{"id":205305,"date":"2026-05-10T06:20:31","date_gmt":"2026-05-10T06:20:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.welovecycling.com\/wide\/?p=205305"},"modified":"2026-05-10T06:20:31","modified_gmt":"2026-05-10T06:20:31","slug":"how-hosting-the-grand-partenza-changed-an-entire-country","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.welovecycling.com\/wide\/2026\/05\/10\/how-hosting-the-grand-partenza-changed-an-entire-country\/","title":{"rendered":"How Hosting the Grand Partenza Changed an Entire Country"},"content":{"rendered":"

Pink is the color of passion. Pink is my new obsession. Aerosmith sang that over a quarter century ago, but it has never been more relevant than right now, in Bulgaria, in May 2026. The entire country has gone pink, and thankfully, it has nothing to do with some bizarre political experiment. It’s the Giro d’Italia. The Grande Partenza. The start of the first Grand Tour of the season.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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For the rest of the world, that’s a perfectly normal sentence. For Bulgaria, it’s the sports event of the century, and we are treating it accordingly, despite a small detail: 999 out of 1000 Bulgarians cannot name a single professional cyclist. Not Poga\u010dar. Not Vingegaard.<\/p>\n

Nobody.<\/p>\n

What they can do, however, is feel the particular national horror of being embarrassed in front of foreigners. We may live in a pigsty, but we will not be seen living in one. Not with millions of eyes pointed at our roads, our cities, our ancient town squares.<\/p>\n

So, while the Giro might be your average May afternoon, for Bulgaria it was a year-long national undertaking that, quietly and somewhat accidentally, changed an entire country.<\/p>\n

Nessebar, the night before<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Looking at Nessebar’s old city walls, you may easily be fooled into thinking that you’re in Italy. That’s mostly because you have little understanding of ancient cultures and can’t distinguish between a Greek and a Roman fortress wall. While I wouldn’t usually let this slide and would give you a stern but fair three-hour lecture on ancient fortress building, on this occasion, there are far too many additional factors. Italians building the start, Italians selling merch, Ricchi e Poveri echoing across the waves and from every restaurant and souvenir shop.<\/p>\n

Yes, Nessebar was celebrating, all dressed in pink.<\/p>\n

Not tastefully pink. Aggressively, joyfully, we-have-one-shot-at-this pink. Every shop window, every restaurant awning, every stone surface that could hold a light had been conscripted into the effort. The narrow land bridge connecting the ancient city to the mainland, the same one the peloton would roll through the next afternoon, was closed, and local children were making full use of the fact, flying through on bikes and scooters with the particular joy of kids who’ve just been handed a city and told it’s theirs for the night.<\/p>\n

In the square in front of the old walls, you could spot the cycling tourists immediately. Tan lines, road bikes, and the slightly evangelical look of people who’d traveled specifically for this. At some point, one of them handed their bike to a local for a photo in front of the Grand Partenza cutouts. Then someone else did. Then it became a thing. An ancient Bulgarian town on the Black Sea, and suddenly everyone wanted a picture on a road bike they’d never sat on before.<\/p>\n

The evening ended with fireworks over the sea, pink reflections scattering across the water, Ricchi e Poveri still going, audible probably in the next town.<\/p>\n

The Giro had already changed something. And it wasn’t just the night lights, the decorations, or the sudden mass appreciation for Italian pop music.<\/p>\n

\"Nessebar\"<\/a>
The Giro changed something. \u00a9 Profimedia<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A country that can’t agree on anything<\/strong><\/h2>\n

To be honest, while I had been dreaming of this day, I truly wasn’t brave enough to actually believe it was happening. After all, doing the Grande Partenza in Bulgaria is a massive gamble. We are a nation that can’t agree on anything. Just in the last five years, we’ve had eight general elections. Our last parliament had nine different parties that couldn’t agree on anything either.<\/p>\n

But the gamble paid off.<\/p>\n

Not that we’ve started agreeing on the important things, but our shared, almost pathological fear of embarrassing ourselves in front of foreigners helped us rise to the occasion.<\/p>\n

Of course, when it became clear that Bulgaria would host the Grande Partenza, the usual political theatre didn’t disappear entirely. Still, it ran into something nobody truly expected \u2014 a cause that no one dared oppose publicly. Politicians who couldn’t agree on a budget, a coalition, or, apparently, basic governance suddenly found themselves aligned on one thing. The Giro was happening, the world was watching, and nobody wanted to be the one who broke it.<\/p>\n

There was one brief moment of sabotage (there always is), when the road repairs along the Borovets pass descended into a budget dispute spectacular enough to make the evening news. A stretch of road sat freshly milled and completely abandoned, 44 days before the start. Classic. But the public reaction was so swift and so fierce that the story died almost as fast as it broke. The road got fixed. Quietly, quickly, and without further comment from anyone involved.<\/p>\n

For a country that has spent five years unable to agree on almost anything, that was something close to a miracle.<\/p>\n

The weird cousin who rides bikes<\/strong><\/h2>\n

The weirdest part was that it was a cycling event. Outside the big cities, there is virtually no infrastructure for it. No lanes, no dedicated paths, nothing that would suggest the local municipality has ever considered the possibility that someone might want to ride a bicycle for reasons other than not owning a car. Even in Sofia, riding up Vitosha<\/a> on a weekend will earn you looks that suggest you’ve announced you’re moving to live among raccoons, sharing their traditions and way of life.<\/p>\n

The general implication being that cycling, as a hobby, is something you do when you are a child, in the park, supervised by your parents.<\/p>\n

This is not a cycling country. Or rather, it wasn’t.<\/p>\n

To be fair, the riders exist. There are more of us than people think, and the numbers are growing, especially in the cities. But for the overwhelming majority of Bulgarians, cycling is that thing your weird cousin does on weekends, the one nobody asks too many questions about. It’s not hostile exactly. It’s more like the bafflement you’d reserve for someone who collects vintage radiators. Each to their own, sure, but why though?<\/p>\n

Which makes what happened next all the more absurd.<\/p>\n

A race that most Bulgarians had never heard of, featuring athletes whose names most Bulgarians still can’t pronounce, was about to pass through over a hundred towns and villages across the country. And somehow, impossibly, everyone cared.<\/p>\n

The roads<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Still, while the entire nation suddenly became cycling fans, decades of neglect don’t fix themselves overnight.<\/p>\n

Bulgarian roads have a long and distinguished history of being everyone’s problem and nobody’s responsibility. Potholes that outlast governments. Repairs that last approximately one winter before returning to their natural state. An entire bureaucratic ecosystem built around the concept of maintenance as a theoretical exercise.<\/p>\n

The Giro changed the calculation entirely.<\/p>\n

Suddenly, roads that had been on municipal to-do lists since the previous century were getting fresh asphalt. Not because anyone had a change of heart about infrastructure investment, but because hundreds of millions of people were going to watch the world’s best cyclists ride over them on live television. That is, it turns out, a remarkably effective motivator. Around 600 kilometers of road across the country were repaired in under a year, a timeline that would normally require three to four times as long and considerably more paperwork.<\/p>\n

Locals, especially those in Veliko Tarnovo, took a rather creative approach to the situation. Wherever the Giro passed, fresh tarmac followed, and residents began half-jokingly suggesting new race routes through their own neighborhoods. Through their street. Past their building. Ideally, right up to their front door. It was the most engaged Bulgarian citizens had been with infrastructure planning in living memory, even if the proposals were entirely self-serving.<\/p>\n

Nobody blamed them.<\/p>\n

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