It was the most thrilling and dramatic bike race I have ever seen, and I’ve been following cycling for more than 30 years. I’m sure that it became legendary less than 20 minutes after the last rider crossed the finish line in Rome on Sunday (Alessandro Verre, of Arkéa–B&B Hotels, who finished 5:04 behind the stage winner, Visma–Lease a Bike’s Olav Kooij).
So we decided to analyze what had made the race so special, in the hope that future Grand Tour organizers will adopt some of this Giro’s counterintuitive tweaks to a sport we had all thought couldn’t get any better, and to understand why the narrative kept changing over the three-week race (which is one of the things that made the race so special).
The route
I was disappointed when I saw that the race only had two bona fide summit finishes and that some of the hardest climbs were so far from the finish line that (I believed) they would have little or no influence on the outcome. But of course I was wrong. And I was wrong because I believed, based on past races, that summit finishes are the most exciting and decisive features of a Grand Tour. I know better now.
The relative lack of summit finishes and the placement of some big climbs far from the finish affected team strategies and actually distributed the suspense and drama over more of the individual stages and over more stages. The teams couldn’t plan to make a winning move at the end of a stage. They had to devise strategy for the entire stage and take into consideration the many events that could affect their riders (although no one can plan for bad weather or crashes). For spectators, it created a race that had more surprises than a magician’s hat and more suspense than a visit to the dentist.
It was also genius to include, on stage 9, gravel sections from the Strade Bianche. This stage was pivotal in what followed (see more below). It was also thrilling in its own right, as a crash took down the pre-race favorites, Juan Ayuso (UAE Team Emirates–XRG) and Primož Roglič (Red Bull–BORA–hansgrohe), who spent the rest of the stage trying to minimize their losses while Wout van Aert (Visma–Lease a Bike) outdueled Ayuso’s teammate Isaac del Toro for the stage win in Siena. It was breathtaking stuff.
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The crashes
The crashes on stage 9 changed the narrative of the race by putting del Toro into the race leader’s pink jersey and, more importantly, affecting Roglič and Ayuso so that they gradually weakened and eventually dropped out of the race. Roglič never quite got back into the race again, crashed three more times in the rain, dropped to tenth place in the GC, and eventually dropped out during stage 16. Ayuso injured his knee in that crash and was never the same, joining Roglič on the sidelines two stages later, after he had dropped nearly 50 minutes behind del Toro.
I’m convinced that without that first crash and the misfortune that followed, Roglič would have won the race. And since Pogačar and Jonas Vingegaard were not in the race, that left the Giro without a real favorite, which added to the suspense. I’m not saying that I’m happy that the favorites crashed out; it happened and created a much more open race with an unexpected race leader, del Toro, and two other new favorites, Richard Carapaz (EF Education–EasyPost) and Simon Yates (Visma–Lease a Bike).
That forced their three teams to draw up new strategies – though I suspect that Visma and Yates had always planned to make a move on the daunting Colle delle Finestre, for tactical reasons and reasons personal for Yates, who had lost the 2018 Giro on the mountain. Del Toro was an unknown quantity. He was confident, cocky, and fast, and reminded many commentators of his team leader and mentor, Tadej Pogačar. But how good was he really?
And what about Carapaz and Yates? The Ecuadorian was the most explosive climber, but did he still have the legs to win a Giro? And Yates did not strike anyone as a real threat, because he was often caught out on climbs and struggled to make his way back. And he himself seemed to have doubts about his own ability.
The entire race was finely poised ahead of the penultimate stage.
The decisive madness of stage 20
Having the toughest climb of the race, the Colle delle Finestre (18.5 km @ 9.2% with ramps up to 14% and 7 km of gravel) about 45 km from the finish line produced a thrilling and loony finale that was the perfect climax for a thrilling and crazy race. Enough has been written about the strategy of del Toro and his UAE team, including in these pages; future psychology and sports majors will probably write lengthy dissertations on the stage. But not enough has been said about Visma–Lease a Bike’s and Yates’s brilliant strategy, which I’m fairly certain was all about winning the stage, not the race – because no one had expected Roglič not to be riding anymore.
But with the Slovenian and Ayuso out and Yates only trailing the race leader, del Toro, by 1:21, Yates’s climb of the Finestre, the fastest by any rider ever, and his meeting with Wout van Aert on the descent, will now become textbook illustrations of how to win a race – just as UAE’s tactics will become a lesson in how to lose. Van Aert turned himself inside out for Yates, and with del Toro and Carapaz dithering and blathering on the road behind them, he helped the 32-year-old Briton to a brilliant race victory. For that effort, van Aert was awarded the Trofeo Bonacossa, a prize voted by a panel of journalists for the “greatest exploit” of the Giro.
I think there was another factor in Yates’s victory. He rode the entire race, until stage 20, saving energy and remaining under the radar so that he could surprise his rivals on Saturday’s stage 20 on the Finestre. It was a masterful strategy by Visma and Yates and carried out to perfection. That was probably why UAE believed, mistakenly, that the Giro title went through Carapaz. “It was a battle of nerves and legs between Isaac and Richard Carapaz, but the strongest and the smartest rider won the Giro,” UAE sports director Fabio Baldato explained. “We underestimated Simon Yates because he did a fantastic ride, just look at the times.”
There has likely never been a stage like this one in any previous Grand Tour (though I couldn’t swear to it), and there almost certainly won’t be one like it again – if for no other reason than future Grand Tour teams and riders will be loath to repeat the UAE strategy. But it made for a riveting and superbly entertaining watch.
Mad Mads and the purple Jersey
The race was also enlivened by the almost ubiquitous presence of Lidl-Trek’s Mads Pedersen. If he wasn’t winning four stages – and nearly winning a few others – or going for bonus points at intermediate sprints, the seemingly tireless Dane was active in breakaways, dragging teammates back to the peloton or up a climb. Until that disruptive stage 9, Pedersen was pretty much the Giro and illustrated the skills, tenacity, and class of a superstar rider. If the Giro had something like a Man of the Match award, I’d vote for Pedersen in a heartbeat.
