2017 GIRO D’ITALIA
Tom Dumoulin made this centenary edition of the Corsa Rosa a race to remember…
W as it the greatest Giro in living memory? Perhaps not, especially if you like your Grand Tours served up with a generous helping of home rivalry, as we saw in the 1980s with the tension between Francesco Moser and Giuseppe Saronni; or ruthless backstabbing, as happened between Stephen Roche and Roberto Visentini in 1987; or epic weather, from which Andy Hampsten emerged victorious in 1988. Even the mid-race tension between eventual winner Tom Dumoulin and the riders who stood either side of him on the podium in Milan, Nairo Quintana and Vincenzo Nibali, wasn’t quite up to the standards of 2004, when team-mates Damiano Cunego and Gilberto Simoni were openly hostile en route to first and third place respectively. But the 2017 edition of the Corsa Rosa was a slow-burning and finely balanced race and one of the closest Grand Tours in history. The top four were all so close going into the final weekend of racing that if you’d run it 24 times, you could conceivably end up with each of the 24 possible permutations of that quartet of riders. As it was, Dumoulin finished 31 seconds ahead of Quintana and 40 in front of Nibali, with Thibaut Pinot in fourth at 1:17.
The counterfactuals started even before the race ended. Did Quintana attack too early on Oropa, where he ground out a lead over Dumoulin but was caught, then dropped at the finish, ceding 24 seconds to the Dutchman? Did Nibali try too hard to match Quintana on Blockhaus, where he blew and conceded a minute to the Colombian and 40 seconds to Dumoulin? Did Pinot underperform in the time trials, where as French champion he might have been expected to concede less than 4:09 to the Dutchman?
There’s no doubt Dumoulin was a deserving winner. The route didn’t favour him – in spite of the two TTs in which he laid the foundations of his win, the second half of the race was very mountainous and his Sunweb team was neither the strongest outfit nor operating at full power, following the withdrawal of mountain domestique Wilco Kelderman after crashing on Blockhaus. But in beating Nibali by 2:07 and Quintana by 2:53 in the Montefalco TT, and defending
so strongly on Blockhaus and Oropa that he won the latter stage, he put himself a long way in the lead. Dumoulin has previous form in cracking at the end of a Grand Tour – he conceded almost four minutes on the penultimate stage of the 2015 Vuelta and lost the race lead. But he looked confident and resilient going into the final week this time around. When the attacks came on the final two days and he faltered, he had enough help from fellow riders and enough strength to stay close to the lead going into the final TT.
The biggest threat to his win turned out to be the impromptu toilet stop he made on the Stelvio. A great deal of bandwidth was taken up debating whether Nibali and Quintana were right to eventually press home their advantage. But a Grand Tour is a test of physical resilience, and his body had exhibited weakness. You could argue that there’s no real difference between a rider’s legs going or his stomach going, and it’s not unreasonable for rivals to take advantage of that. It is a bike race after all.
There was criticism of Quintana and Movistar the day of the Blockhaus crash too. Geraint Thomas, Mikel Landa and Adam Yates were all brought down by a freak incident involving a race motorbike, and all lost the Giro, one way or another, that day. Movistar, already on the front, kept up the pressure. In both cases, Movistar could argue that the race was on and they were executing a tactical plan. On Blockhaus they were setting up Quintana’s attack and on the Stelvio they had riders up the road ready to link up with Quintana over the top. With the Blockhaus crash, it’s the race organiser’s responsibility to pause or stop a race in extreme circumstances, not a team’s.
Either way, Movistar was defeated, and it was interesting to observe that they didn’t create alliances with other teams. By leaving Yates behind on Blockhaus, they made enemies of Orica, and it was Yates in turn who gave Dumoulin a dig out on the final mountain stage. Dumoulin’s mastery of the race made him the first Dutch Grand Tour winner since Joop Zoetemelk won the Tour in 1980, and the first Dutch Giro winner in history.
The 2017 Giro was a slowburning and inely balanced race, and one of the closest Grand Tours in history