Closing the circle - Simon Yates, the Colle delle Finestre and Giro d'Italia redemption

Chris Froome had been presented with the pink jersey on the podium by the time Simon Yates rolled beneath the Arrivo banner in Bardonecchia, his ordeal finally at an end. The clock by the finish line read 38:51, but Yates had already been counted out of the fight on the lower slopes of the Colle delle Finestre, some 80km away.

For two weeks, Yates hadn’t just led the 2018 Giro d’Italia, he had dominated it, stitching together three stage victories in the maglia rosa, each more dazzling than the last. Two days from Rome, he looked on the cusp of overall victory, but then suddenly, cruelly, the previous logic of the Giro collapsed upon itself.

On the lower slopes of the Finestre, even before the tarmac gave way to gravel, Yates’ strength abandoned him. He was irretrievably distanced from the front group even before Froome began a race-winning attack of almost absurd ambition. While men like Tom Dumoulin and Thibaut Pinot would at least spend the afternoon chasing Froome to Bardonecchia, Yates suddenly found himself in the position of simply trying to make it to the finish, shepherded by teammates Jack Haig, Roman Kreuziger and Mikel Nieve. 

On crossing the line, Yates’ previously resplendent pink jersey was dulled by the dust of the Finestre. He was guided through a scrum of television cameras and into a tent by the finish line, where he removed the maglia rosa for the final time. “All you can hear in there is guys coughing their lungs out,” said one team official on emerging from the tent, with the hushed tones of a mourner in a funeral parlour.

I was among a small group of reporters keeping vigil outside. Some drifted away to attend Froome’s press conference, but a couple of us stayed out of a sense of duty to the narrative we had just witnessed. The stage is recalled by posterity as Froome’s day of grace – “He pulled a Landis,” as an incredulous George Bennett quipped – but, at least for some of us, the most compelling story was Yates’s collapse.

It was a tale as old as tales themselves. Whoever came up with Daedalus and Icarus would have loved the mountain-packed third week of the Giro, where a rider who flies too close to the sun always runs the risk of finding the wax on his wings has melted at exactly the wrong time. Yates attacked repeatedly in the first two weeks, fearing the stage 16 time trial, but his onslaught left him depleted for the grand finale, and he dropped from the heavens like a stone.

When Yates emerged fifteen minutes later, his eyes were red, maybe from fatigue as much as from tears. The image told us everything we needed to know about Yates’ state of mind, but the inimitable Gregor Brown – now of FloBikes – and I were still compelled to ask him to put words on his day. Yates was always a reluctant interviewee, and he would have been within his rights to move right through us like a ghost, but instead he lingered long enough to answer the most basic yet revealing question – what happened out there?

“I was just really tired and extremely exhausted,” Yates told us. “That's bike racing unfortunately. That's it. I tried to manage it, but then it was blowing out really quickly, and I had nothing to give. I'm just really, really exhausted and that's how it is.”

What had looked like a Giro victory for the ages that morning would now go down in history as an unfinished symphony. The terrible beauty of cycling.

Although Yates won the Vuelta a España that autumn, the hurt of that Giro collapse never went away. Like a man jilted at the altar, he would spend the next four years desperately trying to revive his relationship with the Giro, but it seemed like the more fervently he pursued his lost love, the more cruelly it repelled him.

In 2019, Yates arrived at the Giro in sparkling form – “I’d be shitting myself,” he said when asked what he thought his rivals felt about him – but he fell well short once the race got under way. In 2020, he set out from Palermo as the logical favourite after annexing Tirreno-Adriatico beforehand, but he was forced out by COVID-19 in the opening week.

In 2021, Yates never quite fired on all cylinders, though he briefly put Egan Bernal on the ropes with a combination of attacks in the final week, reaching Milan in third overall. A year later, he sparked familiar early hopes with a time trial win in Budapest but then collapsed inexplicably on the Blockhaus at the end of the opening week.

That setback was enough to persuade Yates to go no contact and think about other races. The plan worked well enough in 2023, when he placed fourth overall at the Tour de France, and less so in a more subdued 2024 campaign. His switch from Jayco-Alula to Visma | Lease a Bike this past winter, however, allowed him a chance to shoot his shot in May once more with feeling.

Cycling, like life, doesn’t tend to present too many bona fide chances for a complete do-over. Sure, there’s a Giro every year, but every Giro is different. Yesterday’s truth is not necessarily today’s, and a bike race today is certainly not the same as a bike race from seven years ago. 

Yates has remained a fine and consistent rider over the years, but it was hard to shake off the sense that he was 2018’s man. He hadn’t been diminished by the passing of time, but simply overtaken by a younger generation of riders reaching levels nobody dared imagine back then when Froome’s long-range attack was dubbed by the race speaker as a “break from another era.” These days, that’s simply a break from last week.

And yet, and yet. Yates’ move to Visma | Lease a Bike offered a hard reset after a decade at GreenEdge, and the absence of grandees like Tadej Pogacar, Remco Evenepoel and his new teammate Jonas Vingegaard made the Giro a more biddable kind of challenge. 

Above all, there was the route. When Yates watched the Giro presentation in January, one detail stood out above all others. The Colle delle Finestre was back on the course, and on the final weekend to boot. Can't repeat the past? Why, of course you can…

In cycling, as in life, fighting the previous war is an occupational hazard. In the event of a previous failure, it’s only natural to overcorrect when the opportunity comes again. Yates’ strategy for the 2025 Giro – lay low through the opening two weeks, stake everything on the grand finale – was the inverse of his 2018 tack of attacking early and often.

It was an approach drawn both from memories of the past and the realities of the present. 2018 taught Yates that the entire complexion of the Giro could change on the final mountain, while the early season told him that he couldn’t hope to match the explosive efforts of men like Juan Ayuso, Isaac del Toro and Richard Carapaz on the shorter, punchier climbs that peppered the race.

The Yates of yesteryear would have thrived on a finale like Tagliacozzo on stage 9, where Ayuso ripped clear to win in the final kilometre. At 32, and now driven by a diesel engine, Yates was content to leave the younger men to it and follow home in 11th place.

Indeed, Yates scored only three top-five finishes across the entire Giro. He took fifth on the gravel day to Siena on stage 9, fourth at Bormio on stage 17 and then third on the penultimate leg to Sestriere. His entire race turned out to be an exercise in restraint, with more or less everything staked on the final week and, in the end, the final real climb.

“Some of the other stages were more tactical and they had a more explosive finale,” Yates would explain in Rome. “I was losing time, but I felt I had more to give on a longer, more sustained effort. I think also just with the way the race was organised, it was always going to be decided in this last week.”

Yates tried on the road to Bormio, but he couldn’t make the difference. At Champoluc, he conceded more ground to the sharper Del Toro and Carapaz, slipping to 1:21 off pink with one mountain stage remaining. Whether it was by destiny or by design, it all came down to the mountain that had defined his relationship with the Giro, the Colle delle Finestre.

When Carapaz launched his onslaught at the bottom of the climb, Del Toro immediately followed, while Yates refused to get drawn into their running conflict. He stuck to his tempo and steadily worked his way back up to the warring pair. He wasn’t to know then that they were hellbent on mutually assured destruction, but Yates took his chance by dancing clear with 14km of the ascent still to come.

It was strikingly close to the point where Yates was distanced by the front group seven years ago, even if he shrugged off the question when the coincidence was put to him in the post-stage press conference in Sestriere. The Colle delle Finestre may have been a palimpsest, but Yates was more concerned about writing a new story than reading back over the old one.

In 2018, Yates experienced the loneliness of losing the jersey here, but he had three teammates for company too. Their presence helped him to the finish, but it also reminded him of what he had just lost. This time out, he wanted a different kind of solitude.

“I had an idea on the climb just to get away,” he said. “I really wanted to be alone; I wanted to focus on my own effort. I knew I had strong legs, so if I was on my own, I could concentrate on my own performance.”

Yates’ lead quickly grew to 30 seconds and then yawned outwards as he navigated the gravel-strewn upper sector of the climb with considerable élan. By the summit, with Del Toro and Carapaz festering in mutual distrust, he was already the virtual race leader.

Being alone was only half the story, mind. Over the other side of the Finestre, Yates would link up with teammate Wout van Aert, who had dropped back from the day’s early break to provide a Giro-assuring assist in the valley road to Sestriere. For Van Aert, still chasing his former self, there was redemption to be found in this Giro too. By the time he swung off halfway up the climb to Sestriere, Yates was all but guaranteed to take the Giro. 

At the summit, like at Bardonecchia all those years ago, there were again tears for Yates, just of a different kind. In the best bike races, the result is only ever a part of the story. This Giro was all about the journey, about circling back to the same dusty stretch of road, and about everything that happened in between.