What should we know about the Giro?
As Belgians of Eddy Merckx of course and of his exploits in those three weeks through Italy, in his time the equivalent of the three weeks through France and much more important than the three weeks through Spain.
Merckx’s raid on the Blockhaus in a Giro that he has not yet won. That was in 1967.
Merckx in 1968 at the Tre Cime, but actually from long before that. With thirty kilometers to go, he made up nine minutes on a small leading group in hellish winter conditions and laid the foundation for his first Giroge. The opposition – Felice Gimondi – cried in misery afterwards.
Merckx in 1969, who was taken out of the Giro in Savona for a positive urine test and the state affair that became, after which he piled everyone into a pile in the Tour. That seventeenth stage to Mourenx. Eight minutes ahead, fourteen ahead of Gimondi, who has forgotten how to cry.
Finally, Merckx showed the first signs of decline in 1974 and won his fifth Giro with just twelve seconds ahead of the moderately talented tour rider Gianbattista Baronchelli, who would never come closer than second place in a Grand Tour.
Also from Johan De Muynck, who missed out on a first Giroge win in 1976 because his teammate and leader Roger De Vlaeminck did not grant him that triumph and gave up prematurely. And from 1978, when he did win and was the last Belgian to win a Grand Tour, until Remco Evenepoel won the Vuelta in 2022.
In general, we should know the Giro from their crazy organizers/race directors who symbolize the old cycling, the heroism of the better demolition work, in which as many riders as possible have to reach the finish line emaciated and worn out. That’s why the Giro looks for it every year speciallekes.
The Giro does not have the prestige of the Tour de France, which is why spectacle has been turned into a unique sales strategy. Higher, harder, further became the motto. It was Angelo Zomagnan who came up with this. He experienced his high and then low point with the 2011 Giro, in which Wouter Weylandt died after a heavy fall in an unsafe descent.
Zomegnan had to resign after that Giro and was succeeded by Michele Acquarone, who had to modernize the Giro, but the first thing he did was to finish the Tirreno on a slope of 27 percent. Acquarone was also fired in 2013 after a financial scandal. Six years later he was proven right.
Mauro Vegni is his successor and he thinks nothing better than to regularly illuminate the dark years of cyclists with a giant spotlight. In his first year (2014) as big boss, he finished at Plan di Montecampione because Marco Pantani won there in 1998. In 2014, Pantani had also been dead for ten years, that’s why.
On Sunday, the year is 2024 so he has been dead for twenty years, the Giro arrived above the pilgrimage site of Oropa. Scherpenheu van Piedmont, but after a climb of 13 kilometers. Catholic Italy at its narrowest, in short, a terrible place.
That stage is also a commemoration of Marco Pantani. At Oropa he won his last stage in the tour of his country. Six days later he was withdrawn from the competition because his red blood cell percentage set off all possible alarm bells.
Marco Pantani would never be the same again. This is called mentally broken in posthumous historiography. The reality is that after winning the 1998 Festina Tour he had appeared so blatantly on the radar of the UCI and all other supervisory authorities that wherever he showed his bald head he was given a needle in his arm and/or had to donate urine.
That eats at a person. Also to Marco Pantani, who was undoubtedly a gifted climber, but certainly also one of the most heavily doped riders of the last century, and there were a few riding around at the time who knew what to do.
His 36’50 in 1995 for the 13.8 kilometer climb to L’Alpe d’Huez still stands as a rock thirty years later. Pantani has recorded most climbs longer than 20 minutes in which more than 7 watts per kilogram of body weight were delivered. For an effort longer than 20 minutes, that’s too good to be real.
Tribute, commemoration, have we missed something? No need to spit on the poor thing’s grave, but he was in the fond a cocaine-addicted, persistent doping user. Any other sport would silently deplore him, but not honor him and certainly not put him on a pedestal. The old cycling and Italy do. Shame.
