'He's a thoroughbred' - Is Giulio Pellizzari the man to end Italy's Giro drought?

Perhaps the most striking thing about Giulio Pellizzari is just how much he seems to enjoy it all. In an era when riders are burdened by ever greater demands and bound by ever tighter restraints, the Italian manages to carry himself with a striking looseness.

It was visible at last year’s Vuelta a España, where he developed the playful ritual of kissing his teammate Jai Hindley’s shoulder for luck each morning, in the manner of Laurent Blanc pecking Fabian Barthez’s bald pate before matches at the 1998 World Cup. 

It was apparent in March when Tirreno-Adriatico visited his hometown of Camerino in the Marche, where Pellizzari somehow found the energy amid his own effort to urge his tifosi to turn up the volume a little further on the final climb.

And it was evident in Pellizzari’s winning run at the Tour of the Alps, where he dealt with the vicissitudes of the bike race itself and the various post-stage duties of the race leader with the same lightness. 

Pellizzari wore his broadest smile of the week when he bounded into the press room after winning the final stage into Bolzano and explained that the Tour of the Alps had been the first stage race victory of his entire cycling life. “I never won one before, not even as an amateur,” he said.

That meant, of course, that the daily routine of the podium ceremony, the gladhanding with dignitaries and the succession of post-stage interviews in the mixed zone and the press room were all new to Pellizzari, but he took the experience in stride.

“For now, I like it,” he said. “Winning is always good, and then being coming in to do a press conference afterwards is a way of lowering the tension. You get to talk with people other than the ones you spend your whole day with. Now, maybe I only like it because I have little experience of all this, and maybe in a month’s time, I’ll hate it… But I like it and I hope to do a lot of it in the future…”

Pellizzari’s ease with the attention was already obvious on the eve of the Tour of the Alps in Innsbruck. When he showed up half an hour early for the pre-race press conference, he figured he might as well kill the time before the main event by amiably shooting the breeze with a pair of Italian journalists until a Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe press officer fussily put a stop to it.

No matter, Pellizzari would devote ample time to the fourth estate for the remainder of the week, and the column inches dedicated to his exploits would also grow as the race progressed. After Pellizzari had sealed the general classification, La Gazzetta dello Sport ran a piece from former national coach Davide Cassani in which he backed him for a podium finish at this year’s Giro d’Italia and predicted he would win a Grand Tour in the years ahead.

Speaking to Domestique in Trento, two-time Giro winner Gilberto Simoni went a little further. He dismissed the idea that a Jonas Vingegaard victory was a foregone conclusion this year, and he suggested that Pellizzari might just be the man to upset his plans.

“Giulio Pellizzari really could be his number one rival, and the Giro d’Italia throws up surprises sometimes…” said Simoni. “I see that Pellizzari is more mature this year, and he has a team that believes in him. And Red Bull have a very strong team, let’s not forget…”

Perhaps more than anything, Simoni has been struck by Pellizzari’s unfazed attitude to the whole business of bike racing. Years ago, in an interview with Daniel Friebe for the much-missed Procycling magazine, Simoni rejected the notion that a pro rider was required to make sacrifices for his trade, insisting that riding a bike for a living was a privilege rather than a pressure. He sees something of that spirit in Pellizzari.

“I like him, he’s always got a nice big smile,” Simoni said. “You can see that he lives the racing itself very intensely, but he also manages to enjoy it, so that means he enjoys suffering – and, well, the Giro d’Italia is suffering.”

The Giro has often been suffering for the home nation in the decade since Vincenzo Nibali’s second and final victory in 2016. Italy’s current record drought pales by comparison to France’s 41 years and passing, at the Tour de France, and Pellizzari doesn’t carry anything like the expectation that is being heaped upon Paul Seixas right now, but his emergence is a timely one all the same.

Nibali remained competitive at the Giro after his 2016 victory, placing on the podium a year later and again in 2019. But by the time he placed a dogged fourth overall at his final Giro in 2022, his performances served as a damning indictment of the lost generation behind him. 

Antonio Tiberi offered a flicker of hope with fifth overall in 2024 and there are high expectations for the future under-23 world champion Lorenzo Finn, but in the here and now, Pellizzari is taking on the mantle as Italy’s Giro standard-bearer.

There have been a variety of contributing factors to Italy’s ten-year drought at the Giro, and the most obvious is simply that the WorldTour era has increased international competition. In 2004, the last year before the introduction of the WorldTour, the Giro gruppo featured 75 Italian riders and 11 of the 19 teams were Italian-registered. In 2026, by contrast, there are just two Italian teams on the start line, and the provisional start list includes 45 home riders.

But the malaise in Italian cycling has extended further down the pyramid. In particular, Italy was slow to adapt to the reforms of cycling structures enacted twenty years ago, with the biggest amateur teams reluctant to register as Continental squads. 

That mindset had slowly begun to shift over the past decade, though it’s perhaps now been superseded by the trend of riders moving immediately from the junior ranks to the pro peloton. Indeed, that was the path Pellizzari himself chose, signing directly for Pro Continental outfit Bardiani at the end of his junior career.

In his first two seasons with Bardiani, Pellizzari raced predominantly at under-23 level, culminating in a breakout second place at the 2023 Tour de l’Avenir behind Isaac del Toro. By then, WorldTour teams were taking notice and 2024 was always going to be Pellizzari’s final year with Bardiani. 

They opted to send him to the Giro d’Italia, where he made a series of cameos in the mountains. His most notable days saw him attack at Monte Pana and Montegrappa, and though he was caught and passed by Tadej Pogacar on each occasion, it was a sign of things to come.

“The Giro gave him an extra gear, but he still has big margins to improve,” Bardiani manager Roberto Reverberi told Bici.pro after Pellizzari’s transfer to Red Bull had been confirmed. “One area where he needs to improve a little is his approach to long climbs. He struggles a bit with the initial change of pace. It takes him a while to get going. He drops back. Then he catches up again and might even pull away from you. But I think this is just a natural part of the process and will improve with time.”

Reverberi’s words proved prescient. By his own admission, Pellizzari still takes his time to ride his way into climbs, but his ability to deliver telling accelerations of his own has been increasingly evident since his move to the WorldTour.

In his first season at Red Bull, Pellizzari placed sixth overall at a Giro where he spent the first two weeks working in the service of Primoz Roglic. By the time the Vuelta came around, he was handed co-leadership alongside Hindley, and he thrived. As well as taking another sixth place on GC, he soloed to stage victory on the Alto de El Morredero, his first pro win.

That victory, and the manner in which it was achieved, earned Pellizzari the benediction of Nibali’s old directeur sportif Giuseppe Martinelli, who labelled him the “future of Italian cycling.”

“Pellizzari is a thoroughbred,” Martinelli told Malpensa24. “He’s the rider who’ll probably save us. He’s the future of cycling because everything he does, he does it just like that, almost for fun, you know what I mean? And the day he really sets his mind to it, when he really shows how strong he is, he’ll lift the spirits of all Italian cycling fans.”

His status within Red Bull has certainly been on the rise in his 18 months at the team. The arrival of Remco Evenepoel and the flourishing of Florian Lipowitz meant that leadership berths were at a premium in Grand Tours, but Roglic has been bumped to the Vuelta to allow Pellizzari a freer run at the Giro, where he lines out alongside the 2022 winner Hindley.

“I learned a lot from my leaders last year,” Pellizzari told us before the Tour of the Alps got under way. “This year, I feel better and the relationship with the team has changed. I feel more at home, so to speak, and I’m glad the team is giving me the chance to show myself. I’ll try to do my best, knowing that the team result comes first.”

He warmed to his task across the week. After placing third at Tirreno-Adriatico in March, Pellizzari was keen to deliver a win at the Tour of the Alps. He took the overall lead after sprinting to win at Val Martello, but he showcased his full range when he attacked on the climb of Cologna di Sopra, dropping rivals Egan Bernal and Thymen Arensman to cap a commanding overall victory.

“It’s really different when you have to perform,” Pellizzari said. “Last year, I was just a helper, and I started races hoping that I would perform. Today, I had no choice; I had to perform. This makes a difference. Now I understand what it means to be a leader. When you have a team working for you, you can’t just say, ‘I don’t have the legs.’ It’s crazy what the team does for me, so you have to go full for them.”

That Tour of the Alps triumph, allied to the withdrawal of men like João Almeida, Richard Carapaz and Mikel Landa, only adds to the expectation being heaped upon Pellizzari for this Giro. But the man they call the Duca di Camerino – a moniker bestowed upon him due to an annual medieval reenactment in his hometown – doesn’t give the impression of being unduly burden by the pressure.

Pellizzari was putting the final touches to his Giro preparation with some time at altitude with Gianni Moscon and a few days at home before flying to Bulgaria for the Grande Partenza. “For me and the team, I hope the Giro will be open until the end,” he said in Bolzano. 

Asked if the rarefied level of Vingegaard was beyond his reach, Pellizzari didn’t flinch. “I don’t know yet, but I hope not. I’m learning, but I know I still have to improve.”