POSTCARDS FROM THE GIRO

Rabobank veteran Pedro Horillo discusses everything from mountaintop finishes to riding his way into form and avoiding the dreaded time-cut

This is the thirteenth time I’ve started a major stage race in my career, but if you thought I might be getting fed up with them, you couldn’t be more wrong. In fact, I’ve got a soft spot for the Giro d’Italia. Each major Tour is a very different kind of event and of the big three—the Giro, the Tour and the Vuelta—the Giro is probably the one with strongest roots among the people in its own country.

At the Giro you can see the different types of people that turn out on the roadside to watch—from all walks of life, not just your typical cycling fans. It’s good to see and it makes the race a real celebration of cycling.

On top of that, things happen in the Giro that never happen in other races: like a couple of days ago, in the middle of the stage, the peloton rode onto a military airfield and did a couple laps round the runway before heading out of the airbase and on toward the finish. While riding round the runway, I remembered that in my first Giro we had also gone around an airfield and a load of military fighter planes had flown overhead in homage to the race.

So I turned around to see if it would happen again and sure enough there were a couple dozen jet planes roaring up behind us. They came hammering overhead producing red, green and white trails of smoke in honor of the Giro and the colors of the Italian flag. That’s the thing that makes the Tour of Italy special.

This Giro’s different because it’s the centennial edition, but it also looks different in terms of the route. This has to have the oddest three-week stage race route I’ve ever seen. In the first part there are four big days in the mountains, and then we get to the main time trial, which is over 60 kilometers long. Then the last week—which is usually the most exciting—looks like it will be the most uninteresting.

This design has made for exciting racing so far, and there are no “transition stages” for the first two weeks, but ultimately it’s as if they want to run the race backwards, and I can’t figure out why. So I’m sure that whichever rider is in the pink leader’s jersey after that long mid-race time trial will, barring misfortune, be in the pink leader’s jersey when we hit Rome. All the big obstacles come before the time trial—afterward the biggest question will be whether the leader has enough strength to control the race through tricky terrain like the Abruzzo mountains.

As for me, I’m just hoping to get to Rome—end of story. I had very bad bronchitis in the build-up to the race, and I couldn’t train for ten days so I’m not feeling at my best yet. But I’m riding myself into form and getting through.
Like I always say in a three week stage race, there’s time for everything, such as recovering from an illness, getting ill again and then getting well again. So far I’m just in the first phase.

With one stage win already, our team leader Denis Menchov is doing well and very much in contention. Denis told me over supper a few nights ago that the first mountaintop finish (Stage 4) was more interesting for the riders at the back than the ones in front. While nobody attacked at the front, at the back there was a lot of tension because the first big climb had seen a lot of riders getting dropped and they were worried about the time cut.

I know all about getting eliminated in the Giro—it happened to me in my first ever stage race, which was the 1998 Giro, and not for the most logical of reasons, either. As a first-year pro, I’d managed to get through to the 17th stage before I was eliminated because I failed to make the finish within the maximum time permitted. There were 40 of us, but we were 15 seconds too slow.

I wasn’t alone in feeling annoyed. I mean a time like that—just 15 seconds on a four-hour stage—is minimal, and to be honest it looked suspiciously like revenge on the part of the race organizers. It’s a long story but RCS also organize the Tirreno-Adriatico stage race earlier in the season, which I had also taken part in.
In that race back in 1998 there had been a protest by the riders about dangerous conditions. As a result, about three quarters of the bunch deliberately rode slow, finished outside the maximum time permitted, protested about the stage afterward, and were eliminated. Only 40 of us, including me, completed the race.

Three months later in the Giro on that Stage 17, a lot of the big names from Tirreno of that year—Mario Cipollini, Claudio Chiappucci, Michele Bartoli—were in my group of riders. I figured it would be impossible for us to be eliminated, and that the organizers would cast a blind eye over us missing the time delay. But instead, we were all thrown out. All 40 of us! This time, I’ll try to make sure it doesn’t happen again.