A sprint stage. Yes there’s a climb of over a thousand metres to scale along the way but it’s featured in recent years and the stage has ended in a sprint so it’ll take a team or two to really apply themselves to change the outcome.
Giro d’Italia Stage 4 Preview
The Giro is back in Italy and it’s straight into the mountains with a summit finish on Mount Etna.
Book Review – Al Giro d’Italia by Dino Buzzati
With a rest-travel day in the Giro, why not pull out a book whether you’re travelling or looking for something to replace the TV coverage for a day? Dino Buzzati’s account of the 1949 Giro d’Italia stands the test of time. A writer dispatched as a special correspondent it is as much the story of Italy and its people as it is of the race where Fausto Coppi and Gino Bartali duel. Many of the Giro’s sights and sounds from 1949 often find a reflection or an echo today.
It’s been translated into English, Spanish, German and French so many readers can enjoy it.
Giro d’Italia Stage 3 Preview
A stage for the sprinters including a dragstrip finish along the shores of Lake Balaton.
Giro d’Italia Stage 2 Preview
A time trial stage to reshape the overall classification. It’s also a small GC day, a form test and also because today supplies one third of the Giro’s total TT distance so anyone hoping to use their time trial bike as a tool to gain time on their rivals needs to get the most out of this stage.
Giro d’Italia Stage 1 Preview
The Giro begins with a road stage that’s all about the uphill finish at Visegrad. Who will take the maglia rosa?
Giro d’Italia Preview
The Giro d’Italia starts this Friday in Hungary and ahead lies over three weeks of racing. That much we know, the hard part is rating all the contenders and pretenders for the maglia rosa because so many have question marks about their form, their season so far or their consistency during a grand tour.
Richard Carapaz is the deductive choice in the absence of Tadej Pogačar and Primož Roglič because when they’ve beaten him he was at last often on their wheel while all the others had been dropped. Yet Carapaz hasn’t had it easy this season and it’s far from certain he can hold it together for three weeks. It makes for an enticing race, any emerging hierarchy we see atop Etna could be altered at the Blockhaus and rewritten again and again in the Alps.
Politics Is Everywhere
The Giro’s starting in Hungary and if you just want to enjoy the sport of a bike race riding across the countryside and through a capital city… then skip this post, do not read any further. A preview of the GC contenders should go up later today is available to read instead.
To look more closely at the race is to keep stumbling into Hungarian politics, and Prime Minister Viktor Orbán seems to be everywhere.
UCI World Tour Promotion and Relegation Weekly
With the Giro d’Italia around the corner the last thing on many people’s mind is arithmetic but there are molto points for the GC. However neither Lotto-Soudal nor Israel have any obvious candidates so they’ll have to seek points elsewhere this month.