ALGHERO-PESCHICI
Fabio Aru’s forlorn, defeated expression as he shuffled towards the departure gate in Turin’s Caselle airport already told one story of the 100th Giro and its journey from the island Italians call the Piccolo
Continente – the small continent. Aru was going home. Or rather, he was flying to Alghero, in Sardinia, not as one of the favourites for overall victory, as could and should have been the case, but only to attend the team presentation as a token, talismanic ambassador for his native land. His training crash in the Sierra Nevada in April and resulting knee injury had left him facing an uphill battle harder than anything on Mauro Vegni’s roadmap for the Giro. The challenge proved too steep and on April 11 Aru formally announced that he would not start the Corsa Rosa. On April 22, Astana’s stand-in leader and Aru’s friend, Michele Scarponi, was struck by a van while riding 1.8km from home and died in the impact.
Now, in Alghero, stood among his eight team-mates – Scarponi’s place having been left unallocated in his honour – Aru waved at his countrymen and promised he’d be back stronger. Moments later he had turned, like the rest of the large and colourful crowd huddled onto Alghero’s harbour front, to watch and applaud images of Scarponi on a giant screen. Meanwhile, just metres away, the 100th Giro was settling into the starting blocks in what cynics might call time-honoured fashion – with a doping scandal. Actually, with two doping scandals, as the Bardiani-CSF riders Stefano Pirazzi and Nicola Ruffoni had both just learned, minutes before they were due on stage, that they had both tested positive for the peptide hormone GHRP.
The two riders – or “cretins” as their team manager Bruno Reverberi called them the next morning – would stand up there waving regardless. And in doing so, they, like Aru, had already embodied the larger contradictions at the heart of this centenary, celebratory edition – a race designed to serve up fairytales when not even in Italy do they really exist.
So it was we got a Grande Partenza in the image of the Giro’s chaotic history, and therefore fitting. “We feel Sardinian first, Italian second,” Carlo Alberto Melis of the
Unione Sarda newspaper told us on the opening weekend. Melis’s fellow islanders also seemed to have mixed feelings about an event which had cost Sardinia’s autonomous government 4.5 million euros. Suddenly, roads neglected for years, like so many in Italy’s cash-starved southern regions, wore glistening cloaks of fresh asphalt. Roundabouts had appeared from nowhere. Alghero’s streets, locals said, had never looked so colourful or inviting.
One journalist, Alessio Zucchini of Italy’s most popular news programme, TG1, was lambasted for attempting to explore a grittier, more authentic backstage to the sugarcoated, Instagram version of Sardinia showcased by the Grande Partenza. The
The 100th Giro was settling into the starting blocks in what cynics might call time- honoured fashion – with a doping scandal
reporter went to Orune to film road signs peppered with bullet-holes – apparently a common sight and form of vandalism in Sardinia – but also to talk about an 18-year-old boy gunned down at a nearby bus stop. The president of Sardinia’s regional government, Francesco Pigliaru, reacted furiously, but Zucchini defended his work, saying: “We can’t only talk about the beautiful sea, the great food and the sunshine. I’m trying to tell the story of the Giro’s Italy – not just the bike race – and what I showed was also Italy.”
In fairness to Zucchini, the race director himself, Mauro Vegni, had also spoken at length in the months before the Grande Partenza about “telling the story of Italy, the difficulties this country has faced, and our knack of recovering and rebuilding”. But, equally, Vegni was hardly going to take the race through the ghettos of Palermo when the race island-hopped to Sicily for stage 4, through the mafia lairs of Corleone, or the southern ports that in 2016 absorbed 90,000 African immigrants. It could also be argued that, far from deserting its duty to provide a snapshot of modern-day Italy, this Giro highlighted the country’s very real and pressing need to monetise its manifold treasures, particularly in the south and on the islands. Indeed, what some decry as the race’s desperation to sell a sanitised, airbrushed vision of ilBelPaese and, maybe, part of its soul to the global audience, is in fact a revealing insight into the way Italy sees itself today – no more, no less so than, say, the 1946 ‘Giro della Rinascita’ still cited by historians as a vivid photograph of a nation brought to its knees by the Second World War.
On the road, without Aru or a stage to truly excite Nibali, there was little to turn the enthusiasm of the large crowds into real, smouldering fervour. Another great incongruity of this Giro was that a strong field would also be a highly conservative one, particularly with so much climbing stuffed into the final week. Sure enough, with the wind not helping matters, stage 4 to Mount Etna offered no sparks beyond a late attack by Ilnur Zakarin. That was also the day Bob Jungels began his latest soggiorno in pink. The other clear standout of the island stages was Fernando Gaviria – the winner in Cagliari and Messina and a rider, at age 22, with the speed to threaten Marcel Kittel’s status as Quick-Step’s senior sprinter and, soon, Peter Sagan’s as a green jersey shoo-in at the Tour de France. Caleb Ewan was the other young sprinter to enjoy a breakthrough, winning by the width of a handkerchief among the trulli of Alberobello. That day, too, the riders groaned at the precariousness of the finishing circuit while the worldwide audience swooned.
Another instance of real life and real sport encroaching upon the picture postcard was about to occur at Blockhaus. This time the protagonists were Mikel Landa and Geraint Thomas – and the victim the Giro.