Italy's Sinner fever overshadows Pellizzari's plight at Giro

You had to go a long way to find mention of the Giro d’Italia in Monday’s edition of La Gazzetta dello Sport. 49 pages, to be exact. The front of the newspaper was dominated by Jannik Sinner’s victory at the Italian Open, the first by a home player in half a century. 

‘Il Gigante,’ read the page one spread, and the tennis coverage was abundant inside. The usual sequence of reports and reaction from Sunday’s Serie A matches followed. News of the Giro, the race founded by La Gazzetta in 1909 with the express aim of selling the pink newspaper, was tucked in towards the back.

Things might have been different had stage 9 of the Giro turned out a little better for the home nation. But just as Sinner was entering the second set of his victory over Casper Ruud in Rome, a stricken Giulio Pellizzari was draped over his handlebars in a tunnel on the top of a mountain in Emilia-Romagna after suffering another setback in his Giro challenge.

As the Giro broke for its second rest day, Pellizzari was already 2:51 down on favourite Jonas Vingegaard. There are still two weeks until Rome, but Italy’s record ten-year drought without a Giro winner already looks set to continue for another twelve months.

It would be an exaggeration, mind, to suggest Pellizzari’s plight is a drama on a national scale. Home expectations have been steadily diminishing in the years since Vincenzo Nibali’s second Giro win in 2016, and they shrank practically to zero after he hung up his wheels in 2022.

The late Adriano De Zan spent almost half a century as RAI television’s commentator for the Giro, and he highlighted the importance of having a recognisable home contender when he paid tribute to Felice Gimondi. “A television commentator has an obligation to offer viewers a safe product... With Gimondi, I could be certain,” he once said. In the 21st century, the same formula could just as readily be applied to Nibali. 

When the 2020 Giro was shifted to October amid the coronavirus pandemic, RAI proved the point by hiring Nibali to star in a commercial in which he rode alongside computer-generated renderings of past champions. The subtext was clear: even in a world turned upside down by the pandemic, Nibali was a guarantee for the Italian public.

No such garanzia exists these days, and it shows everywhere, even in the Giro press room. This is the 15th time I have covered the Giro on site, and the difference between now and 2011 is stark. Back then, La Gazzetta used to send so many reporters to the Giro that they had a separate press room to themselves, as well as three drivers to ferry them wherever they needed to go.

Writers like Marco Pastonesi or Claudio Gregori would have the freedom and the space to go deep with Ilnur Zakarin on his upbring in Tatarstan one day or with Domenico Pozzovivo on his penchant for playing the piano the next. And the rest of us would watch enviously on the final day of the Giro, when the overall winner finished his press conference and was ushered quietly into La Gazzetta’s room for a private audience that would be splashed across the next day’s paper.

These days, the inimitable Ciro Scognamiglio and his colleague Sergio Arcobelli now find themselves doing a job that was once carried out by seven or eight reporters – they do it remarkably well, and then they drive themselves to their hotel every night too.

La Gazzetta is far from the only newspaper travelling lighter on the Giro these days. The chief sports correspondents of the Italian broadsheets have migrated to following Sinner and the tennis scene in May, and some newspapers and agencies – national and local – no longer send anyone at all.

A lot of that is down to ongoing cuts in media the world over, of course, not just in Italy or in cycling. The AI barbarians are already at the gate (or perhaps on LinkedIn), looking to strip any humanity or original thought from journalism.

But the lack of a reliable or at least recognisable Italian star is also playing a part. The overriding narrative of this Giro is that of Vingegaard vying for a full set of Grand Tour victories ahead of his next joust with Tadej Pogacar. There’s plenty in that to keep a specialist site like ours occupied, but it’s a harder sell for Italian mainstream media. 

The eyeballs are not just on football and motor racing these days, but on tennis too. While Vingegaard was soloing to victory at Corno alle Scale on Sunday afternoon, some 4.6 million people in Italy were tuned in elsewhere watching Sinner win on the clay in Rome.

It would be unfair to hang all this at Pellizzari’s door, of course. The Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe rider is an undeniable talent, as his displays this season have underlined, and his travails on Sunday appear to have been triggered by illness rather than a lack of conditioning. He won the Tour of the Alps with considerable aplomb not long before the Giro, of course, and he shone on home roads at Tirreno-Adriatico in March.

Sunday afternoon excepted, when Red Bull enacted something of a press blackout after his difficulties at Corno alle Scale, Pellizzari has also been a most willing and engaging interviewee at stage starts and finishes, smiling as he talks reporters through his Giro in Italian and English.

And Pellizzari, despite his time losses at the Blockhaus and Corno alle Scale, isn’t entirely out of the hunt at this Giro. He currently lies ninth overall, 5:15 behind maglia rosa Afonso Eulálio, but still resolutely within striking distance of a podium spot.

Everything will depend on how he recovers from his illness, with La Gazzetta relaying that he had vomited after suffering stomach cramps during Sunday’s stage. His teammate Gianni Moscon has reportedly also been struck by the same symptoms, and the rest day could not have come at a more opportune time – though Tuesday’s 42km time trial to Massa is hardly a gentle reintroduction to racing.

Red Bull’s reluctance to communicate Pellizzari’s illness publicly, meanwhile, was criticised in an editorial by Enzo Vicennati on Bici.Pro on Monday. Amid the prevailing obsession with high performance, he suggested, Red Bull seemed to forget that cycling is about humanity as much as results, plucky losers as much as unerring winners.

“If it had been known that Giulio was ill, then that time gap at the finish would have seemed heroic and not the sign of his feared surrender,” Vicennati wrote. “Communication in the age of communication is often managed in a peculiar manner.”

And in Italy, more than anywhere these days, they need something to write home about. Still only 22, Pellizzari isn’t (yet) a guarantee like Nibali or Gimondi, but he is a story. This Giro will be a poorer narrative if he fades from the picture altogether. 

Still, not all hope is lost. Around midnight on Sunday, just as I flipped off the lights in my hotel room in Gaggio Montano at the bottom of the final climb, the guest in the next room decided to switch on their television set, and the voice of RAI cycling commentator Francesco Pancani boomed through the paper-thin wall. 

After half an hour or so of being blasted by the highlights of the day’s stage in blaring surround sound, I eventually knocked on the wall to suggest my neighbour turn down the volume a little given the late hour.

“Ma, vaffan’” came the gruff response as he turned it up even louder, in the manner of Bob Dylan going electric in Manchester.

I probably asked for that. The times they are a-changin’ but the Giro clings on to a loyal constituency all the same.