‘Some bastard Italian attacked from the gun today. The first 5km were up a mountain and split the field to bits. Before I knew what was happening, the three cups of Colombian coffee, swallowed just before the off, were coming back up my throat. This race is beginning to stink. Where was the Giro of legend, where riders laughed and joked for five hours and raced for two?’ − Paul Kimmage, Rough Ride.
It’s probably best for all involved that we don’t reveal the exact details of the pirate streaming service that has been a saviour for the purposes of following this year‘s Giro d’Italia.
Trust me, there are plans to upgrade the satellite subscription before the Tour de France, and no cycling commentary is the same without the soft melodious tones of Seán Kelly. But the Giro has always made for irresistible viewing, particularly this year with Sam Bennett chasing another Grand Tour stage win before his career inevitably starts to slow down.
At age 34, Bennett’s best years aren’t yet necessarily behind him, but the years ahead are clearly numbered. He’s twice come close to winning in the Giro already – narrowly bumped out in Tuesday’s bunch sprint into Lecce on stage four, where he finished sixth, and appeared to blow a glorious chance in Thursday’s stage six finish into Naples, where he ended up 11th.
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The Giro has long been revered among pro cyclists as the most beautiful of the three Grand Tours, and the most chaotic. The first week has brought plenty of reminders. With three opening stages in Albania (stunning landscaped noted), one of the podium favourites, Mikel Landa, crashed out on day one, fracturing a vertebra that will require him to remain in a stable lying position for several weeks.
Four more riders were forced out after the mass crash 70km before the finish into Naples, including former Giro winner Jai Hindley. These are the inherent risks all pro cyclists face as they go about their rough daily lives, and no one knows that better than Bennett.
His first Tour de France start in 2015 was cut short by illness and injury, his second a year later marred by another crash on stage 1, and he finished in 174th position, the last rider of the lot. After three stage wins in the 2018 Giro, and two more in the 2019 Vuelta a España, it was only after joining his own self-proclaimed dream team in Belgian outfit Deceuninck-QuickStep for the 2020 season that Bennett was free to chase stage wins in the Tour.
With that his dream season unfolded, Bennett winning two Tour stages, including a victory in the final stage down the Champs-Élysées, only the fifth rider in history to win in Paris while also wearing the green jersey as race points leader. He also became only the second Irish rider is history to win that prize after Kelly last won it in 1989.
Bennett has a few more chances to win a stage in this year‘s Giro, possibly as soon as Sunday’s stage nine into Siena, and there’s no reason to believe he won’t be back for another Grand Tour.
At the same time as the Giro was unfolding this week, Bradley Wiggins provided a startling reminder of how some riders struggle after their career ends, revealing he was “lucky to be here” given the extent of his addictive behaviour and self-destructive tendencies after he retired in 2016.
Wiggins became the first British rider to win the Tour in 2012, crowning that season with a gold medal in the London Olympics. Some of his struggles were known. In 2020, he divorced from wife Cath and last year he was declared bankrupt, but his confessions this week were startling.
“I had a drug addiction as well, I was doing s***tloads of cocaine, I had a real bad problem,” he said in a joint interview with Velo, the Guardian and Cycling Weekly. “There were times my son thought I was going to be found dead in the morning. I was a functioning addict. People wouldn’t realise. I was high most of the time for many years.
“There’s no middle ground for me. I can’t just have a glass of wine. If I have a glass of wine, then I’m buying drugs. My proclivity to addiction was easing the pain that I lived with.”
“I already had a lot of self-hatred, but I was amplifying it. It was a form of self-harm and self-sabotage. It was not the person I wanted to be. I realised I was hurting a lot of people around me.”
Now 45, Wiggins said he managed to quit his addiction a year ago, but it’s a familiar tale in that he’s one of many tainted by suspicions of drug use of the doping sort, and whose life after cycling has been far from straightforward.
Wiggins also spoke about the support shown to him by Lance Armstrong, who likewise came to the assistance of 1997 Tour winner Jan Ullrich, whose decline and fall after the end of his cycling career was documented in terrifying detail in the 2022 biography The Best There Never Was.
[ Jan Ullrich, a sad and lonesome tale of cycling’s best there never wasOpens in new window ]
Wiggins reckoned his drift towards addiction stemmed from a harrowing childhood − his father Gary, an Australian track racer, walked out on the family when he was five, and later came sexual abuse from a cycling coach. Wiggins intends to provide further details of that in The Chain, his autobiography to be published later this year.
Every Giro also brings the reminder of Marco Pantani, one of the riders who didn’t make it out alive, dying in 2004 shortly after the end of his career. Each story is different, each one nonetheless a reminder of the sometimes perilous life after pro cycling.
