As in 2010, 2012 and 2014, after three days racing on foreign soil, on Monday the Giro d'Italia faced a major transfer south from a northern European country to more familiar terrain - and for all 22 teams that means one of the biggest logistical operations of the entire season.
Riders headed out of Amsterdam's Schiphol airport at 9.20 this morning. Their flight will reach Lamezia Terme in southern Italy around midday, then they will head onto their respective hotels from there. But as Sky's head of performance operations Rod Ellingworth tells Cyclingnews in the Netherlands, a hefty proportion of their initial Giro d'Italia staff, bikes and management won't actually see Italy at all this May.
"We did this a couple of years ago when the Giro d'Italia started in Ireland so it's a fairly similar operation," Ellingworth says. "For the last six weeks we've been having weekly calls on all our logistics anyway for the Giro d'Italia and talking about this, obviously, is a big part of that."
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The key element for Sky is that no team vehicles are heading all the way from the Netherlands down to southern Italy on the rest day, instead they have a new set of vehicles already there. There's also a big changeover on the staff side.
"All our new vehicles turned up there [in Italy] already, we hired some external drivers to get them down there," Ellingworth said. "We've got five staff who are carrying on on the race, but who are down there waiting and four staff, like myself, who do this Dutch part and then will go home and somebody else takes over the role I'm doing here.
"Everybody else is flying down on that flight with the organisation on Monday. It's pretty straightforward, we're going with minimal stuff, we're not flying with any wheels or tool boxes and everything's already down there, beds, bedding and so on. Everything is doubled up. We've got three of each of those, more or less, per rider and double up on that so that's not so tricky."
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