On his lone appearance in the race almost 30 years ago, Paul Kimmage was moved to bemoan that the Giro d'Italia was far harder than previously advertised. 'Where was the Giro of legend, where riders laughed and joked for five hours and raced for two?' he wrote after an especially relentless slog across heavy southern roads between Potenza and Campobasso during the opening week of the 1989 Giro.
If anything, the Giro has only grown harder in the decades since. True, at the turn of the century, Mario Cipollini still had the sway to warn a young Thomas Voeckler off the idea of attacking early on a flat stage, and in 2004, the gruppo seemed to call a truce at various points as Alessandro Petacchi quietly annexed nine sprint wins, but such instances are increasingly rare in the modern Giro, where every day counts.
The 2015 edition of the race was a case in point. Alberto Contador lined up targeting a Giro-Tour double and, with that goal in mind, RCS Sport seemed to have designed a particularly amenable route. With the most difficult stages shoehorned into the final week, Contador had – in theory – a chance to ride his way into form as the race left San Remo.
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Astana, however, had other ideas, and from the Riviera down to Campania and all the way back north, they waged guerrilla warfare against Contador, lining out the peloton at every opportunity, and turning the supposed procession into a trial by ordeal. Although Contador reached Milan in the pink jersey, it came at a cost. Exhausted, he was a shadow of himself at the Tour de France – which had, of course, been part of Astana's game plan. As one Astana staff member explained, Fabio Aru's job wasn't so much to win that Giro as to make sure Contador was too tired to challenge Vincenzo Nibali at the Tour that followed.
In 2018, for Alberto Contador, read Chris Froome. For Astana, read Movistar (and others). The four-time Tour winner may be about to receive a monstrous payday to compete at the Giro, but he won't get too many free rides between Jerusalem and Rome next May.
In that context, picking out five key stages at the 2018 Giro feels almost redundant, but – at a remove of six months – some stages leap off the map all the same.
Stage 9, May 13: Pesco Sannita - Gran Sasso d'Italia (Campo Imperatore), 224 kilometres
Stage 14, May 19. San Vito Al Tagliamento - Monte Zoncolan, 181 kilometres
Stage 16, May 22. Trento – Rovereto (ITT), 34.5 kilometres
Stage 19, May 25. Venaria Reale – Bardonecchia, 181 kilometres
Stage 20, May 26. Susa – Cervinia, 214 kilometres
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