In her memoir Auto da Fay, the novelist Fay Weldon observed that the human condition tended towards ennui, punctuated by rare drama. “There seems to be a general overall pattern in most lives, that nothing happens, and nothing happens, and then all of a sudden everything happens,” she wrote.
I’m not saying that the 2023 Giro d’Italia made me think of this quote, but there was a general overall pattern for most of the race, that nothing happened, and nothing happened, and then all of a sudden everything happened. It’s hard to say whether the incessant rain and cold of the first two weeks of the event had more of a chilling effect on the race than the rather unsubtle design of the final week’s percorso, but as the exploits of entertaining rides by Derek Gee, Thibaut Pinot and a few others fade from memory, the abiding memory of the 2023 Giro will be of a long, long wait for something significant to happen. Nice stage battles; shame about the GC.
Weldon also wrote: “I long for a day of judgement when the plot lines of our lives will be neatly tied, and all puzzles explained, and the meaning of events made clear.” There was one day of judgement in the 2023 Giro and that was the penultimate stage, the mountain time trial to Monte Lussari, a hitherto obscure corner of Friuli Venezia Giulia that also happened to be one of the most beautiful settings I have ever seen in a bike race. A nice landscape can go a long way to blinding us to the fact that nothing’s changing in the GC, as the tappone to Tre Cime di Lavaredo demonstrated just 24 hours before Monte Lussari. Of course, it’s true that stage races, especially Grand Tours, are attritional – cumulative fatigue is always building, even when it looks like it isn’t, and you can argue that without everything that had gone before, quiet stages and all, we wouldn’t have had that upheaval. However, Monte Lussari both dazzled with its fairytale scenery and finally, finally gave us a bike race.
Primož Roglič’s stunning victory on Monte Lussari by 40 seconds over maglia rosa Geraint Thomas, giving him the overall win by just 14 seconds, was an irresistible and compelling story of redemption. He’d looked less strong than Thomas through the mountain stages of week three, and even the handful of seconds he did manage to squeeze out of his Welsh rival at Tre Cime di Laveredo were put down to Thomas mistiming his attack with 500m to go and fizzling out in the last 100m. And of…