In well over a century, Italy's national bike race, the Giro d'Italia, has survived two worlds wars, internal political turmoil and no little doping scandal.
The race remains at the forefront of international cycling and how Italy presents itself to the world.
With the 108th edition now well under way, three fanatics of the race – two who've competed in it, 59 years apart, and one who's studied its past, present and future – tell their own stories from the race and why it's left such an imprint on all those who come into its orbit.
Giulio Ciccone
Giulio Ciccone has won three stages of the Giro d’Italia (2016, 2019, 2022) as well as the mountains jersey in 2019. Since 2019, he has ridden for Lidl-Trek and is currently competing in this year's race
My earliest memories of the Giro d’Italia are tied to Marco Pantani, Il Pirata, the late, great climber and winner of the Giro and Tour de France in 1998. I was only a little child, but these were boom years of professional cycling in Italy and everybody was talking about it.
I remember seeing the pink caravan of the Giro for the first time, together with my father, from the side of the road. What an emotion. For a little child, it was the spectacle of colours and sounds that were so alluring.
Later, when I started riding and racing, the Giro became a time to get excited, to impersonate the champions I saw on my television. From age 10 onwards, I didn’t miss a single stage when the Giro came to my home region of Abruzzo.
In 2016, I won a stage of the Giro, on debut. It’s an indelible memory. My first victory as a pro rider, in my first year as a pro rider, at the Giro d’Italia. The perfect picture. It was a hectic stage. We were in a breakaway, me, Damiano Cunego and my teammate in Bardiani-CSF, Stefano Pirazzi.
On the descent leading to the last ramp to Sestola, Cunego and Pirazzi touched wheels, so I took advantage and decided to go all in. It was instinctive. From the team car, they were saying I was gaining time, which only galvanised me. Arriving alone at the finish was a dream, a thrill I had never experienced.
It had a tremendous personal impact, as if the cycling world had suddenly discovered me. From there on, it was a crescendo, of expectations and responsibilities, as well as visibility. In Italy, there is always a hunger for new talent, the next champion.
Competing in the Giro is different to every other race, on an emotional level. From a technical point of view, I think, by now, all three Grand Tours have their own status, their own characteristics. Then the riders make the race.
The Giro maybe enjoys different visibility based on the general classification riders who decide to come. There is never a shortage of stars for the stages, but it is the fight for the pink jersey – the Maglia Rosa – on the legendary climbs, that keeps spectators and fans transfixed. Just think of the Pantani or Vincenzo Nibali years.
My recent experiences in the Giro were affected by bad luck. The golden year was 2019, with the blue jersey and the Ponte di Legno stage win. In 2020, I was affected by Covid and didn’t finish. Then 2021 was tough, abandoning the race because of a stomach virus in the last week when 10th on GC. In 2022, I had a complicated preparation, but managed to capture a stage.
Herbie Sykes
Herbie Sykes is a journalist and author, writing about professional cycling and football. His books include Maglia Rosa: Triumph and Tragedy at the Giro d’Italia
In the early days, cycling for me was Italian cycling. I loved Paris-Roubaix, Belgium and the rest, but I had this love affair with the Giro d’Italia because it was the first race I’d been to. To watch it in the Dolomites, it was love at first sight.
It was actually football that had been my way into it. I was a fan of the rubbish team in Turin, Torino, and would fly out from England in the early ’90s to watch them play. I was living in Lincoln at the time. My dad had raced bikes and my brother was into it too.
One year, we combined football with watching the Giro. I loved it. In my late 20s, I bought a bike, as my best mate was into it. I’d always played football, but was struggling with my knees. So, a combination of the Giro, my own riding and the years of Marco Pantani lighting up the sport in Italy… it was an epiphany for me.
This was the boom time of cheap travel. We’d throw our bikes onto a Ryanair flight and come out to Turin or Bergamo, routinely, for the weekend. I was already in love with Italy: the people, the cycling, the friends I had here, and I was learning the language.
Soon, I’d turn it into a career, too – though somewhat serendipitously. At the time, I was collecting old, race-worn jerseys. I was fascinated with the whole Fausto Coppi and Gino Bartali thing – two greats of Italian cycling who dominated the sport pre- and post-WW2.
One jersey I wanted to blag belonged to Franco Balmamion, who lived in Turin and won the Giro in 1962 and 1963. Through a mutual friend, I wanted to set up a meeting, in the hope that he’d give me one. I needed a pretext for this meeting, so I pretended to be a journalist who was writing a book about cycling.
And I did, I met Balmamion, and he told me the story of his first Giro. I didn’t dare ask him for the jersey. It was a ridiculous idea – I didn’t know the bloke – but I was happy to have met him.
Later, my friend who’d organised the meeting rang and said Balmamion wanted to know how the book was going. And so, having said I was writing a book about cycling, I had to do it.
I was friendly with Vin Denson, a Brit who’d won a Giro stage in 1966. I asked him to come to Turin, where he could reacquaint himself with some of the guys he’d ridden the Giro with. I still didn’t have a publisher, nor know of anyone who’d want to publish the book.
Vin came, in 2006, and we met the doctor of Balmamion’s team, who’d subsequently been Eddy Merckx’s doctor at Faema.
The doctor told us his daughter spoke good English, so she could assist. So we sat in his garden: me, Vin, Balmamion, the doctor, Enrico Peracino and the doctor’s daughter, Paola. I was married at the time, living in Lincoln.
But I fell in love with Paola – I’d move in with her in 2008 and marry her in 2018. Two years later, the book [The Eagle of Canavese, the story of Balmamion’s life through the prism of his 1962 Giro win] came out – Mousehold Press saw fit to publish it.
It got noticed, and more writing jobs came. I moved to Turin in 2008, then my second book, Maglia Rosa [the history of the Giro] was published in 2011. Fundamentally, it was a woman and cycling that brought me here.
I write a lot about the history of Italian cycling, and the wider sport, but I still love the Giro as it is today and I’ll go and watch it every year. I’m interested in the trajectory of it, and care about it and its general wellbeing. It’s given me so much, personally.
I always go back to this idea, from 1909, that somebody could conceive of it in the first place. In this long, varied country, that you could do this tour on bikes, was a magical idea and still is to this day.
Mario Anni
Mario Anni rode the Giro d’Italia seven times between 1966 and 1973. He never won a stage, but helped some of the greats win theirs. He lives in Brescia and still rides today.
I turned professional in 1966, and I’m not going to pretend I didn’t have aspirations of being a champion. I’d won a lot as an amateur, a stage at the Tour de l’Avenir and suchlike. I thought I was good, and in reality I was good.
However, the real champions are born, not created, and immediately I turned professional it became apparent that my “good” wasn’t so good after all. So I started out as a gregario – a support rider – with Molteni, one of the biggest teams in Italian cycling.
I didn’t like it at first, because I wasn’t used to being told what to do. I thought I was better than that, and that I knew better. The issue was that we had Gianni Motta, who won the Giro that year, and Rudi Altig, who won the World Championship. Then Michele Dancelli won the Italian Championship, so we had all three jerseys.
Eventually, it dawned on me that these people were just much better riders than me, and that I’d been deluding myself to think I was going to be a big winner. I think I was very fortunate in that respect, and I’ll tell you why…
After a couple of years of fetching and carrying, my mindset started to alter. I was being paid to act like a gregario, and to do that I needed to think like one. I learned a bit of humility, and I started to understand that helping other people at the Giro was my job.
Only by doing it to the best of my ability was I going to be able to carry on as a professional, so that’s what I did. The fact that they kept selecting me to ride it suggests I must have been doing something right.
I rode the Giro seven times all told, and I’m grateful for every one of them. You have good days and bad, but it was 99 per cent positive. I was fortunate enough to be able to help some great champions, and to witness the way they rode at close hand.
If you’re a professional cyclist, it’s because you love cycling, and I think you need to be a rider to truly appreciate just how good they are.
It goes without saying that the Giro is the highlight of the year for an Italian rider. It’s sort of a shop window, with everyone immaculate and everyone keen to make a good impression. There’s a unique optimism around the first week, and it’s the one race that gives everyone a chance to shine. I had my day in the sun in 1969.
I was flying that year, and I was within a couple of seconds of wearing the maglia rosa. It was agonising, because everyone understands that, figuratively at least, the maglia rosa is for life.
I didn’t quite make it – mainly because there were issues of team politics – but there you go. I’d have liked to win a stage or wear the jersey, but it didn’t do for a gregario to get ideas above their station. Cycling was a lot less egalitarian than it is today.
For me, the best things about the Giro are the best things about life. When you live moments of such intensity together, you’re bound to form bonds. Of course, some turn out to be fleeting, but some evolve into real, genuine friendships that last a lifetime.
I rode for champions like Dancelli, Davide Boifava, Franco Balmamion and Italo Zilioli. They were much more talented riders than me, but I like to think that the respect was (and still is) reciprocal.
You can’t fake a race like the Giro. If you’re underprepared, there’s no way to hide, and if you’re not serious, you’re going to be found out. Everyone has their job to do, and my leaders understood that I did mine to the best of my ability.
I like to think the fact that we remain close friends is testament to the fact that I was a proper rider. Not a winner you understand, but a good helper and a real companion.
So that, for me, is the Giro. It asked a hell of a lot of you as a cyclist, but it gives back so much more in return. It’s the race that has everything, and the race that teaches you everything.
