RACE PREVIEW: 2018 GIRO D'ITALIA
We look ahead to the first grand tour of the year, which has been beset by controversy over its opening stages in Israel
At Jerusalem’s Western Wall, a million prayers a year are written on small pieces of paper, folded up and slipped into the cracks between the stones. It’s considered taboo to read somebody else’s prayer, but if the Giro d’Italia’s organiser Mauro Vegni were to pass by in the run-up to the 2018 race’s grande partenza in Israel, it wouldn’t be difficult to guess what he’d ask for: three quiet weeks and, God willing, an uncontroversial winner of his race.
Somewhere among all the controversy and polemica, Vegni and the Giro organisers RCS must be crossing their fingers that a bike race is going to break out. The 101st edition of Italy’s grand tour has been covered on both the back pages and front pages of the newspapers, and while the story of the race and its likely battlegrounds have been buried somewhere far below the lede, the headlines have been split between the will-he-won’t-he participation of Chris Froome, and the location for the first three stages of the race in the Middle East.
Religious iconography and the Giro have ever been comfortable bedfellows. In the 1940s, Gino ‘The Pious’ Bartali was the hero of Catholic Italians and you only had to look at the imagery around the life and career of Marco Pantani, whose victory salute, deliberately or otherwise, resembled Jesus on the cross, to understand that the link between the twin Italian institutions of church and Giro has often been explicit. Italy, after all, is a country where more than 80 per cent of people describe themselves as Catholic. And there’s overt and deliberate symbolism in the fact that the finish of the 2018 Giro will happen in Rome. Two holy cities, linked by a pilgrimage on wheels, and, along the way, we’ll see all the tropes of cycling as religious experience: suffering, ecstasy and maybe, for those who seek it, redemption.
RCS, along with Sylvan Adams, the real estate tycoon and co-owner of the Israel Cycling Academy team who has been the driving force behind the project to bring the Giro to Israel, insist that the grande partenza will be a festival. Israel will bask in the reflected glory of what the organisers describe as the biggest sporting event ever to have happened in the country, while the Giro will provide a prism through which what Adams calls ‘Normal Israel’ will be visible to the rest of the world. The publicity material has stopped short of proclaiming that the Giro will bring any modicum of peace to the wider region, but ‘Normal Israel’ is intended to convey a different side to the country than the majority of news reports.
However, the PR around the Giro’s visit to the Holy Land has not converted critics of the decision to hold the start of the race there. Almost as soon as the official announcement of the Israel start had been made, RCS found themselves treading a delicate line between the various interests in the region. Their official route maps put ‘West Jerusalem’ as the location of the stage 1 time trial. Israel’s sports minister and tourism minister were angered (Israel claims that a unified Jerusalem has been the capital of the country since the Six Day War in 1967, though this is not recognised by the UN or EU) and insisted that the ‘West’ was removed from the official literature. RCS duly excised it, and then faced a barrage of criticism from human rights groups and Palestinian organisations that they were tacitly legitimising Israeli claims to the whole city. The Giro had already faced its first lose-lose situation of the race, and Vegni’s watery statement, that he wanted the event to “stay away from any political discussion” looked naïve at
Vegni’s watery statement, that he wanted the event to “stay away from any political discussion” looked naïve at best and negligent at worst
best and negligent at worst. And this is before the race has even started, or the build-up really begun in earnest. As this edition of Procycling went to press, 16 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces at demonstrations in Gaza. The Palestinians claimed they had been peacefully demonstrating; the Israelis claimed that the Palestinians had been rioting, and the situation was escalating. Sport likes to exist in a vacuum when it is convenient, but road cycling, more than any other sport, necessarily bleeds out into the real world of geography. And in this part of the world the geographical is political.
The European Coordination of Committees and Associations for Palestine (ECCP) wrote an open letter with more than a hundred signatories at the end of 2017 which pointed out not only the fraught question of Jerusalem, but also that the race would pass by Bedouin villages not recognised by Israel in the third stage, which goes south from Be’er Sheva to Eilat, on the Red Sea. The question of Palestinians and their treatment by Israel has not been addressed in the race literature, and there continues to be strong criticism of the Giro’s decision to
hold the first three stages of the 2018 race in the region of not just one of the world’s hottest conflicts but one of its most intractable geopolitical stalemates. The problems faced by the locals are complex, profound and multi-faceted, but any long term solution will of course have to include both sides, and the Giro isn’t in the area for the Palestinians.
There are rumours that RCS has a plan B, in case of emergency, with three alternative opening stages in Italy, though the loss of face involved in the Israel start being cancelled means that it’s unlikely this will come to pass. RCS are publicly bullish about the ambitiousness of being the first grand tour to go outside Europe, but it’s hard to escape the impression that they’re in over their heads.
THE SHADOW OF FROOME
It’s a measure of how great the controversy of the 2018 grande partenza is that the participation of the favourite and the reigning Tour de France and Vuelta a España champion being in doubt is not even casting the biggest shadow over the Giro.
Chris Froome insists he will be in Israel to make his first attempt at the Giro since he emerged as a grand tour contender in 2011. The GiroTour double that he’s attempting in 2018 was to be, on paper, his biggest challenge yet – a more impressive, more complex riff on the TourVuelta double he achieved last year. Win a pink, and then another yellow jersey, and he’d bring his total to seven grand tours, including five yellow jerseys. He’d be one Tour away from the all-time record. He’d also have won four consecutive grand tours on the calendar, a feat only ever achieved by Eddy Merckx.
What’s more, the Giro’s steep mountains are tailor-made for Froome and the 2018 season offers a once-in-a-career opportunity to have a realistic chance of winning
The Giro’s steep mountains are tailor- made for Froome and the 2018 season offers a once- in- acareer opportunity to have a realistic chance of winning the double.
the double. Conventional modern cycling wisdom dictates that the Giro and Tour are usually too close together to build two peaks of form, but spread over too long a period to hold a single one. With the 2018 Tour being shifted a week later, to avoid too much overlap with the World Cup, a tantalising window of opportunity has opened. It would still have been – will still be – a very complex challenge, but to
see Froome’s 2018 season in purely sporting terms is to miss the point.
The adverse analytical finding for salbutamol Froome furnished on the evening of Thursday September 7, which means we might yet have to rewrite the history of the 2017 Vuelta, means that the 2018 Giro, and cycling, will be choking on one of its regular helpings of fudge. The facts as we went to press are these: the onus of providing an explanation for the AAF is on Froome; there is no deadline for Froome to prove his innocence; until then, he is free to race; if Froome cannot provide a plausible explanation for the 1,000 extra nanograms of salbutamol over and above the 1,000 allowed by the rules, he will lose his Vuelta title. Froome has stated that his interpretation of the rules, however, is that even if he loses his Vuelta crown, he’ll still keep whatever he wins in the interim.
Froome has faced calls to sit out the races until there is resolution. However, the rules of what WADA calls ‘specified’ substances, like salbutamol, allow riders to compete until a final ruling is made and Froome is sticking to the rules. Not only that, but he is as cool as a cucumber. It sits awkwardly with some fans.
The current predictions are that we won’t have resolution until after the Giro, and the Tour organisers have been spending the spring transmitting as many warning signs as they can that they don’t want Froome to line up in Vendée for the French grand depart. That battle will be fought out in earnest in June and early July, but as it stands, it looks like Froome will be in Israel for the Giro. Should he be there? The rules, unsatisfactory as they are, say he can be there. But that won’t be enough for many. As the Giro organisers may also discover, just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should.
CLIMBS AND PUNISHMENT
It’s easy to forget that there’s actually a bike race happening in Italy in May. The 101st Corsa Rosa has served up its usual bolito misto of high mountains, punchy finishes, minimal time trialling and grippy, unpredictable terrain.
The opening three stages in Israel are relatively straightforward in racing terms. A flat 9.7km time trial in the capital is followed by a sprinters’ stage to Tel Aviv, then the traverse of the Negev Desert to Eilat which gains a little altitude, but the climbing is nothing that will break up the bunch. Deserts are more prone to strong winds.
Froome’s Vuelta AAF means that the 2018 Giro, and cycling, will be choking on one of its regular helpings of fudge
The first hard phase of the race comes in Sicily, for stages 4 to 6, which culminate in the summit finish on Mount Etna. The route the race is using on the volcano this year is one of the harder approaches to the 1,736m summit, and it potentially looks like a GC day, even if the sixth day of the race is early to start defending the pink jersey. The Sicilian stages are incessantly rolling, with uphill finishes of differing degrees of difficulty on all three – the Caltagirone stage lurches between sea level and as high as 779m altitude with nasty rolling roads all day and a persistent drag to the finish; next comes another lumpy day with the shorter, sharper uphill finish to Santa Ninfa; finally there’s Etna, with 140km of up-and-down roads then the 20km climb to the top.
The second weekend of the race will give the riders two more days of hard climbing before the first proper rest day (the first rest day will be spent in transit from Israel to Italy) with summit finishes at Montervergine di Mercogliano, at 1,260m, and then Gran Sasso d’Italia, at 2,135m. These follow the one real bone thrown to the sprinters between the return to Italy and the middle week, with the flat seventh stage to Praia a Mare.
With the race less than half done, there will already have been three bona fide mountain-top finishes, plus two more for the puncheurs, and the GC riders will probably call a truce for the next four days. The climbing on the 10th stage to
Gualdo Tadino will probably ensure the success of the break, and the short, sharp uphill finish to Osimo the next day will be a gift for the puncheurs. The sprinters will look at the next two days, to Imola and Nervesa della Battaglia, as chances, but even with these stages, the organisers have been unable to resist adding complications. Both stage profiles could have been drawn with rulers, except for small climbs right before the finishes. The peloton will climb the 252m Tre Monti 9km before the Imola finish and the 242m Montello 20km from the end of stage 13. Most sprinters should survive, but they’d better be vigilant.
The penultimate weekend will see the biggest GC fight so far, with the very hard Monte Zoncolan finish (preceded by two more difficult climbs) on the Saturday for stage 14 and the incessant mountains of stage 15 to Sappada. The climbs of Friuli-Venezia Giulia make up in difficulty and quantity what they lack in altitude – the 1987 Giro was won and lost primarily on these roads, and there are four very hard climbs in the last third of this day.
The week three flat time trial to Rovereto was a love letter from the organisers to Chris Froome, written in happier times. If there is stalemate among the climbers, this 34.5km test will separate them. And if the race is still close, the Giro has saved the best until last, with stages 18, 19 and 20 taking the riders into the Alps. The Prato Nevoso summit finish comes first, then it’s the queen stage of the race, an impossibly hard 181km from Venaria Reale, over the unsurfaced Finestre, Sestriere and the summit finish at Bardonecchia. Most of the second half of the stage is above 1,000m, and the Cima Coppi, high point of the whole Giro, comes on the 2,718m Finestre. Finally, there’s a triple whammy of hard climbs on stage 20: the Tsecore, St Pantaléon and the finish at Cervinia. There’s a long transfer to Rome for the final stage.
Of the current startlist, Froome, notwithstanding his current problems, will be the favourite. As the dominant grand tour rider of his
Fabio Aru has inished second and third in the Giro and he is one of the few favourites who isn’t afraid to attack Froome
generation, a strong climber and time triallist and with a strong team, he is the man to beat.
Defending champion Tom Dumoulin will have the confidence of knowing he’ll gain a couple of minutes on the climbers (except Froome) in the mid-race time trial, and 30 seconds-plus on the opening day, but he was dangerously underestimated in 2017 and his rivals won’t make that mistake again. Fabio Aru has finished second and third in the Giro and he is one of the few favourites who isn’t afraid to attack Froome, and Esteban Chaves as also been second. Thibaut Pinot has shown an aptitude for this race which netted him fourth place last year, while Simon Yates can realistically challenge for the podium. Miguel Ángel López has the ability to make the top five or better. Movistar have the manpower to unsettle Froome, but it currently looks like none of their best three riders, Quintana, Valverde and Landa, will race the Giro. Darker horses include Louis Meintjes, though he has yet to crack the top five of a grand tour.
Tactically, it’s not so complicated. The climbs tend to be concentrated at the end of the stages, so the entry criteria for the possible winners’ club is to be a strong climber, preferably with a strong team, and be able to at least defend in the time trial. With all the controversy about both Israel and Chris Froome, a straightforward race would probably be the best possible outcome for RCS and cycling.