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The Giro d’Italia finished in Milan on Sunday, with Ryder Hesjedal storming home in the final time trial to win by a mere 17 seconds over Joaquim Rodriguez.
After three weeks and 3,502km of racing, that is a ridiculously narrow margin, and the race organisers have been widely praised for producing a course that built tension until the very last minutes of the race.
They deserve credit for producing a close finish, albeit one dominated by an attritional style of riding that produced few fireworks. In a sport that glorifies suffering, the final few days perfectly showcased the extraordinary qualities required to win a Grand Tour.
The ancient Greeks had a concept of virtue called arete, or excellence. A person of arete uses all of their skills, intelligence and physical capabilities to achieve excellence, and it was an important moral virtue for the Greeks.
The final weekend of the Giro showed off the peerless aesthetic and moral qualities of professional cycling, as the race wound through spectacular mountain passes, requiring the riders to demonstrate arete in all its facets: physical power, endurance, mental fortitude, tactical skill, teamwork and fearlessness.
Indeed the brutality of stage 20, a 218km epic of Homeric proportions finishing at the 2,757m summit of the snow-capped Stelvio, resulted in racing that was about as attritional as cycling gets.
No self-respecting rider will ever agree with me here, but I wonder if the extreme difficulty of the last few days of the Giro forced the top riders into a sort of tactical conservatism that ultimately cost the race some excitement.
It was too hard for GC contenders to attack each other in the mountains. That much climbing means the riders are battling for survival, and are unwilling or unable to attack early enough to create significant time gaps.
Instead we saw Christian Vande Velde expertly pacing his Garmin-Barracuda captain Hesjedal up the Stelvio, while a steely-jawed Rodriguez and Scarponi clung to each other’s wheels and Ivan Basso was slowly chewed off the back.
Rodriguez and Scarponi knew they had to take time out of Hesjedal if they wanted to win the Giro, but simply looked too fatigued to attack until the last kilometre or so, and were unable to grab more than the handful of seconds that Hesjedal had himself claimed on stage 19.
They were similarly unable to resist the brilliant solo attack of Thomas De Gendt, who dragged himself into podium contention with the kind of ride that sets a rider up for a career.
I wonder what would have happened if the Stelvio and the Mortirolo had been split between two shorter stages. I suspect we would have seen much more aggressive attacks: it would certainly be easier to launch a blistering assault if you’d only ridden 130km before you hit the base of the day’s major climb.
Instead, Garmin Barracuda’s time-honoured tactic of using Vande Velde to drive the pace for Hesjedal paid off perfectly, as the relentless pace made it too difficult for Rodriguez and Scarponi to launch.
This is the value of a strong team-mate who is willing to sacrifice himself for the team leader. In contrast, Scarponi had his Lampre team-mate Damiano Cunego ahead of him in a breakaway on the Stelvio, which should have put him in a position to help his team leader. Instead, Cunego went for personal glory and a failed attempt at the stage win.
Must have been awkward around the Lampre dinner table on Saturday night.
Ivan Basso again threatened constantly, using his Liquigas team aggressively over the last week to control breakaways and put him in good position, but ultimately he didn’t have the legs to stay with Hesjedal, Scarponi and Rodriguez when it mattered.
Hesjedal and his team were too strong, too determined, and too united. As the first Canadian to win a Grand Tour, he should be incredibly proud to have won the toughest Giro d’Italia for a long time.
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