Stage 19: Mortegliano – Sappada, 157.0k
The penultimate day in the Alps is more of a mid-mountain stage. The profile screams breakaway day, but the history says otherwise…
The route
For this stage, the race moves into its final new region for this year, Friuli-Venezia Giulia. The starting town of Mortegliano is rather unassuming, but can be seen from afar thanks to the highest bell tower in Italy.
The town is approximately 30 kilometres from the edge of the Alps, and we take a fairly direct route there, reaching touching distance of the slopes in San Daniele del Friuli, where Jan Tratnik won the stage in 2020. However, the route sticks to the valleys at first, making for terrain that’s rolling at most as far as Tolmezzo, Jonathan Milan’s hometown. Shortly after it, the road heads uphill in earnest for the first time, as the riders take on the uncategorised Rosa dei Venti.
Following a brief descent and the Intergiro sprint in Paularo, it’s time for the steep Passo Duron, the day’s hardest climb. It is one of the more typical climbs in Friuli, but despite its proximity to Zoncolan, this is only the third time the Giro’s been up it.
Its descent ends at the crossroads where the next climb starts. They do a small detour to the bonus sprint in Cercivento first, so only the final 4.9k of the profile below match.
Technically, the descent of Valcalda also backs directly into the final climb to Cima Sappada, but really it’s an endless drag, extended by the detour into the biathlon facilities at Forni Avoltri (adding a kilometre of flat near the Piani di Luzza marker on the profile below), until the 2.4k at 8.6% section near the end.
The summit is 6.2k from the finish line in Sappada. The first 4.2 of those are a false flat downhill, before a penultimate kilometre at 5.4% and a flat finish.
Sappada has only hosted the Giro twice before, but despite that it’s seen one great and one legendary stage. The legendary one was in the famous Giro of 1987, a brawl between Carrera teammates Roberto Visentini and Stephen Roche that had already developed prior to the race. On the morning of the Sappada stage, Visentini was comfortably in the lead, and there was no reason for that to change on a day with only two mid-sized climbs. Roche had other ideas, attacking on the descent of the first climb (Monte Rest). Team management ordered him to sit up, and with neither side backing down, Carrera chose to chase its own rider. While the strongest from the peloton would catch him on the final climb to Cima Sappada (the same as on this stage), Visentini was not among them after having bonked completely: he lost six minutes that day. The fallout was immense, with Visentini, most of Carrera and the Italian fans alike in fury for the next stages. Roche fended off the attacks by all three en route to winning the race; he would, of course, win the Tour and Worlds the same year, the second (after Merckx) and final rider to do so (but if there’s any year where a third may join them…). Visentini ended up abandoning after a crash on the final mountain stage, and was never the same rider again.
The great stage into Sappada was in 2018, where Simon Yates proved his dominance by winning solo and Chris Froome proved that he was riding a disastrous Giro by failing to finish with the first chase group. Or so the world thought at the time. How wrong we all were…
What to expect?
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram