Who's the boss? The Giro d'Italia's slow search for a new director

In some ways, Sunday’s stage to Milan was a perfect piece of Giro d’Italia commedia dell’arte. We’d seen the broad brushstrokes of this very scenario several times before, and everybody dutifully played their part when the curtain went up.

After the riders, led by maglia rosa Jonas Vingegaard, voiced their concerns about the road conditions on the finishing circuit in Milan, the race jury made an on-the-hoof decision to stop the clock for the general classification with 16km to go.

The obligatory round of polemica inevitably followed, with an array of voices, from former pros to newspaper columnists, quickly weighing in with varying degrees of nuance on the decision to neutralise the stage and on Vingegaard’s role as the peloton’s shop steward. Vingegaard, for his part, was firm in his arguments on rider safety. 

But as the debate petered out, it was hard to shake the feeling that one of the most important stock characters in the whole piece was conspicuously absent from the drama: the Giro director.

Since its beginning in 1909, the Giro has always had a figurehead. For the first four decades, the role was filled by Armando Cougnet. The reins then passed to Vincenzo Torriani, who would epitomise the figure of the patron for the next 42 years. 

Carmine Castellano followed, guiding the Giro through some turbulent waters in the late 1990s and early 2000s, before former La Gazzetta dello Sport journalist Angelo Zomegnan had seven years at the helm.

Following Michele Aquarone’s brief reign, Mauro Vegni, the Giro’s long-term technical director, was promoted to the role in 2014. The powers of the Giro director had been steadily diluted since the days of Torriani, but the role continued to carry both a ceremonial and practical significance.

When Vegni retired last winter after designing the 2026 route, however, RCS Sport did not name a successor. For the first time in its history, the rolling citadel of the Giro has been a town without a mayor. 

The anomaly had made it through the first two weeks of the Giro without drawing too much attention to itself, but in Milan, it was impossible to ignore. Like the Do Lung Bridge scene in Apocalypse Now, it was hard to see who, if anyone, was in charge now that Vegni had departed the scene without being replaced.

When situations like this arose in recent years, Vegni was the obvious point of reference on the ground for the commissaires, teams and riders. And the event director was, of course, also the clear and authoritative media spokesperson for the Giro itself.

After the infamous Morbegno strike on the 2020 Giro, for instance, Vegni was stinging in his criticism of the riders and resolute in his defence of a race that had somehow managed to complete its course through a country that had been especially haunted by the coronavirus pandemic.

One could agree or disagree with his stance – and plenty did – but nobody could debate that Vegni had a mandate to speak on behalf of the Giro itself. Informed by decades of experience and knowledge, his was a voice that mattered.

In the Giro of 2026, no such figure exists. During his time in command, Vegni was listed in the Garibaldi, the Giro roadbook, as “direttore evento,” but nobody has been handed that title for 2026. 

Stefano Allocchio, for years Vegni’s right-hand man, is essentially in charge of the bike race itself as the lead technical director, but he hasn’t been formally promoted into a new role. In this year’s Garibaldi, Allocchio is listed as one of the five members of the Giro’s “cycling management,” but he is not the “direttore evento.”

And so, when a polemica (an admittedly minor one in the grand scheme of things) finally arrived at the Giro, the race itself had no one to speak on its behalf. Pointedly, the debate about the neutralisation on RAI’s Processo alla Tappa show came and went without any contribution from the Giro’s race direction. Urbano Cairo, president and primary owner of the entire RCS Media Group, made a brief appearance, but only to answer a couple of more general, softball questions about the Giro in Milan. 

The RCS Sport stance on the neutralisation was only publicly relayed on Monday morning, in the newspapers owned by the media group. Both La Gazzetta dello Sport and Il Corriere della Sera carried the same line from RCS Sport CEO Paolo Bellino, who said the “safety of the circuit was perfectly guaranteed.”

In Imperia a few days ago, Domestique took the opportunity to ask Bellino about what plans, if any, RCS Sport had to appoint a new Giro director following Vegni’s retirement. We noted that Vegni had designed this year’s route, and we asked who was currently working on the 2027 percorso.

“We’ll announce everything soon,” Bellino told us. “We have a team that’s working on the Giro route just as they did last year, and we’ll also be announcing some organisational changes within the next few weeks, after the Giro Donne.”

We pointed out that, in the history of the Giro, it was unprecedented for the race to take place without a director to serve as a clear figurehead, but Bellino pushed back against its significance.

“Cycling has changed a lot,” he insisted. “The point of reference used to be a very important figure, but now the organisation is much broader and larger, and there are still points of reference there. It’s true that Mauro was obviously a very important person and a real leader within the organisation, but let’s just say that everything is going well for now.

“I don’t think we’ll be appointing a traditional race director because I don’t think that model works anymore. We’ll definitely be changing the organisational structure.”

RCS Sport’s intention to alter the status of the race director tallies with what several seasoned ASO-watchers have told us about the likely succession plan when Christian Prudhomme ends his stint as Tour de France director. 

Their view is that Prudhomme, as happened with long-term Tour speaker Daniel Mangeas, will ultimately be replaced by two or more people. As the cycling business becomes ever more corporate, there seems to be resistance to concentrating too much authority in one person. 

But even before Vegni’s retirement, there have been plenty of figures linked with the role of Giro director, or something like it. Earlier this year, the journalist Beppe Conti claimed that Vincenzo Nibali would soon be confirmed in the position, or at least its new iteration. 

Within the Giro caravan, meanwhile, there have been murmurs that a figure with extensive experience of working in the WorldTour has been sounded out about the revamped role, though it’s not yet clear if they are likely to take it.

“There are a lot of rumours going around, and none of the names that have been mentioned is the right one,” Bellino said. “But it will be someone from the world of cycling, you’ll see when we announce it.”

By the sounds of it, the job description will be very different to that of men like Vegni, Castellano or Torriani. But the Milan neutralisation quietly underlined that a basic tenet of this old business holds true even for the 21st century Giro: a bike race always needs someone who is visibly in charge.