The Giro has been run and won for another year. It was, once again, a spectacular and demanding course, and a race of ups and downs for different riders.
Nairo Quintana proved that he is the best climber in the world on a course that suited him incredibly well.
I was always keen to see Cadel Evans succeed, but in the high mountains Quintana was in a league of his own and Evans’ abilities over this sort of terrain have waned over time.
Honourable mentions must also go to the few young Aussies who made it all the way through this year. Nathan Haas, Michael Hepburn, and Jay McCarthy showed great spirit to finish along with some of the stalwarts of Australian cycling.
The Giro organisers should be applauded for their efforts to maintain interest in the race by making the most exciting routes they can think of, including the use of gravel roads and incredible climbs like the Gavia.
The Giro has arguably become more challenging than the Tour de France as a result. This year’s course was quite likely the most spectacular for any race of the season.
The overall project seems to have lost momentum this year, however, with many big-name contenders missing from the start line in Dublin and a high rate of dropouts. The race started with 198 riders and finished with only 156.
There were some obvious shortcomings to this year’s race organisation unbefitting of a Grand Tour, the semi-neutralisation fiasco on stage 16 being the most talked about.
But while it’s true that incidents like this detract from the race’s success, I don’t think they define the reasons for the Giro’s decline. This issue goes a lot deeper than just some small operational errors.
The difficulty the Giro faces in attracting and retaining big names for the whole three weeks has multiple components. Firstly, recent years have seen teams change their focus from the entire calendar of big races to prioritising the Tour at the expense of the prestige of all the others.
In turn, the timing of the Giro in relation to the Tour de France is far from ideal for any individual rider with ambitions in the latter. This has always been the case; it’s only the first point that has changed.
Cycling teams rely on sponsorship dollars, and as the world of bike racing has become more and more globalised, many sponsors in the sport now come from outside of Europe. The Tour de France is the best known cycling event to the general public in these countries where cycling lacks a cultural history.
The big-value result for a modern team and its backers has narrowed down almost exclusively to a good showing at the Tour. The economic forces entailed by its global success are, paradoxically, coming at the expense of cycling’s cultural diversity.
We probably have, at least in part, the Lance Armstrong era to thank for this change.
Never before Armstrong had there been a champion with such unquestioning team support to win only one race a year. Other teams had to change their focus in order to keep up, and the culture of basing the entire year around the Tour has become embedded.
The situation is clear in the case of Orica-GreenEDGE, who recently indicated that they could be interested in signing Bradley Wiggins for the 2015 season.
Their Giro squad was whittled down to just two riders. Yet with the prospect of gaining Tour de France associated recognition, enough sponsorship dollars will be available to sign a contract with Wiggins and, presumably, a significantly stronger Grand Tour team with which to support him.
As the Tour de France is the only bike race the average Australian tunes into, this is sound reasoning for the team’s Australian sponsors.
This seems to me a great shame, as I have fond memories of racing the Giro in a time when it was afforded the respect befitting of a Grand Tour. I’d prefer to see my favourite riders, including the Aussies, contesting all 21 stages rather than dropping out with an eye to France.
The Giro was and still is a race on fire; exciting and dramatic, presenting the stars of the future, and full of the flavour and flair that only the Italians can offer, though perhaps there was a touch too much flavour to the Tifosi on Monte Zoncolon this time.
It was always a favourite of mine and I often did well there, winning two stages during my career and also the now defunct Intergiro jersey. The Intergiro was a prize awarded to the leader of the Giro at the halfway mark of each stage of the race, and was awarded considerable prestige for a minor classification.
It worked in the same cumulative fashion as the General Classification, and the potential winner still had to finish all stages. It only existed between 1989 and 2005 but perhaps should be re-introduced, as it provided a reason to continue all the way to the end rather than focusing on early targets before dropping out.
Two days before the end of the 1990 edition, I was holding both the Sprint Classification jersey and the Intergiro jersey and had to make a decision on which to race for.
I decided to go for the Intergiro as the jersey offered a significant purse, which even then was a significant motivation for professionals as salaries were not as high as today. I also finished seventh overall that year.
Historically, teams and riders could not collect prize money for jerseys worn or stages won unless the rider finished the race. The prize pool does not hold any value for a team owner, however.
The impact of the jersey win is what secures sponsors. Meanwhile, higher modern wages make the prize purse less of a reason for riders to target specific races than it once was. If riders are to be persuaded to suffer through the whole Giro then the hit needs to be applied to the team, and it has to hurt more than solely the loss of the purse.
The Italian race organisers could consider a strategy where teams are fined for ditching the race mid-stream for no real reason, having used the first weeks as preparation for the Tour de France. This attitude devalues a great race.
But I think riders also need to take responsibility. If the fate of cycling’s most sacred traditions is left exclusively to sponsors and the interest of the non-riding public that they attempt to court, then they will eventually decay into a homogenous calendar geared toward the marketing efficiency offered by the Tour de France.
Of all professional sports, cycling is better than that. While sponsors keep professional sports going, the heart of cycling lies in these great traditions. It would be a shame to lose them simply because a generation of riders and all that follow them have come to adopt identical priorities to their corporate backers.
Symptoms of the same tendency are seen as ASO attempt to devise ways of ‘capitalising’ on the scores of fans who get an intimate view of their sporting heroes without paying a cent for tickets. Sure, race organisation needs to be a sustainable venture, but let’s not sacrifice everything that makes them so great and unique.
To those who assert that the sport is at risk of dying due to a lack of sponsorship interest, and that it must do absolutely whatever it takes to attract more money, I say that these fears are greatly exaggerated.
Cycling has survived for a long time, and will go on in some form or other regardless of whether or not its champions are given contracts worth several million Euros. The question is whether that form is as culturally rich as it is commercially.
Perhaps I’m being overly sentimental about a golden age that has long since passed.
In any case, I very much hope that we don’t see the Giro decline in participation any further than it already has, and that in five, ten, and fifty years time, it holds the status it deserves rather than disappearing altogether.
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