wall but few teams get surprised by this but it can surprise at times, especially as organisers seek out more spectacle.
One idea for a cycling tech company would be to scan the route of a time trial with laser/radar from a vehicle on the morning of the race and then have software plot the quickest route, on which side is the smoothest tarmac, the most shelter from buildings or vegetation, the best line may not always be the obvious racing line.
From what I understand (from a local resident) there is a 1km climb through a park at around km 181 (5 km to finish) on this stage too.
It isn’t flat to the finish after the big climb (and that isn’t shown on the published profile either…)
There’s only 4km after the descent ends and no park so hard to find. But there is a fun ramp on the other side of the valley coming off the descent that climbs to the San Margherita di Caperana church, it’s a narrow wall. That would be fun if they’ve kept this back for now.