The Giro d’Italia organisers have officially confirmed that the race will start in Turin, Piemonte in 2024, for the fourth time in its history and the second time in four years. The full route will be published on Friday this week.
As was widely rumoured, the race will kick off on Saturday, May 4 with a mass start stage from Venaria Reale on the outskirts of the city and finish in the city centre, while stage 2 will finish on the summit of Oropa in the north of the Piemonte region.
While stage 1 is set to be a repeat of the hilly 2022 stage through Turin, but with fewer climbs, stage 2 will be the earliest major mountaintop test for the Giro d’Italia since it began in Sicily in 1989 and went up Mount Etna on its second day.
The Giro d’Italia already started in Venaria Reale in 2011 with a team time trial, won by HTC-HighRoad. Ten years later in 2021 when it last began in Turin, the stage was an individual time trial won – for the second year running – by Filippo Ganna (Ineos Grenadiers).
La Gazzetta dello Sport notes that the start date is exactly 75 years after the major air tragedy on the hill of Superga, where on May 4th, 1949, a plane carrying Turin’s football team, known locally as Grande Torino, crashed into the climb on the outskirts of the city and all 31 people on board died. That year’s winner, Fausto Coppi, dedicated his victory to Ezio Loik, a midfielder who was on board the plane.
“The 107th edition will be a homage to Grande Torino,” the paper stated, and the first stage, just 136km long, will include the Superga climb at its mid-way point to honour their memory and the anniversary of the crash. The cat. 2 Colle Magdalena, with its summit 20km from the finish could well decide the winner and first race leader.
The Oropa finish also marks an anniversary, as it takes place 25 years after Marco Pantani‘s famous victory on the Piemontese climb. Oropa was last tackled in the 2017 Giro d’Italia, with victory going to the overall champion of that year’s edition, Tom Dumoulin, and with only two cat. 3 climbs preceding it, will likely be the crunch moment of stage 2.
A third stage will take place in Piemonte, running south from Novara to Fossano, which will likely end in a bunch sprint before stage 4, starting in Acqui Terme, takes the race out of the northwesterly region.
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