The Giro Notebook – stages 1-3

Crashes, Frenchmen called Paul, guess the breakaway, and more

I’m back with a new feature for the Giro d’Italia, looking back at each batch of stages and drawing out the main talking points. There won’t be blow-by-blow accounts of the action, mainly because it’ll be old news by the time I manage to hit ‘publish’, but hopefully you’ll find within these posts a distillation of the main events, so that you might follow through the narrative arcs and subplots of the race, even without watching every moment.

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Time to talk all things Giro - let’s begin with the Grande Partenza in Bulgaria.

An opening defined by chaos

Looking back at the past few years of Grand Tours, there are too many occasions where the race’s ultimate shape has been heavily impacted by major crashes in the early stages. I’m thinking Mikel Landa at last year’s Giro, Jasper Philipsen at last year’s Tour, Enric Mas and Richard Carapaz at the Tour in Bilbao in 2023, and of course the infamous ‘allez omi-opi’ incident at the Tour in 2021. The ink has barely dried on the various previews, and riders expected to be challenging for jerseys are gone from the race. It always feels crueller at the beginning of a Grand Tour. So much preparation, so much time away from family, all that sacrifice, and it is wiped out in the blink of an eye.

It was sadly also the case for a number of riders at this year’s Giro following two major crashes in as many days. The nature of racing is ever thus, but the high-octane, full-throttle tension of the early days of a Grand Tour, when the first jerseys are on the line, exacerbates the nerves and elevates an already pressurised situation into something even more highly charged.

Stage 1 saw a mass crash in the final kilometre leading up to the first bunch sprint finish of the race. Most of the major contenders made it through to battle for the win, but Kaden Groves came out of the pile-up looking pretty banged up, and Matteo Moschetti was forced to abandon. The following day, on a wet descent heading into the final portion of the day’s action, the full UAE team wiped out into the barriers, taking a couple of other teams down with them. It was immediately clear that not everyone was going to be able to continue the race.

There are crashes which define races, and then there are crashes which define whole seasons. This feels like one of those, instinctively. Like the crash at Itzulia in 2024, its impact shook me, and just as in that crash, one of the first riders confirmed to be out was UAE’s Jay Vine. My heart ached for him, yet again. How is it that some riders seem to skate through their careers without any major issues, and others are blighted again and again? Vine was only just on his way back from the freak kangaroo crash that took him out of his home race back in January. He was one of the worst impacted riders in the aforementioned Itzulia crash. His team are under a curse this season, it seems. Riders crashing out of every race; squad decisions made off the back of who’s actually fit to ride – a situation we don’t see in men’s pro cycling very often. Their planned leader for the Giro was João Almeida, but he withdrew due to illness, leaving the GC bid in the safe hands of Adam Yates, who hoped to follow in his brother’s footsteps and contend for the top step of the podium. It was not to be, as he was one of the riders who came down - hard.

The sight of Yates muddied and bloodied will stay with me for a long time. That was a man who needed to be immediately placed in an ambulance and taken to a medical facility. Instead, with the thousand yard stare of the most-probably-concussed, he was put back on his bike to try and salvage his GC bid. He finished over 11 minutes down and was later withdrawn due to – insert gasp of surprise here – concussion. The protocols were clearly applied to some riders; but the speed at which Yates was sent on his way does not fill me with any confidence at all that the proper checks were carried out. I’m not a medical professional and as such, I won’t go on about this. But I don’t feel comfortable with what I witnessed.

Questions over safety continue to plague the sport, and where F1 by contrast continues to innovate and respond in attempts to improve and maintain safety, cycling flounders with half measures and mixed messages. I honestly don’t know what the answer is. There may well not be one – not a perfect one at least – but ‘just accept it because it’s cycling’ doesn’t feel like the correct reaction. Anyway. Onto other matters.

Frenchmen called Paul who ride bikes rather well

Hey look, I’m not saying that it’s not a common name or anything, but I do feel like there’s something odd going on in France – what is it with the name Paul? This is the year in which Paul Seixas will make his Tour de France debut, at the age of 19 – the best announcement ever in the history of racing revealed the news last week, and finally put an end to the ongoing speculation over whether or not he would pop his Tour cherry this year. He will. As I’m sure you can imagine, I have many thoughts about this, but you will have to wait to hear them after the Giro is done.

In the meantime, Paul Magnier decided enough was enough – it was time to thrust another French Paul into the spotlight. He duly won stage 1 in Burgas, in impressive fashion, though not with every sprinter present and correct following the crash. More importantly, he claimed the first maglia rosa for his Soudal-QuickStep team and the youngest Frenchman to wear it since Laurent Fignon, and laid down the gauntlet for the likes of Jonathan Milan and the rest to pick up on stage 3, when the sprinters went in for round 2. It was a clean sprint that time around, no crashes thank goodness, and Magnier doubled up, this time sandwiched between a pair of sprinting colossuses in the shape of Milan and Dylan Groenewegen, both of whom looked absolutely massive and ridiculously powerful, and yet somehow the more slightly built Frenchman capitalised on his confidence to extend his streak of two sprint wins against a selection of the fastest men in the world. In his first ever Grand Tour. At the age of just 22.

Spare a thought, before we move on, for Pauls Penhoët and Lapeira, who are doing great work just being French Pauls in the men’s pro peloton, even if they may not be soaring quite as high as their Paul pals. I have high hopes they too will achieve big things in 2026, because well, it’s the rules apparently. Paul Double is the only other WorldTour Paul and he can also be an honorary Frenchie if you just say his name with a bit of flair (it’s ‘Doub-lay’ don’t you know).

A word on the GC

It’s early days, and yet it’s already difficult to avoid reaching the conclusion that the GC is going to be an open and shut case. There are plenty of riders lurking on the periphery, who might be in with a chance of making the podium, but it looks like Jonas Vingegaard’s race to lose. He is trying to win the only Grand Tour not yet on his palmares, and he opened his account with an early attack on the climb on stage 2, to give us an indication of the form of the rest of the field. To that end, only Giulio Pellizarri (Red Bull-BORA-hansgrohe) and Lennert van Eetvelt (Lotto-Intermarché) could stay with him, though it’s probably fair to say the Dane wasn’t giving it ALL of the beans.

The two youngsters may have felt buoyed by their involvement in the attack nonetheless, but it leaves other, more experience riders still waiting to have their say – we’re talking Ben O’Connor, Felix Gall, Jai Hindley and Derek Gee-West – though it should be noted that the Canadian champion came down in THAT crash, so already finds himself at a significant disadvantage. Netcompany INEOS will hope to be included in the conversation either with two-time Tour stage winner Thymen Arensman, or former winner of the race Egan Bernal, who stuck his nose in the wind to grab a couple of bonus seconds in the Red Bull sprint on stage 2. Wouldn’t it be ace to see him play a serious role in proceedings? Yes, yes it would.

It’s a case of watch this space, heading into the rest of week 1.

Vingegaard leads the charge on GC

Breakaway business

Picture this: you wake up from a very long sleep. You’re groggy and confused. You don’t know what month it is, but you clearly remember you’re a cycling fan and the first thing you want to do is check in on the latest news from the sport. You are immediately shown stage 1 of a Grand Tour but without the on-screen graphics (they’ve mysteriously disappeared, along with your need to eat or see your family despite your long sleep - it’s a tenuous hypothetical I know, just go with it, OK?). How do you know which one you’re watching? Use this handy checklist:

• Is the break established after approximately 30 seconds of racing?

• Is it composed of two Italian continental team riders only?

• Is one of them named Bais, Tonelli or Tarozzi?

• If you answered yes to all of the above, congratulations, you’re watching the Giro d’Italia!

• If on the other hand there’s at least one World team represented, the break numbers four or more, there’s at least one French rider, and something mad happens in the desperate dash for LITERALLY ANY INTERMEDIATE POINTS well, it’s the Tour de France!

• Is there at least one reasonably strong GC candidate involved? Is Jay Vine there? Are there about 16 riders, a motley mix of sprinters and climbers and rouleurs, and you’ve got literally no idea who will win the stage? Ah, it’s a bouncing baby Vuelta stage!

Initially this was just going to be a laconic complaint about how relatively boring Giro breakaways are in the first stages of the race – but I’ve since reflected and it feels a bit unfair. It’s classic, isn’t it? We know exactly what to expect, the commentators know what to expect, the Italian conti teams send their guys out to do their jobs, and we all cross off a box on our bingo cards. On reflection, it’s fair to add that it’s usually so quiet in the early stages because of RCS’s course design, which inevitably begins with at least two or three sprint stages in the first three days, and is famed for backloading all of the climbing stages. The Vuelta is mad throughout and as such, it’s always impossible to predict what will happen in the breakaways. The Tour well, it’s the Tour. There’s so much on the line. It’s another level of intensity, and you can expect much more interest in any breakaway. That being said, on a big sprint stage, it’s as boring as the Giro, if not sometimes worse.

Fair play to this year’s victims – I mean volunteers, who actually had a really good crack on stage 3, unexpectedly taking their bid for glory to within the final kilometre – what a turn-up that would have been. They were caught in the end, but it was a spirited effort and a twist in the usual tale that can perhaps give us hope that the boring breakaways days are at an end, as we head into Italy for the race proper to begin.

An Italian Miscellany

This section is for other bits and bobs that I’ve noticed or thoughts that I feel compelled to share.

• Unibet Rose Rockets are riding their first ever Grand Tour – yes, everyone’s favourite underdog team are going for glory and they had a really strong chance of taking the leader’s jersey on stage 1 with Groenewegen – ironically, they are already pretty pink, as far as kits go. Expect to see them very active throughout the race, in their continued quest to score a place at the Tour de France - could they make their debut on British shores in 2027?

• The UAE curse continues, but they won’t go down without a fight. Expect them to feature heavily during the rest of the race, in breakaways and basically anywhere they can insert themselves into the action. Already willing to throw himself with reckless abandon at any race day, Jan Christen is now free to attack at will. Mikkel Bjerg has been chained to his leaders as a super reliable domestique for so long now he may have forgotten how to win himself but I’m willing to bet he’ll give it a go at some point. Perhaps their best hope though is Antonio Morgado, who already looked lively on stage 1, or Jhonatan Narvaez, who won stage 1 two years ago.

• If Jay Vine has a crash curse on him, then Arnaud De Lie has the illness hex - yet again at a major race, De Lie is far from his best as a result of a stomach sickness that has affected a number of the Lotto-Intermarché team caused by cow poo of all things. The “Bull of Lescheret”, as he is affectionately known, will rather rue this particular bovine connection, as he has already missed two chances to sprint. It’s the latest in a series of illnesses De Lie has suffered, and he will hope to be in contention later in the race, if he can recover. It’s not the easiest place to recuperate, let’s be honest.

• You know I love to see riders celebrating the victories of their teammates. Ever since the UCI had the audacity to outlaw the practice due to the danger aspect of taking hands off handlebars* we’ve seen a bit less of it, but I still enjoyed Christian Scaroni celebrating the surprise victory of Guillermo Thomas Silva on stage 2. XDS Astana took the race lead, and Silva recorded the first stage win and maglia rosa for his home nation of Uruguay – and the shared joy was so lovely to see. Sadly the UCI didn’t share my rose-tinted view and fined Scaroni for the action – he later claimed it was worth it. Terrible pic below!

*I know, I was banging on about safety earlier – I get this one, I really do, but I’m not always certain it’s that dangerous, compared to some of the other issues that we regularly see.

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Stay tuned for more, as the race is back in Italy as we speak – the wind is high, the skies are blue, and unfortunately Kaden Groves is the latest rider to leave the race following his stage 1 crash. More in a few days’ time.

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