Old Trafford’s Theatre of Dreams may be beckoning Sir Jim Ratcliffe as he closes on acquiring Manchester United, but in Italy the Eternal City is awaiting his Ineos Grenadiers cycling team, who start the 106th Giro d’Italia on Saturday.
Ratcliffe’s charges have not won the Tour de France since 2019 but its Italian counterpart, the Giro, has been a happier hunting ground, with wins by the Londoner Tao Geoghegan Hart in 2020 and the Colombian star Egan Bernal the following year.
The 2023 Giro begins on the Trabocchi coast, in the middle of Italy’s Adriatic seaboard, with an individual time trial and ends on Sunday 28 May in Rome. Over those three weeks, there will be multiple classified climbs, six high mountain stages and two more time trials, with the final “race of truth” falling on the penultimate stage.
Ineos Grenadiers’ identity has morphed in recent seasons and is a million miles from the all-conquering Team Sky that Ratcliffe took over in the spring of 2019. The four-time Tour winner Chris Froome is long gone, Nicolas Portal, the team’s talismanic sports director, died in 2020 and Sir Dave Brailsford, once ever-present on the team bus, is now rarely seen at races.
However, the British-owned team have been very much at the races this spring with, most notably, an assured overall win from Geoghegan Hart in a recent Giro warmup, the Tour of the Alps. The same lineup, augmented by the former world time trial champion Filippo Ganna, starts the Giro.
Yet unlike the Team Sky era, leadership duties remain fluid. The eight-rider roster includes two past Grand Tour champions, Geoghegan Hart and the evergreen and durable Geraint Thomas, who finished third in last year’s Tour de France.
Remco Evenepoel, Belgium Soudal Quick Step, age 23
Winner of the 2022 Vuelta, current world road race champion and unstoppable at this year's Liège-Bastogne-Liège, Evenepoel's talent ranks alongside that of the prodigious Tadej Pogacar. The only apparent frailty seems to appear during serial mountain stages, so the Giro's final week could be his Kryptonite.
Primoz Roglic, Slovenia Jumbo-Visma, age 33 (pictured)
Roglic, susceptible to bad luck, should perhaps already have won a Giro — not to mention the 2020 Tour de France. Instead he is a three-time winner of the Vuelta, while falling short on the French and Italian tours. Master of Evenepoel's attacking style in March's week-long Tour of Catalunya, this may be his last chance to claim the pink jersey.
Tao Geoghegan Hart, GB Ineos Grenadiers, age 28
The Londoner, unexpected winner of the pandemic-delayed Giro in October 2020, will be buoyed by his recent success in the Tour of the Alps and can count on strong support from his team. His one appearance in the Tour de France was anonymous and, based on his results, the style and terrain of Italian racing seem his preferred environment.
Thibaut Pinot, France Groupama FDJ, age 32
The French climber seemed a burnt-out case after the 2019 Tour de France in which he thrilled his home nation only to abandon the race. tearfully in the Alps. Recent form suggests a comeback, with a resilient second-place finish on the toughest stage of the Tour de Romandie and consistent climbing form hinting at potential for a top-10 finish. Jeremy Whittle
The Welshman starts alongside Geoghegan Hart and, with more than 60 kilometres of time-trialling to be raced, will hope for a high finish in Rome, after an early season he has described as “stop-start”.
“I’m on the right track and coming into some shape just in time,” Thomas said. “We had a really good camp at Sierra Nevada and then the Tour of the Alps obviously went really well, so morale is high.”
Thomas crashed out of his last two Giro campaigns. In 2017, he was forced to abandon the race when he was one of a group of riders taken down by a police motorbike, while in 2020 he fell and fractured his hip. As Thomas recovered at home, Geoghegan Hart, then his understudy, rode through the ranks of the peloton to win the race.
Now 36, Thomas’s 15th-place finish at the Tour of the Alps, in support of Geoghegan Hart, was, as Thomas would say, a solid performance that suggests an upward trajectory.
Mark Cavendish, riding his first Grand Tour for the Astana Qazaqstan team, will be eyeing the rare flat finishes in this Giro. The first chance to add to his tally of 16 Giro stage wins comes on Sunday, in San Salvo, but he will be relying on his wits and guile, rather than a dedicated lead-out team.
There are some big-name absentees. Tadej Pogacar, nursing a fractured wrist, will not be racing in the Giro and is focusing on this year’s Tour de France, as is the defending Tour champion, Jonas Vingegaard.
Good news for Geoghegan Hart and Thomas, then, except that they will have to contend with the serial winners and pre-Giro favourites Remco Evenepoel, the 2022 Vuelta a España winner, and the multiple Vuelta champion Primoz Roglic in the three-week race.
Both have taken emphatic wins already this year, Evenepoel in the Liège-Bastogne-Liège one-day Classic and the early-season UAE Tour, while Roglic has won Tirreno-Adriatico and the Volta a Catalunya. The pair’s sparring match in the hills and mountains of the Catalan race relegated the rest of the peloton, including Ineos Grenadiers, to also-rans.
Over the three weeks of a race that is usually subject to volatile weather and that weaves its way from the Adriatic to the Apennines, from Switzerland to the Dolomites, their duel is expected to be the focal point of the Giro.
Just as he did last July, Thomas is expected to play a waiting game, biding his time and shadowing the favourites, before a final week among the most brutal in Giro history. The penultimate time trial, to the teetering summit of Monte Lussari, features 7.3km of climbing and has stretches at 15%.
That particular stage will not bring back happy memories for Roglic, who infamously fell apart on a very similar-looking route at the end of the 2020 Tour de France, dramatically ceding overall victory to his Slovenian compatriot Pogacar. He will be hoping lightning doesn’t strike twice; Thomas, meanwhile, will be planning to be in the mix during the final week.
