BREAKING: Italy Reaching Dangerous Levels of Giro

Dozens have already succumbed to Tejay van Garderen Syndrome, and the maglia rosa is in peril

Photo Credit: Charly Lopez, ASO

You’re probably wondering why there’s a new Wheelysports in your inbox on Tuesday night, instead of the usual Friday morning publication time. Two reasons: First, for reasons outside my control¹ I have been obliged to spend this weekend in The Middle of the Fucking Woods.² That means I’ll be consuming the final weekend of the Giro in highlight form, probably sometime Monday or Tuesday; it also meansthe usual Thursday evening writing/Friday morning publication schedule won’t fly this week.

But also, there have been Events. Stage 16 is what you might call a watershed moment in the 2025 Giro d’Italia, setting up what I hope will be a barnburner of a final week, contested among a fascinating subset of riders. Or at the very least, we’re in for a barnburner of a Stage 17 on Wednesday, and I want to make sure everyone who hasn’t been following this race is aware of that while there’s still time to tune in.

Because this is a great onramp for cycling, if you’re an American sports fan who doesn’t know anything beyond the Tour de France. It’s the sharp end of a major race, with an interesting mix of personalities and styles at the forefront, with historical connections galore. Moreover, it’s broadcast live on (HBO) Max, which means it’s available to a bigger subsection of the American audience than races on FloBikes or probably even Peacock. And we get the good commentary team. I say that having no particular beef with the NBC/Peacock duo of Bob Roll and Christian Vande Velde, but I know some of you can’t stand those guys, and drop into the comments to say so from time to time.

Anyway, tomorrow on Max, starting at 6:30 a.m. Be there.

Can Our Man Isaac del Toro Actually Win the Giro?

On Friday morning, our beloved Mexican wunderkind Isaac del Toro held a tenuous 33-second lead over teammate Juan Ayuso, with pre-race favorite Primož Roglič another minute(ish) behind. The peloton finished together on Friday, with del Toro taking more bonus seconds. Then, on Saturday, the peloton went through a slick cobbled section in the Slovenian town of Gorica, and almost everyone hit the deck: Roglič, Ayuso, Antonio Tiberi (third on GC at the time), points classification leader Mads Pedersen…but not del Toro.

One thing I’ve been mightily impressed with this Giro is how del Toro has consistently stayed at or near the front of the peloton while wearing the maglia rosa. It takes a little extra effort to keep up there, and you might catch a little more wind, but the reason you want to do this if you’re leading a stage race is twofold.

First, riders near the front can react more easily to sudden attacks, or launch attacks of their own to gain bonus seconds at sprint points, as del Toro did on Friday. Second, the farther up in the field you are, the greater the probability that when The Big One happens, it happens behind you.

So when Roglič and Ayuso went down, del Toro stayed on his wheels. As a result, he put 48 seconds into the two pre-race favorites, and Michael Storer and Egan Bernal, and almost two minutes into Tiberi.

On Sunday, UAE put the screws to Roglič on the race’s most comestible stage, which passed over Monte Grappa and ended in Asiago. With 20 flat kilometers from the end of the final climb,³ I didn’t expect big time gaps here, and for the most part the GC contenders stayed together. But not Roglič, who shipped another 90 seconds and fell from fifth on GC to 10th.

Which brings ups to Tuesday’s Stage 16. Well, actually, it brings us to Monday’s final rest day. The challenge of a grand tour is not just that the startlist is stronger or the stages are harder or the spotlight is brighter. After a week of racing, it becomes a real physical challenge not just to perform day-to-day, but to recover to 100 percent each night so you can go again on Sunday. That’s why stage hunters will often lollygag on hard climbs on days they’re not in the mix. Not to put too fine a point in it, but recovery is why cyclists got so much out of EPO and blood transfusions back in the day.

Most riders can hang for one week without too much trouble. After two, things start to get hairy. And somewhat counterintuitively, that second rest day⁴ can sometimes do more harm than good.

I’m coming to realize that, like, 30 percent of my beliefs about cycling are the result of repressed trauma from rooting for Tejay van Garderen in the early 2010s, but this used to happen to him all the time. For two weeks, he’d hang in there against Chris Froome and/or Nairo Quintana, and then the second he slowed down to take a breath, his body would just quit on him. He’d get sick, or a nagging injury started barking too loud to ignore, or some other calamity would befall him, and he’d either lose half an hour in an afternoon or be forced to abandon the race altogether.

Some riders are more susceptible than others,⁵ Tejay van Garderen Syndrome can strike without warning. Especially when the rider in question—i.e. del Toro—has never raced a grand tour before.

Stage 16 started in heavy rain, which led more crashes—Josh Tarling from the breakaway, then a crash that took down Roglič and Richard Carapaz. Carapaz popped right back up and his EF team got on the front to up the pace. But Roglič, evidently tired of getting kicked in the chest by a horse every afternoon, quite reasonably abandoned the race.

Even setting the rain aside, this stage was going to be brutal, with four categorized climbs, including three Category 1 summits in less than 100 kilometers to end the stage.

But even after the crash on Saturday, I did not expect to see Ayuso drop on the penultimate climb. UAE kept a couple domestiques behind to slow the flooding, but del Toro, stuck to Rafał Majka’s wheel up the road, seemed to have cleared his first two big hurdles. First, he looked unflappable; no sign of TVGS. Second, he’d not only held the maglia rosa far enough into the race that it’d be impolite for UAE to ask him to give it to Ayuso; he’d put Ayuso on the canvas. I went to sleep Monday night reasonably confident we’d see Ayuso win his first grand tour this weekend; by the time I finished breakfast on Tuesday, he’d shipped 12 minutes to del Toro and slipped from third place on GC to 17th. If he stays in the race at all, Ayuso’s GC hopes are finished.

With Ayuso and Roglič cooked, the GC battle quickly refocused on del Toro, second-place Simon Yates of Visma-Lease a Bike, and Carapaz.

Around this point in a grand tour, a weird thing happens where the top however many riders on GC separate themselves not just in the standings, but on the road. After two-plus weeks of racing, whoever has enough left in the tank to be the strongest on the day will also end up the strongest against the clock.

So eventually, the leaders happened upon a group of dropped breakaway riders that included Wout van Aert. Wout did what he always does in this situation: Wait for his team leader to catch him, then drill it for as long as he can—usually only a couple minutes—and knock the leading group down to less than half a dozen riders.

With six kilometers left, Carapaz attacked. I don’t think there’s any secret about this, but Carapaz is my favorite GC rider, and it’s because of moments like this. A lot of top GC riders are either conservative or formulaic. They know this game is about conserving energy, so they stick to team tactics or wait for others to attack before reacting and counterattacking.

Carapaz doesn’t really do that. If EF—the team that signed him at enormous expense in 2023—wanted to, it could build a traditional grand tour team around him. It’s a good squad, with plenty of talented dedicated climbers and experienced classics riders who could serve as road captain in a stage race. But Carapaz is capable of freelancing when it comes to the decisive moments of a mountain stage. When he goes, he can go alone. So EF is free to let Carapaz do his thing, while building a powerful stage hunting team; it was EF’s Kasper Asgreen who emerged from the chaos on Saturday, like the Millennium Falcon escaping the exploding Death Star, to win Stage 14.

The jaunt off the front on Tuesday was another one of those “well, let’s see what happens” attacks from Carapaz. A similar attack on Stage 14 of the 2019 Giro won Carapaz his only grand tour GC title while Roglič and Vincenzo Nibali ignored him, and his own team’s designated leader, Mikel Landa, farted around along with them.⁶

He knew he was third on the virtual GC, more than two minutes down from del Toro, and he knew that Yates and del Toro would be more concerned with each other than with him. Derek Gee, the Canadian rider from Israel-Premier Tech⁷ who sat fourth in the virtual GC after Ayuso’s collapse, followed Carapaz briefly. Given his position in the standings, would’ve probably made a good ally for Carapaz had he held on.

At this point, I figured Carapaz would put some time into Yates and del Toro, maybe make the two leaders sweat heading into the final few stages. But Yates and del Toro kept looking at each other, kept screwing around, refusing to work, until Yates had finally had enough and went off after Carapaz.

This was the first inkling I had that anything was wrong with del Toro, but he completely blew up. What I had originally thought was going to be a gain of maybe 20 or 30 seconds for Carapaz quickly turned into a gain of about a minute on Yates, and nearly two minutes on del Toro. With Roglič out of the race, Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe’s own 21-year-old, Guilio Pellizzari, had attacked from the leading group in an attempt to move into the top 10 on GC, and when Carapaz hooked onto his wheel, I thought the Ecuadorian would end up in pink once again.

It all settled down by the end of the stage; Carapaz gassed in the last kilometer, and del Toro finally stopped the bleeding. But now we’re heading into the grueling Stage 17 with the top three riders separated by just 31 seconds, and Gee only a minute further back.

Right now, it seems like del Toro is starting to fade, while Carapaz is only getting stronger. Which puts UAE in a position I almost could not have imagined four days ago. They started the race with four riders capable of mounting a GC threat: del Toro, Ayuso, Brandon McNulty, and Simon Yates’ twin brother Adam. After Stage 12, del Toro and Ayuso were 1-2, McNulty was eighth, and Adam Yates was ninth.

But in addition to Ayuso crashing on Saturday and cracking on Tuesday, McNulty got caught up in the crash as well this weekend, and then he and Yates were both completely spent in a vain effort to unfuck the situation when both of their leaders popped on the same stage.

Now, del Toro is clinging to a 26-second lead on GC, and the next-closest UAE rider on GC is Adam Yates, in 10th place, 5:08 behind. A team that looked like it’d be able to handpick the Giro winner 48 hours ago now has one card to play, and said card is hemorrhaging…oh boy, this metaphor got away from me in a hurry.

I don’t know what is to come, how del Toro will recover—and recovery, after all, is the name of the game.

Wednesday’s stage crosses the Passo del Mortirolo, and if del Toro or anyone else cracks there, he’ll have 48 kilometers of chasing to the finish in which to think about it. The reason I’m so insistent on everyone tuning in on Wednesday morning is I don’t know if all three leaders will make it over the top together. This race could blow up again by two-thirds of the way through tomorrow’s stage.

If it doesn’t, and the standings stay more or less as they are, the last competitive stage of the race is an absolute beast: Over the gravel-tracked, outside-category Colle delle Finestre to Sestriere.

Simon Yates being in such strong position to win another grand tour, well, it tickles me a little. He’s only 32, but I’d kind of written him off. I thought this move to Visma-Lease a Bike was mostly about serving as a second set of lungs for Jonas Vingegaard in the Tour de France, the kind of superdomestique coda a lot of good-but-not-great GC riders go through in their 30s.

Similarly, with no Vingegaard, no Matteo Jorgenson, no Sepp Kuss in the lineup for Visma-Lease a Bike at this Giro, I figured Yates could get to the podium in what I’m going to call the 2020 Richie Porte Tour de France Special; a valedictory rolling-back-the-clock ride for an aging Anglophone GC guy.⁸

But on the final climb on Tuesday, TNT play-by-play announcer Rob Hatch started barking about Saturday’s stage passing the Colle delle Finestre, and how Yates has history there. And I felt foolish for letting this slip my mind, but it was a long time ago.

Back in 2018, Simon Yates was legitimately one of the best GC riders in the world. That year, he won the Vuelta, and before that he won three stages at the Giro and spent 13 days in pink. Why didn’t he win that race, and set up a historic Giro-Vuelta double?

History will mostly remember Stage 19 of the 2018 Giro as the site of the coolest thing Chris Froome ever did.⁹

But even before Froome went solo from 50 kilometers out over three mountains, vaulting himself into first from fourth place, 3:22 behind,¹⁰ Yates was already cracking. He’d end up shipping 39 minutes to Froome and 17 positions in the standings in the span of a single afternoon.

Now, seven years later, he can win the Giro on the very same mountain. Isn’t that portentous? Doesn’t that just make you itchy with excitement? I know I’m itchy.

1. The fact that this is outside my control will become even more clear by the end of the sentence

2. See?

3. A Category 2 climb of 16.6 kilometers but just 5.3% average gradient, so, like, not a huge one

4. Third, in this case, since this Giro started on Friday and had a rest day after the Albania leg

5. If grand tours were two weeks long, Thibaut Pinot would’ve won three or four of them

6. Ironically, it was Yates who finished second to Carapaz on that stage.

7. I’m into the second full season of just not knowing what to do with IPT. Having that team name in the peloton is like having a team called Army of Republika Srpska-Compaq in 1995

8. See: Geraint Thomas at either of the past two Giros.

9. You’re welcome to object to my use of the word “cool,” seeing as how Froome was racing that Giro as a hedge against a potentially unsuccessful appeal of a PED ban that would’ve kept him out of the Tour de France

10. Who finished second on that stage? Carapaz. History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes