Still Crazy After All These Years. The Modern-Day Giro (2008–15)
Over the years, with the notable exception of the remarkable Miguel Indurain, the Giro d’Italia had been comparatively barren ground for Spanish riders. For decades the Vuelta’s early season slot in the calendar, when Spanish riders were expected to compete flat out for their Spanish teams in their showpiece domestic race, militated against repeating such an effort often less than a week later, when the Giro started. The best of the Spanish riders usually preferred to rest up and then prepare for the Tour de France. It also has to be said that although Spain has always been blessed with talented climbers not all of them prospered in the often wintry conditions that frequently existed in the Dolomites and Alps in May and early June. Additionally, the Spanish media often tended to be lukewarm about the Giro and the expense of covering the event in addition to their own national Tour and the Tour de France. There were years when Spanish TV flatly refused to pay the Giro organisers’ asking price for ‘live’ coverage and without that incentive for their sponsors Spanish teams simply didn’t compete.
By 2008, however, the landscape was changing. After the retirement in 2005 of Lance Armstrong whose final mea culpa admission to systematic doping was still some way down the track, there was a vacuum to be filled. The sport lacked an obvious star rider and figurehead but after his victory in the 2007 Tour de France there was every reason to suspect that a slim but resourceful Spaniard, Alberto Contador, a climber of extraordinary fluidity and endurance, might be that man. Being the naughty noughties he also came with a little baggage. Contador was one of a number of ONCE-Eroski riders who had been withdrawn from the 2006 Tour de France on the eve of the race after possible links with the Operación Puerto investigation in Spain. Contador has always denied any links with Fuentes and investigations by the UCI and the Spanish Federation found no case to answer.
Despite being cleared by the UCI over the alleged Puerto links, Contador still seemed unlikely to race in the 2008 Giro with the organisers initially wanting to show their displeasure at the tainted Astana squad, who Contador had signed for at the end of 2007, by denying them an entry. Similarly ASO had made it clear that Astana would not be allowed to race at the 2008 Tour de France. As the start of the Giro in Sicily approached, however, the Italians wavered. Astana let it be known that, denied of the opportunity to race at the Tour de France, they would be fully committed to competing with their strongest available squad at the Giro if invited and that would include the reigning Tour de France champion Alberto Contador. It was a mighty draw and the Giro, mindful of the huge hike in media interest Contador would spark, ruthlessly ‘uninvited’ the wild-card entry, the NCS Medical team, in order to allow Astana to take their place at the start line. All is fair in love and war ... and bike races. So late was the call-up that Contador was enjoying a brief holiday sunning himself on a Spanish beach when he received the call but he was in good shape nonetheless. Early wins at the País Vasco and Castilla y León had seen him start the season with a bang.
Contador checked out of his beachside hotel and caught the first plane to Sicily where the start was being staged in Palermo. Understandably he eased his way into the race a little, a process aided by an unlikely break on stage six which established Giovanni Visconti and his Quickstep team in pink for over a week. Visconti was a rider who was never going to win the Giro but somebody who would defend the jersey proudly which allowed the GC contenders a little longer to manoeuvre quietly under the radar before launching their challenges. Contador demonstrated his building form, however, when he finished second in a testing mountainous time trial on stage ten which moved him to fourth overall but ahead of all his main GC rivals. Not that Contador wasn’t tested; he undoubtedly was, with a number of riders, not least Emanuele Sella, producing all sorts of pyrotechnics in the mountains. Sella took no fewer than three stage wins climbing at a scarcely believable pace. Contador, however, contented himself with defending the jersey at all times, riding consistently well, and although he didn’t claim a stage win in 2008 he duly became only the second Spaniard to win the Giro.
Later that summer Sella was subjected to an out-of-competition doping control and tested positive for CERA, one of the latest EPO products for which a test had not existed a couple of months earlier in the Giro. Eventually he admitted the offence to CONI and, banned for a year, named his team-mate Matteo Priamo, the winner of stage six at the Giro, as the supplier of the drug. Priamo was subsequently banned for four years and never raced again. Strangely their stage wins and Sella’s sixth place overall have not been scrubbed from the official Giro records. Meanwhile, Riccardo Ricci, who had produced a number of spectacular but suspicious rides during the Giro en route to second place behind Contador, tested positive for CERA at the Tour de France a couple of months later, after winning two stages, and was kicked out of the race and sacked by his team, Saunier Duval–Prodir. Suspicion immediately turned on his performances in the Giro. The UCI, using the updated tests, eventually revisited 82 samples from selected riders in the 2008 Giro and found six of the samples to be what they called ‘presumptive positives’. The governing body, however, has declined to name who those riders were. Ricci’s runner-up spot in 2008 stands but, after another drugs offence in 2011, when he fell seriously ill after an illegal blood transfusion, he was banned for 12 years.
The stench of drugs and doping still attached itself to the Giro with old habits dying hard and the 2009 podium was more tainted than most, but the organisers tried to put their best foot forward for what they termed the race’s centenary although that only referred to the 100 years of its existence, not the actual editions of the race. The re-emergence, out of retirement, of Lance Armstrong also added superficial gloss and notoriety to the event although nobody expected him to seriously contest the honours, firstly on account of his four-year retirement and also an early season crash and broken collarbone had put him weeks, if not months, back in his preparations. Armstrong eventually finished 12th overall although that result was ultimately scrubbed from the records, along with all his other performances, by the UCI after his later admission of wholescale doping. Armstrong maintains to this day that he didn’t dope in the 2009 Giro.
A team time trial up and down the Lido on the Venetian lagoon was as spectacular and photogenic as it gets for the start in 2009 and offered that rarity in Giro history, a British maglia rosa with sprinter Mark Cavendish leading his impressive HTC–Highroad team to a notable victory. Although losing the jersey to Alessandro Petacchi the following day, Cavendish went on to claim three individual stage wins to underline his growing reputation as the fastest sprinter in the peloton. Danilo Di Luca took over the jersey from the sprinters and opportunists on stage five before ceding it to Denis Menchov after a week and it was his daily fight with Menchov that provided the central theme to what was an enthralling race, one of the most absorbing in recent history. Menchov eventually won by 41 seconds, surviving a late scare in wet conditions on the final-day time trial when he slid off at a corner. It could all have come to grief there and then but luckily he avoided hitting the barriers or any spectators and was able to remount and continue on his way.
Absorbing as the contest was, it seems that seeing wasn’t necessarily believing when it came to Di Luca. On 22 July it was announced that he had given not one but two positive tests during the race, firstly at the Cinque Terre time trial and then on the Mount Vesuvius stage during the final week. A long legal battle ensued but he received a two-year suspension for his trouble and his results were struck from the record books. Third-placed Franco Pellizotti also retrospectively found himself in hot water when, nearly a year later and on the eve of the 2010 Giro, Gazzetta reported suspicious readings on his biological passport dating back to the previous season. He was eventually found guilty of doping in an appeal heard by CAS and received a two-year ban, backdated to 17 May 2009, which meant his results at the 2009 Giro and the Tour de France were rescinded. In a similar retrospective blood-passport offence Tadej Valjavec, riding for Ag2r, had his ninth place set aside. It was a sorry tale.
In 2010, with Di Luca and Pellizotti prevented from riding and Menchov concentrating on the Tour de France, not one of the previous year’s top three was back to contest the Giro which started with three stages in the Netherlands. One rider who was back, however, was Ivan Basso, the winner in 2006 who had now served his Operación Puerto-related ban and was looking for redemption in a race he had once seemed set to dominate. Another interesting returner was Bradley Wiggins, a star of various Olympic and World track cycling championships, who had set out the previous year to see if he could reinvent himself as a Grand Tour rider having previously ridden on the road mainly as a gregario and specialist Prologue and time-trial competitor. Indeed, in many ways the 2009 Giro had been his Damascene moment when, having lost a stone in weight during the winter, he found himself riding comfortably with the lead group every day for Team Garmin, having been a fully paid-up member of the gruppetto 12 months earlier. After a fortnight he and his Garmin team took the conscious decision to conserve energy for the Tour de France, which was suddenly becoming a viable option, while there was also a final-day time trial at the end of the Giro that he had his eyes on. As it happened, encountering the worst of the conditions on a wet and blustery afternoon, he finished in second place in the time-trial, 1 second behind Ignatas Konovalovas. The following month Wiggins contested the Tour de France and finished fourth in GC, later upgraded to third. In 2010 he returned to the Giro, this time as the team leader of the newly formed Team Sky and, although it started well with a fine win in the time trial and a much-coveted pink jersey, the race soon fell apart badly for Sky. On the crash-prone roads of Holland, Wiggins was unlucky to be delayed by a spill that cost him the maglia rosa and then, on stage three, a day of high winds and rain, he and half his Sky team crashed nastily on a fast corner and lost 4 minutes. His GC challenge was all but over before the race had even reached Italy.
It might not have been a classic in terms of quality, but the 2010 Giro was already proving quite eventful with frequent changes of leadership, and the next talking point was a brutally hard but wonderfully photogenic stage seven, which included lengthy stretches of strade bianche, when gravelly white roads predictably deteriorated into muddy tracks when the rains came. There were crashes from start to finish that day – Wiggins and Carlos Sastre were badly affected – and by the end it was mainly a battle for survival with Australian Cadel Evans, riding with BMC, prevailing ahead of Damiano Cunego and Alexander Vinokourov who went into pink. In many ways the day had been a throwback to the wildest days with just a hint of the Eroica era and although not amused at the finish many of the riders, after the luxury of a bath and massage later that night, admitted to enjoying the novelty of it all and the media was full of iconic images the following day. The race continued on its slightly bizarre way and on stage 11 came the very odd sight of the leaders – Vinokourov, Evans, Basso and his young but very promising Liquigas colleague Vincenzo Nibali – allowing a 54-man break to disappear into the distance after just 20km. It had been a full-on Giro with three rough days in the Netherlands, a transfer, the ‘Eroica stage’ and GC action everywhere you looked and there is no doubt that the leaders were tired. They badly wanted a straightforward, uncomplicated day so a game of bluff and counter-bluff ensued with nobody really wanting to take up the chase although the responsibility seemingly rested mainly with Vinokourov’s Astana team and Liquigas–Doimo. The former, though, were beset by illness that day although trying very hard to disguise that fact lest those in the chasing group gang up and launch another attack.
Meanwhile, up front Sky, who had endured a disappointing Giro thus far in their debut season, and Sastre’s Cervelo team, who were also chasing a positive result, piled on the pressure in unison with young Australian Richie Porte, who had started the day sixth in GC at 2.06, the main beneficiary. By the time the breakaway finished nearly 13 minutes ahead of the pink-jersey group Porte was the new leader. Vinokourov, the leader when Astana signed on that morning, was now 12th, nearly 10 minutes back with Evans, Nibali and Basso packed closely behind him. The Giro hadn’t seen drama like this in a long while. The breakaway had put the hammer down to such an extent that 41 riders missed the cut-off time of 39 minutes, although on this occasion they were treated leniently. It was way too early in the race to lose so many riders.
Yet ultimately Basso still won the race. How was that? With some difficulty is the short answer but at least Liquigas Doimo – who bore much responsibility for the mess-up – had time and mountain stages to make amends. All was not quite lost. They had the best climber in Basso and the best descender in Nibali and they had to make every kilometre count. From stage 11 onwards they had to ride a perfect race. The fightback started on stage 14 when nobody could stay with stage-winner Nibali followed by Basso, the duo putting over 2 minutes into the rest of the field while Basso piled in again the next day on the Zoncolan, this time taking nearly 6 minutes out of Porte. By that evening Basso has climbed back up to third place in GC, behind Porte and David Arroyo, who had taken the pink jersey from Porte. It had taken two mighty efforts, he was back in the game, but still Basso had to stay patient. The course flattened out considerably over the next four days; he would possibly have to wait until the penultimate day which took in the Gavia en route to a hilltop finish at Ponte di Legno to finish the job. It was going to be close and for one horrible moment it looked like snowy conditions on the Gavia might see that part of the stage cancelled and the sting drawn from Basso’s attack, but the organisers eventually decided the stage could proceed as originally planned. Basso did everything that was needed behind stage winner Johann Tschopp to finish third on the day and overhaul Arroyo. Going into the final-day time trial, which was to finish in the Roman amphitheatre in Verona, Basso led by 1 minute 15 seconds, which he improved upon by 26 seconds. It had been some comeback and in many ways Basso’s career highlight.
Tragedy strikes the Giro again
The 2011 Giro will be remembered for the saddest of reasons as the Belgian rider Wouter Weylandt suffered a fatal accident on stage three descending the Passo del Bocco near the town of Mezzanego. Weylandt was a flinty Belgian sprinter who had been a professional for seven seasons, mainly with Quick-Step–Davitamon and, although his form could be patchy, he had won a stage at the Vuelta a España in 2008 and also a stage of the 2010 Giro. He and Quick-Step had parted ways at the end of that 2010 season but the ambitious new team Leopard Trek had snapped him up as a lead-out rider for their number-one sprinter Daniele Bennati.
As a climb the Passo del Bocco – a steady 15km ascent to 956m at an average of 5.6 per cent – barely warrants a mention in the Giro pantheon although it was the venue for an important hill climb TT in 1994 that was won by Evgeni Berzin en route to his overall victory. The road however is very narrow, the tarmac condition is variable and there is a canopy of trees over many passages of the road making visibility difficult as riders move in and out of sunlight. There are also long sections of stone walling right next to the road and coming so early in the race with the peloton compact, animated and nervous, it was definitely a descent that commanded respect. Weylandt’s crash was still horribly random, though. According to a number of the riders closest to him in the peloton, Weylandt, like all the riders travelling at considerable pace, probably in excess of 60kmh, had just momentarily glanced backward to check his position when he clipped a low stone wall on the left of the road. That catapulted him right across the narrow road where he landed heavily and, it would seem, died on impact. Race doctor Giovanni Tredici was almost directly behind the crash in a race vehicle and attended within seconds but later confirmed the rider was dead although they tried to resuscitate him, in vain.
Cycling is a tough sport and there have been plenty of examples of bad behaviour from riders and teams over the decades not least at the Giro d’Italia but there was an instinctive dignity and gravitas about the way the peloton marked the death of one of their own the following day. The longish 216km run from Quarto dei Mille to Livorno was neutralised by the organisers before the start of the day and, after a minute’s silence and at the prompting of the maglia rosa David Millar, each of the teams rode approximately ten kilometres at the front in team classification order before Weylandt’s team Leopard Trek took over for the final stint, arriving ahead of the peloton at the finish along with Weylandt’s best friend and training partner Tyler Farrar from the Garmin team. Both Leopard Trek and Farrar withdrew from the race soon after they crossed the line. All the riders wore black armbands, many of the churches in the small villages and towns the peloton passed through tolled in mourning and at the end of the race Weylandt’s race number of 108 was retired from the Giro in perpetuity. No results or timings from the day counted towards any of the race’s classifications and after the stage, instead of any podium presentations, the four jersey classification leaders – Millar, Alessandro Petacchi, Gianluca Brambilla and Jan Bakelants – appeared on stage with the Leopard Trek team to lead another moment of silence.
The 2011 Giro, although a severe test, was virtually a benefit for Alberto Contador who dominated proceedings from early on, taking the leader’s jersey on stage nine to win by over 6 minutes from Michele Scarponi and Vincenzo Nibali. Contador was a class apart and seemingly won while barely breaking sweat but he was riding under a cloud. At the 2010 Tour de France, which he won, he had tested positive for a minute amount of the banned substance clenbuterol on the second rest day in Pau – he blamed contaminated meat bought by the team’s chef over the border in Spain – and had been vigorously protesting his innocence through the courts. The Spanish Cycling Federation cleared Contador, which enabled him to ride in the Giro, but both WADA and the UCI appealed that decision and the wheels were set in motion for a final hearing at the Court of Arbitration in Sport (CAS). That was a long and involved process but finally, on 6 February 2012 CAS adjudicated that Contador had given a positive test at the 2010 Tour de France and that his win in that race should be annulled, along with his commanding 2011 Giro d’Italia win. Runner-up Michele Scarponi was declared the new 2011 Giro d’Italia champion.
The 2011 Giro was ill-starred in so many ways and it wasn’t just Contador who suffered retrospectively in its wake. Angelo Zomegnan, who had been the Giro race director for seven years, endured considerable criticism before and during the race. Right from the launch of the course there were mutterings about it being too difficult for the modern era, a course that might tempt riders into using PEDs. There were 40 categorised climbs, 409km of categorised climbing and seven summit finishes. Add in two stages – five and 20 – that featured long stretches of strade bianche and a number of transfers that were long even by Giro standards and the peloton wasn’t happy. This manifested itself on stage 14 in which Zomegnan had intended to feature the truly spectacular Monte Crostis climb in the Friulian Alps – 14km at an average of 10 per cent with sections at 18 per cent on the upper ramparts – for the first time in the Giro. The climb is narrow and exposed and not suitable for a convoy of support cars and Zomegnan had already decreed that only team motorbikes could be used as back-up, but in the light of Weylandt’s tragic death neither the riders nor the teams were in any mood to compromise on safety issues. They made representations to the UCI commissaries who on the evening before the planned stage ruled that the much-anticipated Crostis climb would have to be taken out.
The knock-on effect of that was massive with many fans, including local unpaid volunteers who had been working since the snows cleared early in April to make the road surface as good as possible, up in arms. When they learned of the decision they gathered in a small village at the bottom of the Tualis climb which Zomegnan had added to the stage at the last minute as an alternative to the Crostis. The mood was ugly and, amid chaotic scenes, the race was again diverted. Altogether it was an unsatisfactory day at the Giro and the race director was in the firing line again on the final day in Milan when the concluding time trial was suddenly shortened by nearly six kilometres because the local authorities found themselves under pressure with a bigger than expected turnout for local elections. Voters protested that planned road closures and general Giro-inspired chaos in the city centre would make it difficult for them to access polling stations, and again last-minute alterations to the route had to be made. That was the final straw for parent company RCS and a month later, although praising Zomegnan for his handling of events immediately after Weylandt’s death, they sacked their race director although he was kept on as a consultant.
A Giro first for Hesjedal and Canada
The 2012 Giro was a much less contentious affair and offered up a pleasing storyline with Canada’s Ryder Hesjedal, riding for Garmin, becoming only the second North American to win the race, squeezing home by 16 seconds from Joaquim Rodríguez on the final-day time trial after a ding-dong battle in the final week. That last-gasp, final-day win was only the second time in Giro history that this had been achieved – the first was Moser in the controversial 1984 edition – and it was a compelling race despite the absence of Contador who was still serving his ban.
Hesjedal, from Victoria on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, had initially made an impact on the cycling world as a mountain biker winning a silver medal at the 2003 World Championship and he was possibly heading for a gold medal at the 2004 Olympics in Athens when he punctured. He could climb all right but as a big, tall guy – 6ft 2in and prone to put on weight when not racing and training regularly – he had made his way in the professional road-racing peloton as an ultra-reliable rouleur and a superior sort of domestique who could also perform well in the longer time trials. Awareness of his full potential came on the 2010 Tour de France Queen stage, when Contador and Andy Schleck duked it out on the Tourmalet, and he finished a very creditable third on the day and impressive fifth overall. Not for the first time his team manager Jonathan Vaughters and experienced DS and Giro veteran Charly Wegelius, noticed that the Canadian had a tendency to finish long stage races strongly. In an ideal world Ryder Hesjedal would be competing in Grand Tours of four or five weeks’ duration but, in the absence of such ultra-marathons, the Garmin think-tank of Vaughters and Wegelius very much liked the look of the 2012 Giro which finished with three mountain stages in the last five days and a decent length 28.2km TT on the final day. The corsa rosa also had a team time trial on stage four and Garmin around this time were outstanding in that discipline, claiming a notable win in the TTT at Les Essarts in the 2011 Tour de France. No Contador, Wiggins concentrating on the Tour de France, a backloaded final week and a heaven-sent team time trial? The stars seemed to be aligning if you looked in the right direction but could Hesjedal be convinced?
At the Garmin training camp in Boulder, Colorado, in November 2011 Vaughters and Wegelius set about persuading Hesjedal that he might be best served in 2012 switching from the Tour, which he had ridden in preference to the Giro for the last three seasons. He eventually came around to the idea and Garmin set about building a team that could protect him during the windy and sometimes chaotic opening three stages in Denmark, deliver a TTT triumph and then fight hard in the mountains. It was a tall order for a team that traditionally concentrated on stage wins and indeed they still turned up at the 2012 Giro also looking to contest the sprints with Tyler Farrar, but when the American crashed out early on the die was well and truly cast.
Hesjedal looked in good form from the start although probably only the cognoscenti noticed when he finished 17th in the opening day Prologue, some 30 seconds behind stage winner Taylor Phinney. The moot point, however, was that he was 14 seconds ahead of the next recognised GC contender, Joaquim Rodríguez, and those seconds were to prove very valuable indeed three weeks and 3,502km down the road. His team claimed a stunning win in the TTT in Verona on the race’s first day back from Denmark and by stage seven he was in pink, a position he disputed for the rest of the race. In fact, Hesjedal assumed the jersey on three separate occasions – stages seven, 14 and 21. He was nothing if not consistent.
The key to actually winning the race was always finishing strong and that’s how it worked out. Instead of losing time to Rodríguez on the very steep Alpe di Pampeago, as was expected by most, Hesjedal actually pulled 13 seconds back on the pink jersey. Then, on the penultimate day, which included the Stelvio, exemplary team riding and pacing from Christian Vande Velde and Peter Stetina saw him restrict his losses to Rodríguez to just 14 seconds on a day when the Spaniard might have expected to gain minutes. Going into the final trial, Rodríguez may have been in pink but with just a 31-second lead it was Hesjedal’s race to lose. The Canadian was by some distance the better time-trial rider and even if a twisting technical city course wasn’t ideally suited to his big engine, he was experienced enough to measure his effort well to deliver one of the most celebrated wins in Canadian sporting history. Vaughters summed it up like this: ‘Basically Ryder won the Giro because he out-dieseled everybody. He wasn’t spectacular at any time but he never faltered while everybody else gradually fatigued.’
Missing from the 2012 Giro was Vincenzo Nibali who, after a third place in 2010 and a runners-up spot in 2011, opted to try his luck at the Tour de France, where he finished third. He returned home to finally win the Giro in emphatic fashion in 2013, riding what most observers considered to be a nigh-on perfect race in horrid, testing conditions. Most of Europe experienced an unusually cold and wet late spring that year and those conditions certainly affected the Giro, with poor weather the norm and stage 19 – Ponte di Legno to Martell – being lost altogether to the snow. The following day’s climb to Tre Cime di Lavaredo, which Nibali won, was also a wintry affair. Although a native of sun-kissed Sicily, indeed his nickname is ‘the Shark of Messina’, Nibali proved very at home in such conditions with his sublime descending and bike-handling skills serving him well coming off the big climbs. The early withdrawals of reigning champion Hesjedal and reigning Tour de France champion Wiggins through injury and illness respectively certainly paved his way but Nibali looked ‘best in class’ from early on. The Italian stamped his authority on the race from the moment he took the jersey after the stage eight time trial – which Alex Dowsett won from Wiggins in the all-British showdown – and was an increasingly dominant figure as he took overall victory from Rigoberto Urán with Thomas De Gendt in third. Elsewhere the race was also notable for five stage wins from British sprinter Mark Cavendish which saw him take the Points jersey and complete the clean sweep of Points win in the three Grand Tours, a feat only previously achieved by four other riders – Uzbekistan’s Djamolidine Abdoujaparov, Italy’s Alessandro Petacchi, Laurent Jalabert from France and Belgium’s Eddy Merckx.
History was made in 2014 when diminutive climber Nairo Quintana became the first Colombian to win the Giro d’Italia and only the second rider from that cycling-mad country to win a Grand Tour after Luis Herrera who won the Vuelta a España in 1987. Just for good measure fellow countryman Rigoberto Urán finished runner-up and a third Colombian, Julián Arredondo, won the blue climber’s jersey and the prestigious stage to Rifugio Panarotta. As a demonstration of the potential of modern Colombian cycling it could scarcely be bettered and there was also a feeling of the Giro breaking new ground with a spectacular overseas start in Belfast with two stages in Northern Ireland before a third stage finishing in Dublin in the Republic of Ireland. Early May weather in those parts can be as fraught as the Alps and Dolomites and, almost predictably, it rained for the best part of three days with the murk and poor visibility particularly unwelcome on stage two which took in long sections of the famous Antrim coast road, one of the most spectacular roads in the world on a good day. But overall the weather didn’t seem to dampen the enthusiasm of the huge crowds and the riders stoically put up with driving rain and wind, the warm welcome offering much compensation. One thing that did dampen Irish spirits, however, was a crash, and broken collarbone, in the early stages of the opening-day time trial in Belfast for Dan Martin, the Irish rider with the best chance of bagging a few stage wins in the race and perhaps even featuring in the GC contest.
Once new sprinter Marcel Kittel had stolen the early headlines with his impressive turn of pace to win stages two and three, the main GC contenders took over and from early on Quintana, well protected from the rough and tumble by his Movistar team, looked ominously strong although there were spells in pink for both the ageless Cadel Evans and Urán. Quintana took a firm grip with a memorable win on stage 16 which took in a very snowy Stelvio. It wasn’t without controversy, though, as such wintry days seldom are. As conditions worsened the race director announced some three kilometres before the race reached the top of the Stelvio Pass that, because of potentially dangerous conditions in the first part of the descent, riders were to follow race motorbikes down through the first six bends. So late was the call, however, and so problematic getting that message from team cars down the mountain to riders up the road, that not all of the peloton received it. Some radios were working, others weren’t. Some riders were wearing earpieces, others had discarded then as impractical in the foul weather. Another batch of riders claimed to have heard that the whole of the descent was to be neutralised and there is no doubt that confusion reigned, as the official Giro Twitter feed acknowledged with a tweet at 2.57 p.m.:
‘Wrong communication: no neutralization for the descent from the Passo dello Stelvio. Sorry for the wrong information. #giro’
Quintana was already going well when he crested the Stelvio with Ryder Hesjedal and Pierre Rolland and he certainly didn’t hang around on the descent before the 22.35km climb up the Val Nartello which tops out at 2,059m, but he later denied attacking while others slowed in compliance with officialdom. Official timings show he gained 1.41 on the peloton by the end of the descent which he extended to 4 minutes 11 seconds by the top of the Val Martello climb. ‘I realised we were ahead at the top of the Stelvio but we didn’t attack on the descent,’ he insisted afterwards. ‘My team-mates didn’t hear anything, I didn’t hear, just an order from our team car to cover up well. I don’t understand why there is an argument. I gained my time, above all, on the last climb, not on the descent. I just raced like everybody else.’
Quintana wasn’t present the following year for the 2015 Giro and nor were Vincenzo Nibali or Chris Froome for that matter as they preferred to concentrate on the Tour de France. All of which left the field clear for Alberto Contador who firmly believed he could pull off the first Giro/Tour double since Pantani in 1998. As he put it himself before the race, ‘I want to do something people will remember for ever.’ Contador duly won the Giro – and his three-finger salute on the podium clearly demonstrated that he still believed it was his third race win, not second – but the battle took more out of him than he anticipated and he had to settle for a distant fifth place at the Tour. What made this Giro so difficult for Contador, other than the stubborn resistance of the Astana duo of Fabio Aru and Mikel Landa, was a nasty crash on stage six which resulted in a dislocated shoulder. Contador had taken the pink jersey the day before on the summit finish of the Abetone and everything seemed to be going to plan, but the following day – a fairly routine run from Montecatini Terme to Castiglione della Pescaia – he found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time as he coasted home in the bunch some 200m from the finish. On one side of the finishing straight a spectator leaned over the safety barriers to take a photograph and caused Daniele Colli from Nippo–Vini Fantani to crash, that in turn causing a ripple across the peloton that saw Contador come to ground painfully on the other side of the road. The dislocation of Contador’s left shoulder was instantaneous and in the racing footage you can see Contador instinctively reaching for his shoulder to seemingly push it back in place. He remounted and finished but at the podium ceremony the shoulder popped out again and he was unable to put on the pink jersey as protocol normally insists, holding it aloft instead. Nor was he able to uncork the ceremonial bottle of champagne. It looked certain that Contador’s Giro was over, and scans that night confirmed that there had been a dislocation but, equally, there appeared to be very little ligament damage or trauma. There was just a chance he might be able to take the start line the following day for the longest stage of the race, a 264km from Grosseto to Fiuggi. The Tinkoff-Saxo medics strapped him up expertly and in normal life he could have walked around in little pain or discomfort, but Contador was the leader of the Giro d’Italia and nearly 7 hours in the saddle over rolling terrain awaited.
Contador’s defence of the pink jersey over the coming week, greatly aided by outstanding team support from the likes of Ivan Basso, Michael Rogers and Roman Kreuziger, was exemplary and although he lost it to the eager Aru on stage 13 the Spaniard hit back in stunning fashion the following day in a time trial of nearly 60km between Treviso and Valdobbiadene when he put over 3 minutes into Aru and Landa. Beginning to recover now, it gave Contador the buffer he needed in the mountains which, given his climbing style with the shoulder constantly in swaying motion, was going to be tricky. On the first of the final mountain stages which took in the Passo di Mortirolo, Contador gained a further 2 minutes on Aru and for a moment Landa looked the biggest threat. But thereafter Aru started to do himself justice and claimed two mountain wins. Contador, out of necessity, rode conservatively defending his hard-earned lead and finally reached Milan for one of the best Grand Tour wins of his very considerable career. ‘I knew it would be a very demanding Giro, but I didn’t think it would be so complicated,’ admitted Contador. ‘There was the crash and then the Astana team riding so strongly, it was exhausting just about every day from the long time trial onwards. It was a very hard-won race.’ Contador was also unrepentant about his three-finger gesture on top of the winner’s podium. ‘People watching on TV, the riders, the fans … everyone knows it’s my third victory.’