Il Tappone.

The Chaotic Queen - by Herbie Sykes.

By Black Sheep Cycling

August 18^th, 2021

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Quintessentially and emphatically Italian, the Giro d’Italia is part race, part pantomime. No better illustrated than in this year’s Queen Stage – or ‘tappone’ as its known in the Giro – when freak, mid-winter-like weather cut short its marquee stage. But nothing would stop Egan Bernal – the races eventual winner – claiming the Cima Coppi, named in honour of the race's greatest son. Proudly wearing pink, the Colombian left his rivals for dead with an ice cold display of dominance.

Well-renowned British sports journalist, passionate collector of Giro memorabilia, and author of the most significant book on the race in the English language - "Maglia Rosa" - Herbie Sykes gives us his take on the "contemporary work of art" that is the Giro d'Italia.

It’s tempting to think of the Giro d’Italia as a poor man’s Tour de France. By the time the inaugural edition rolled out of Milan in 1909, the transalpini had been up and running for six years. Whilst the Tour introduced its maillot jaune as early as 1923, Italians had need wait until 1931 for the maglia rosa. Italy routinely produced the better cyclists back then, but the Tour has always had more money and more prestige, and as such more of the world’s most talented riders.

It has more of just about everything and as such, for the casual observer at least, it is the bike race.

The Tour, as Italians are apt to lament, is the Tour. It’s the one race which transcends mere sport, a commercial juggernaut and a gigantic, high-summer pastiche of French grandeur. Seamlessly choreographed and immensely profitable, it’s everything that the Giro is not. A good deal bigger, then, but in professional sport bigger is very seldom better.

For all its money-making acumen and all that it envelops an entire sporting continent, the reality is that the Tour has never been the Giro’s equal as a bicycle race. For over a century its route has been formulaic, its climate predictable, its racing anodyne by comparison.

Lance Armstrong “won” seven consecutive Tours, the Spanish automaton Miguel Indurain five. Meanwhile Fausto Coppi, irrefutably the greatest of all time, somehow contrived to lose eight of the thirteen giri he started. Physically there was nobody to touch him, and yet he was routinely undone by the Giro’s myriad enigmas. He was betrayed by mutinous gregari, duplicitous opponents and, in 1948, by mendacious officialdom.

There were crashes (1950), mechanicals (1946) and even, in 1954, a suspect seafood salad. Only once did he retain the maglia rosa, and no Italian has retained it at all for 54 years. That seems incredible given the intensity of their relationship with it, but in point of fact it’s entirely illustrative. It’s the Giro d’Italia, the sporting synthesis of the Bel Paese. Put simply, it doesn’t do order.

Who could have scripted the tsunami which followed Marco Pantani’s dramatic expulsion in 1998? What of the apocalypse on the Bondone in 1956, or the 1988 blizzard which broke maglia rosa Franco Chioccioli on the Gavia? Then Eddy Merckx’ demolition of Felice Gimondi on Tre Cime di Lavaredo in 1968, the mysterious doping scandal which snared him the following year, or his titanic struggle with gallant young ‘Tista Baronchelli in ‘74? What of the delirium (and moral torpor) which accompanied Francesco Moser’s success in 1984? The lunacy which impelled them to introduce a pink jersey at the very height of fascist rule? The romance and heartbreak of Lauro Bordin’s maniacal 350 kilometre lone breakaway in 1914? Then Louison Bobet’s hatchet job of race leader Charly Gaul in 1957? Bobet stopped for a call of nature he didn’t need and then, when Gaul followed suit, remounted and left him contemplating his naval.

It cost Gaul one of the truly great giri, but he’d have his pound of flesh the following day, sabotaging Bobet’s day in the sun by coalescing with the Tuscan Gastone Nencini. Finally 2016 race, one of the best in recent times, animated by Chaves and Kruijswijk but salvaged, at the death, by Vincenzo Nibali. Notwithstanding the stolid globalist imperative, the Giro refuses – or is incapable – to subscribe to modern cycling’s one-size-fits-all matrix.

These days its lead actors are seldom drawn from Tuscany, Veneto and Lombardy, but its character and temperament are still quintessentially and obdurately Italian. Thus its attempts at transforming itself into a slick sales and marketing-driven operation are so clumsy as to be frankly risible.

That’s because, for all that it may pretend otherwise, at its root it’s the antithesis of the “corporate” events which increasingly dominate the sporting landscape. Resolutely chaotic and resolutely human, it remains fundamentally a work of contemporary art.

It’s an object lesson in how not to organise a 21st century bike race and therein, paradoxically but very obviously, lies its greatest virtue. God forbid that it should ever mutate into something – a pale imitation of the Tour – that it isn’t.