GIRO D’ITALIA 2014
Nairo Quintana taking his first grand tour and other Giro tales
The Movistar team manager, Eusebio Unzué, has the kind of soft, soothing voice that, you imagine, could melt mountains or defuse World Wars. But Unzué also has a twinkle in his eye, an air of mischief to which his Omega Pharma-Quick Step counterpart, Patrick Lefevere, alluded after the controversy on the descent off the Passo dello Stelvio, when Nairo Quintana put a minute into Rigoberto Urán in one of the Giro’s key moments: “No one can say they didn’t understand,” said Lefevere of the instruction over race radio not to attack on the Stelvio’s descent, which Quintana apparently ignored. “We’ve all known Mr Eusebio Unzué a long time,” he continued. “He never says yes, he never says no and he’s not the most honest man.”
It was a vicious slur but one that put us in mind of a conversation with Unzué two days before the end of the 2012 Tour de France. Quintana had not ridden that Tour but the then 21-year-old’s victories in the Vuelta a Murcia and Route du Sud had already whetted everyone’s appetites for his debut the following year. Everyone except, apparently, Unzué’s. When asked whether his Colombian climber could be the perfect antidote to Team Sky’s stifling pace and tactics in the mountains, Unzué tilted his head to one side and said he wasn’t sure if Nairo would ever win a major tour. He went on, “The great climbers have disappeared over the last 20 years. You make them ride at 45kph for a week and when they get to the mountains they’re dead. If tomorrow, on the penultimate day of a three-week Tour, you made Nairo ride a 50km time trial against Wiggins, I think he’d lose a week...”
It took fewer than two years. In Trieste on the final day of the 2014 Giro d’Italia, Unzué couldn’t fool anyone any more, and didn’t need to. “The version of Nairo we saw in Belfast has nothing to do with the one we now have here in Trieste,” he said. “He’s shown that he’s a true leader and he’s got to an impressive level. He’s incredibly adept at looking after all of the riders supporting him, for such a young boy. He used to be
bit impetuous, wanting to attack all the time, but he’s overcome that now.”
Irish hospitality
Belfast did indeed seem a long time ago. The Giro’s reception by Ireland had been touchingly warm, the weather rotten and cold. It would easy to sniff at the Giro’s economically driven wanderlust and dismiss this Grande Partenza as a sell-out but no one who was there left with their cynicism intact. Not even Dan Martin’s crash in the team time trial could dampen spirits. At the end of a Giro that would, as usual, dice with controversy, race organisers RC S Sport were perhaps worthy of more applause at least for their Irish interlude. Race director Mauro Vegni certainly deserved better than to have Lefevere call for his head after the fiasco on the Stelvio, of which more later. Lefevere’s complaints about the lack of money in the sport get more insistent and exasperated every season; he should know that the outlook would be even bleaker without daring and lucrative initiatives such as the Giro’s start in Ireland.
On the road, it turned into a good – if not quite classic – edition of La Corsa Rosa, illuminated by Quintana’s brilliance and a starburst of young talent. Marcel Kittel’s back-to-back wins in Belfast and Dublin surprised no one but highlighted a craft and confidence to the German’s sprinting that were not yet fully formed a year ago. The real revelations of the first 10 days, though, were Nacer Bouhanni and Diego Ulissi, both of whom set out from Belfast with impressive CVs but no major tour victories to solidify their position among the world elite.
Bouhanni, the part-time boxer and selfconfessed ‘bad loser’ and ‘difficult character’, bludgeoned his way to three stage wins and the red points jersey. The FDJ coach, Fred Grappe, says that Bouhanni’s technical and physiological profile reminds him of Robbie McEwen: “He’s explosive and hides really well in the wheels.” Grappe will probably regret that Bouhanni’s feats in Italy diminish the chances of their association continuing past this year. Arnaud Démare, FDJ’s other thrusting young sprinter, is the team and French cycling’s blue-eyed boy, a purebred
pédaleur de charme with none of Bouhanni’s spike and perhaps not quite the same speed, either. It is Démare, though, who has already extended his contact with FDJ and Démare who seemed more likely to line up as the team’s sprinter at the Tour de France.
While Bouhanni and Ulissi revelled and the race meandered north to the mountains, Quintana was struggling with a cold and allergies. At the same time, Quintana’s compatriot and former flatmate, Urán, looked as though he might finally live up to Johan Bruyneel’s claim of a few years ago that he was “by far” the best major tour prospect in the world. However, Urán’s crushing win in the Barolo time trial was a misleading message that presaged his toils in the Alps and Dolomites. Progress against the watch, we’ve seen so many times, usually comes at the expense of climbing ability.
The destiny of the maglia rosa remained uncertain until a stage to Val Martello that will go down in Giro folklore, not necessarily for the right reasons. Vegni, the race chief, had made not one but two rods for his own back – namely the 2,645-metre Gavia and 2,758-metre Stelvio – the moment that he promised to rehash a stage from the 2013 Giro that had been cancelled due to snow. Unless the Gavia and Stelvio were completely buried, Vegni and the race would have to plough through, even in brutal, potentially dangerous conditions. The alternative was a loss of face perhaps even bigger than the one that they eventually suffered.
Cold weather, colder blood
Of course, the big day in the mountains dawned wet and freezing…
The facts were difficult to decipher, even days later. All that’s certain, because the recording was leaked, was that the race radio announcer, sitting alongside the president of the race jury in the lead commissaire’s car, called for riders to “stay in their positions for a moment” and “refrain from attacking on the descent of the Stelvio”. He never said the word “neutralisation”. This, supposedly, is why Quintana, Pierre Rolland and others ignored the red flags being waved by officials ahead of them on motorbikes. Nowhere in the UCI rule book does it say that red flags are a universal signal for a race to be
“He’s shown that he’s a true leader and he’s got to an impressive level now. He’s incredibly adept at looking after all of the riders supporting him, for such a young boy” Eusebio Unzué on Nairo Quintana
neutralised. Indeed, Vegni’s instruction to the commissaires had been that they would indicate only that the first six or seven hairpins of the Stelvio descent were affected by poor visibility.
The upshot was that Quintana gained around a minute over Urán on the portion of the descent that some teams and riders believed to have been neutralised. To this he added another three minutes by the time he crossed the line at Val Martello to take the pink jersey. It was undoubtedly a supreme effort but one that’s overshadowed by the debate over whether he had ‘stolen’ some of his winning margin. Before the stage start the following morning, tempers became frayed at an impromptu, al fresco meeting of the AICG P (International Association of Professional Cycling Teams) before a proposal was made to dock 55 seconds off Quintana’s advantage and a vote cast. Unzué, naturally, opposed the motion along with a few others, including Androni’s Gianni Savio. As Savio says: “Quintana didn’t rob anything from anyone. There were riders already down the road ahead of him. If the race had been neutralised, they should have been stopped, too. The red flags were to signal danger but cycling’s an inherently dangerous profession. It’s at every rider’s discretion how many risks they take in any race.” The jury either agreed with Savio or couldn’t face the humiliation of a volte-face. The 55-second penalty was rejected.
Would it have made any difference to the final result? Quintana’s eventual margin of 2:58 suggests not. Even with his breathing problems in the first fortnight, the Colombian never looked flustered. His Movistar team rode superbly, reaffirming their credentials as the best grand tour outfit in the world behind Sky.
For Unzué, it had been a difficult decision to send Quintana to Italy and not the Tour de France but the reward was a pink jersey and Quintana’s invaluable experience of living up to his favourite’s billing. After his second place at the 2013 Tour, this was Unzué’s last remaining doubt about the 24-year-old.
“His secret is his head, his mental strength. Your head is what matters in every moment of your life, in sport and work”
Quintana’s father
Not his ability to survive flat stages and trials. The pressure. He needn’t have worried: as the new Giro champion’s father, Luis, said in Trieste, “His secret is his head, his mental strength. Your head is what matters in every moment of your life, in sport and work.”
giro di rinnova mento
Urán and Fabio Aru completed both the podium and the sense that this Giro had seen a changing of the guard. Ten years ago, Damiano Cunego’s Giro win at age 22 duped Italy into believing that, four months after the death of Marco Pantani, a new Messiah was born and a glorious bloodline (you’ll excuse the double entendre) of Italian riders had segued seamlessly into its next dynasty. The rider who wore dossard number 100 at this Giro went by Cunego’s name but was a mere ghost of that campioncino and the false hopes foisted upon him a decade ago. In Ireland, Lampre manager Brent Copeland spoke bullishly about the likelihood of Cunego rolling back the years. The closest he got to that was a staged photograph with Gilberto Simoni, his team-mate and nemesis in that 2004 race, on the morning of stage 19.
The three weeks also confirmed that it is now safe to exclude Cadel Evans, Ivan Basso and Michele Scarponi from the shortlist of contenders at all future three-week tours. Basso warned us in Belfast that he had “done everything right but had not a single sign of encouragement” in his pre-race training. While not quite a call to retire to his blueberry farm – at least not yet – Basso’s 15th place in Trieste confirms that his future in major teams can only be as a domestique.
We’ve had Tours du Renouveau – Tours of Renewal – before but those epithets referred to (presumed and often illusory) shifts in attitude rather than generation. Rarely before has youth’s march been as emphatic as it was at this Giro. Everywhere one looked there were signs of rejuvenation and reinvigoration – from the three podium finishers and their average age of 25 years and two months, to the four riders aged 26 and under inside the top seven on the final GC. From the 10 out of 20 stages won by riders under 26 to the ages of the four prize jersey winners – Quintana (24, pink and white jersey), Bouhanni (23, red) Arredondo (25, blue). From 20-year-old Sebastián Henao’s remarkable eighth place in the Monte Grappa time trial and 22nd overall to 23-year-old Andrea Fedi’s 608 kilometres in breakaways.
It was Aru’s breakout, though, which bore the freshest scent of a new dawn, certainly for Italy. Cunego and the timing of his 2004 victory proved that sometimes symbolism can be meaningless coincidence but it was still hard to be unmoved by Aru launching his winning attack at Plan di Montecampione mere metres from where Pantani had drawn away from Pavel Tonkov and towards victory at the 1998 Giro. The fact that Aru’s DS, Giuseppe Martinelli, is the man who guided Pantani to his ’98 Giro-Tour double – and Cunego to his 2004 Giro win – heightened the sense of predestination. It may also have saved Martinelli’s job. Rumours had been spreading that, after a barren spring and disagreements with Vincenzo Nibali at Paris-Nice and the Tour de Romandie, Martinelli had nearly exhausted the patience of Astana manager Alexandre Vinokourov.
Aru’s results as an Under 23 – and particularly his back-to-back victories in one of the most mountainous stage races in the world, amateur or pro, the Giro della Valle d’Aosta – had already hinted at a special pedigree. Olivano Locatelli, the man who plucked him from cyclo-cross racing as a junior, has an unsavoury reputation and a 2003 arrest for doping offences to his name but at least possessed the nous to spot Aru’s talent at the 2009 Giro della Lunigiana and immediately herded him towards the road. Perhaps even more than his obvious physical gifts, it is Aru’s even temperament that
“It was super experience. I should have gone to the Giro or Vuelta before now”
Pierre Rolland
augurs well for a long and distinguished career among grand tour royalty – and also reminds us of his team captain, Nibali. Aru’s roots in rural Sardinia, with a father who cultivates fruit, hark back to more innocent and glorious days for Italian cycling, and may also partly explain why the 23-year-old appears so grounded. Quintana’s father, incidentally, grows potatoes and corn as well as breeding sheep and cows.
With the hype around him swirling into a febrile storm by the end of the race, there were murmurs of a possible move away from Astana and a yearly wage of around € 2m to ride for Sky or BMC. But Aru has a contract with the Kazakh team for 2015. “He has a deal so there aren’t any negotiations open with anyone,” his agent, Alex Carera, told us at the end of the Giro.
If few could have imagined that Aru would bloom so spectacularly, Pierre Rolland, in fourth overall, was doubtless one of the other surprises of the Giro. Twelve months prior, the Frenchman’s career had lurched into limbo after an anomalous cortisol reading at the Dauphiné and the ensuing dispute over whether he and his team had broken the rules of the Mouvement Pour un Cyclisme Crédible. The value itself could have been caused by the legal nasal spray that Rolland was using, fatigue, some other illness, or – and here lay the problem – illegal use of cortisone for performance-enhancement. Of course, Europcar and Rolland strongly refuted the last explanation but their cause wasn’t helped by an earlier investigation into the team’s use of the drug (later dropped), or indeed Rolland’s subdued performance in the 2013 Tour. The Europcar manager, Jean-René Bernaudeau still claims that the whole affair was whipped up by the jealous manager of a rival French team.
Rolland therefore had a point to prove in 2014. His response was possibly the ride of his career, a performance full of brio that perhaps merited a stage victory and podium spot. “It was super experience. I should have gone to the Giro or Vuelta before now,” he admitted in Trieste, while acknowledging that the steep gradients of the Italian hills and mountains had caused him more difficulties than the longer, more rolling climbs generally found in the Tour. That Rolland coped so well fully vindicated the technical tweaks that he had made over the winter. “For years I was getting my cadence wrong. I was pushing one or two teeth too many,” he explained in the final week.
Overall victory in a major tour remains a distant goal for Pierre Rolland, Rigoberto Urán and even Fabio Aru, but one gets the feeling that Nairo Quintana is just starting his collection. And that perhaps Eusebio Unzué had seen this coming all along.