When the Giro d’Italia starts next week with three stages in Northern Ireland and Ireland, there will be a notable lack of star quality in the 198-rider field.
Defending champion Vincenzo Nibali, 2008 winner Alberto Contador, reigning Tour de France winner Chris Froome and his Sky Pro Cycling teammate Bradley Wiggins are all skipping the Italian classic to focus on the Tour this year.
“Absolutely,” Giro director Mauro Vegni said when asked if he was upset about the big names missing from the event. “I’m not going to pretend that that’s not the case.”
The two favorites entered for the May 9 to June 1 race — Tour runner-up Nairo Quintana and Spanish rider Joaquin Rodriguez — have never won a Grand Tour.
Sky had initially planned to send Richie Porte, but then moved the Australian to its Tour squad after the promising rider struggled with illness early this season.
“Sure they had some problems, but in terms of moving someone who was supposed to ride the Giro to the Tour, to be honest I didn’t like that very much,” Vegni said in a recent interview, but he was more empathetic toward Nibali.
“Vincenzo won the Giro in such extraordinary style last year that it’s only normal for him to try and win the Tour this year,” he said. “I understand him.”
Vegni is hoping that new International Cycling Union president Brian Cookson speeds up reforms of the sport’s calendar to make it easier for top riders to enter both the Giro and Tour.
“We need to revise the schedule to ensure that the best riders are racing the biggest races,” Vegni said. “With the calendar as is, that will never be possible.”
However, he does not have a simple answer for how to alter the calendar. For instance, he is not open to moving the Giro to earlier in the season than May.
“As is we already have a lot of weather problems in May, so earlier would be worse,” Vegni said.
Weather might be less of a problem if most of the race was held in southern and central Italy, with the key mountain stages in the Appenine Range, but Vegni does not like that idea either.
“I don’t think the fans would accept that,” he said, pointing to the 2009 Giro, which had an atypical route. “The fans are used to seeing riders in the tallest mountains over the last week, where history has been made, on climbs like the Mortirolo and the Stelvio.”
The grueling Stelvio climb is back this year after bad weather rendered it unusable a year ago. It will come in the 16th leg of the race from Ponte di Legno to Val Martello. The penultimate stage 20 is expected to be the toughest, capped by a super-steep finish up Monte Zoncolan, before the race ends in the northeastern port city of Trieste.
“The hope is that it remains competitive until the penultimate stage on the Zoncolan,” Vegni said.
The Italian was the Giro’s technical director before taking over full directorial duties when Michele Acquarone was fired at the end of last year during an investigation into the alleged misappropriation of about US$18 million at RCS Sport, which organizes the race.
Acquarone says he is innocents and was scapegoated.
It was Acquarone who coordinated the start in Ireland and now Vegni is in charge of finding new foreign territory for the Giro.
While he is committed to starting the Giro in Italy next year and in 2017, which marks the 100th edition of the race, there are numerous possibilities for 2016.
Vegni mentioned offers from Switzerland, Corsica, Belgium and the Netherlands, and the race’s finish could also move, with the finale recently held in Rome and Verona.
“The finish is usually in Milan, but it’s not a rule or something permanent like the Tour and the Champs-Elysees,” Vegni said. “We have a lot of requests.”
For now, the focus turns to racing and holding a doping-free event after last year’s edition was tarnished by three positive tests, from Italians Danilo di Luca and Mauro Santambrogio, plus French rider Sylvain Georges.
“There are still some stupid people out there, but it seems to me that compared to before there’s more awareness out there,” Vegni said.
This year’s race is dedicated to Marco Pantani on the 10th anniversary of the Italian climber’s death.
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