- May 14, 2011
- 5,596
- 5,743
- 23,180
Kudos to Devil's Elbow of course:
The standard transitional stage from the penultimate to the final Alpine block, but this time it is a lot less flat than usual…
Map and profile
Start
An overnight transfer halfway from one end of the Valtellina to the other has taken the riders to Morbegno. The town was founded at some point in the Middle
Ages, and became the centre of the western part of the valley from the 13th century onwards. Having been historically been controlled from Lombardy, in 1512 it fell to the Swiss canton of Graubünden together with the rest of the Valtellina. This was the time of the Reformation, and like so many other places at the time the Valtellina was deeply divided between Catholics and Protestants. The ruling Swiss actively favoured the latter, and the Spanish government in Milan used this as a pretext to invade the valley in 1620. Swiss resistance was broken almost immediately, but this proved to be the opening act of a massacre of the Protestant population. In the next two weeks, between 400 and 600 civilians were killed all over the Valtellina, with only the Bormio area appearing to have been spared. The Italian name for this bloodbath, in use until this day, translates to Sacred Slaughter, a rather disgusting phrasing given that it can only be described as a(n admittedly small-scale) genocide by modern standards. Graubünden would regain control officially in 1626 and in practice in 1639, and like Bormio, Morbegno remained Swiss until 1797.
There isn’t really all that much to say about the last 200 years here, so let’s switch our focus to cycling. Morbegno has hosted the Giro on five previous occasions, although the most recent of those arguably doesn’t count: that was the start of stage 19 in the 2020 Giro, when the riders decided it was perfectly okay for them to refuse to ride 250 kilometres in the rain. Considering the events of the past four and a half years, it is fair to say that this was a watershed moment for the sport. However, there will be one person in the peloton with a special interest in having this stage avoid that fate: Davide Piganzoli hails from Morbegno.
(picture by BKLuis at Wikimedia Commons)
Route
This is the shortest road stage other than the final parade, and it may well be as explosive as short stages are always hyped up to be. The first 30 kilometres are flat, with the riders making their way out of the Valtellina and then following the shoreline of Lake Como for a bit, but contrary to their standard approach RCS have elected to throw in some of the climbs in this area. The hardest is the first one, to Parlasco, and corresponds to the first 8.0 kilometres of the profile below. If the break still hasn’t gone by its summit, it may well run out of time, but then again the peloton may also have run out of sprinters by that point…
There is no real descent, instead the road continues to rise more gradually as far as the Colle Balisio. Atop an intermediate rise, there is the sprint in Primaluna. We do only the final 13.0 kilometres of the profile below.
The riders then descend back towards Lake Como, which they reach at it southeastern tip in Lecco. We are not heading up the steep Villa Vergano, the decisive climb of the (pretty bad) Lombardia editions that finished here from 2011 until 2013, but the climbing is by no means over. Instead, we use some of the roads descended in those editions, passing through the intermediate sprint in Galbiate and the summit of Villa Vergano on our way to the KOM at Ravellino.
That is the final KOM, but there is still one more hill right after it, to the bonification sprint in Sirtori.
Finish
This last summit is only 31.9 kilometres from the finish line, but the sprinters’ chances are bolstered by the umpteenth final circuit of this stage. And as we are inside the Po valley by this point, the additional distance is entirely flat. That big turn at 2.9k to go actually has a very wide radius, so no problem there, but less ideal is the fact that the final hectometres curve slightly to the right.
Cesano Maderno is located well inside the Milanese urban area, just 20 kilometres from the city itself. There has been a small town, little more than a village, here since the second half of the Middle Ages, but its history doesn’t really start until the House of Arese gained ownership of the lands here in the early 16th century. The Areses were part of the Milanese nobility and became one of the most powerful families in the city after the Habsburg Empire took over in the middle of that century. They built a Baroque palace in Cesano in the 16th and 17th centuries; the palace still stands today and its gardens are now the main park in the suburban town.
Despite this, the town remained fairly small until industrialization and the arrival of the railway in the second half of the 19th century. However, it mainly boomed as a commuter town, as evidenced by the near tripling of its population when suburbanization took root in the first 25 years after the Second World War. In 1976, it was one of the towns at the centre of the Seveso disaster (named after the most heavily affected town, which borders Cesano Maderno), when an accident in a small chemical plant caused the release of a dioxine cloud. Although nobody was killed, this part of the Milano suburbs suffers from excessive rates of a wide variety of illnesses, diseases and birth defects until the present day. The name of the disaster lives on in the EU’s Seveso Directives, which cover the safety standards applied to the chemical industry. The Giro has been here twice, both times for the start of the final TT into Milano.
(picture by ChoHyeri at Wikimedia Commons)
What to expect?
Could be a full bunch sprint, could be a reduced bunch sprint, could be a breakaway day. This stage actually has potential.
The standard transitional stage from the penultimate to the final Alpine block, but this time it is a lot less flat than usual…
Map and profile
Start
An overnight transfer halfway from one end of the Valtellina to the other has taken the riders to Morbegno. The town was founded at some point in the Middle
Ages, and became the centre of the western part of the valley from the 13th century onwards. Having been historically been controlled from Lombardy, in 1512 it fell to the Swiss canton of Graubünden together with the rest of the Valtellina. This was the time of the Reformation, and like so many other places at the time the Valtellina was deeply divided between Catholics and Protestants. The ruling Swiss actively favoured the latter, and the Spanish government in Milan used this as a pretext to invade the valley in 1620. Swiss resistance was broken almost immediately, but this proved to be the opening act of a massacre of the Protestant population. In the next two weeks, between 400 and 600 civilians were killed all over the Valtellina, with only the Bormio area appearing to have been spared. The Italian name for this bloodbath, in use until this day, translates to Sacred Slaughter, a rather disgusting phrasing given that it can only be described as a(n admittedly small-scale) genocide by modern standards. Graubünden would regain control officially in 1626 and in practice in 1639, and like Bormio, Morbegno remained Swiss until 1797.
There isn’t really all that much to say about the last 200 years here, so let’s switch our focus to cycling. Morbegno has hosted the Giro on five previous occasions, although the most recent of those arguably doesn’t count: that was the start of stage 19 in the 2020 Giro, when the riders decided it was perfectly okay for them to refuse to ride 250 kilometres in the rain. Considering the events of the past four and a half years, it is fair to say that this was a watershed moment for the sport. However, there will be one person in the peloton with a special interest in having this stage avoid that fate: Davide Piganzoli hails from Morbegno.
(picture by BKLuis at Wikimedia Commons)
Route
This is the shortest road stage other than the final parade, and it may well be as explosive as short stages are always hyped up to be. The first 30 kilometres are flat, with the riders making their way out of the Valtellina and then following the shoreline of Lake Como for a bit, but contrary to their standard approach RCS have elected to throw in some of the climbs in this area. The hardest is the first one, to Parlasco, and corresponds to the first 8.0 kilometres of the profile below. If the break still hasn’t gone by its summit, it may well run out of time, but then again the peloton may also have run out of sprinters by that point…
There is no real descent, instead the road continues to rise more gradually as far as the Colle Balisio. Atop an intermediate rise, there is the sprint in Primaluna. We do only the final 13.0 kilometres of the profile below.
The riders then descend back towards Lake Como, which they reach at it southeastern tip in Lecco. We are not heading up the steep Villa Vergano, the decisive climb of the (pretty bad) Lombardia editions that finished here from 2011 until 2013, but the climbing is by no means over. Instead, we use some of the roads descended in those editions, passing through the intermediate sprint in Galbiate and the summit of Villa Vergano on our way to the KOM at Ravellino.
That is the final KOM, but there is still one more hill right after it, to the bonification sprint in Sirtori.
Finish
This last summit is only 31.9 kilometres from the finish line, but the sprinters’ chances are bolstered by the umpteenth final circuit of this stage. And as we are inside the Po valley by this point, the additional distance is entirely flat. That big turn at 2.9k to go actually has a very wide radius, so no problem there, but less ideal is the fact that the final hectometres curve slightly to the right.
Cesano Maderno is located well inside the Milanese urban area, just 20 kilometres from the city itself. There has been a small town, little more than a village, here since the second half of the Middle Ages, but its history doesn’t really start until the House of Arese gained ownership of the lands here in the early 16th century. The Areses were part of the Milanese nobility and became one of the most powerful families in the city after the Habsburg Empire took over in the middle of that century. They built a Baroque palace in Cesano in the 16th and 17th centuries; the palace still stands today and its gardens are now the main park in the suburban town.
Despite this, the town remained fairly small until industrialization and the arrival of the railway in the second half of the 19th century. However, it mainly boomed as a commuter town, as evidenced by the near tripling of its population when suburbanization took root in the first 25 years after the Second World War. In 1976, it was one of the towns at the centre of the Seveso disaster (named after the most heavily affected town, which borders Cesano Maderno), when an accident in a small chemical plant caused the release of a dioxine cloud. Although nobody was killed, this part of the Milano suburbs suffers from excessive rates of a wide variety of illnesses, diseases and birth defects until the present day. The name of the disaster lives on in the EU’s Seveso Directives, which cover the safety standards applied to the chemical industry. The Giro has been here twice, both times for the start of the final TT into Milano.
(picture by ChoHyeri at Wikimedia Commons)
What to expect?
Could be a full bunch sprint, could be a reduced bunch sprint, could be a breakaway day. This stage actually has potential.
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