ALGHERO, Italy (VN) — The king of Sardinian cycling, Fabio Aru, is absent, but all the other pieces are in place for a history-making Giro d’Italia island start.
This is only the fourth visit to the island off Italy’s west coast in the Mediterranean Sea, and a special one because it launches the 100th edition of the Italian grand tour.
“I’m so sorry and disappointed for what happened,” said Aru recently. “I was dreaming of the Giro start from my Sardinia and we were preparing the Giro for months.”
Aru, winner of the 2015 Vuelta a España and second in the 2015 Giro, comes from the Sardinia’s southwest. It would have been a rare chance for him to start his home grand tour on the island. A crash in training and resulting knee injury forced him to cancel his plans.
The island hosted the Giro start in 2007. However, organizer RCS Sport mostly stayed on the mainland over the past 100 years due to the logistics of hauling team and race equipment on an overnight ferry. Besides the Giro start in 2007 and this year, the organizer only visited in 1961 — a hard to imagine one-stage stop in a tour celebrating 50 years of Italian unification — and 1991 for three days with stages won by Gianni Bugno and Mario Cipollini.
“It’s just too difficult getting there,” said one team member on the flight this afternoon from Bologna to Alghero, where the race starts Friday.
Cyclists and staff from home teams Bardiani-CSF and Wilier-Selle Italia, and Italian cyclists from Movistar, Orica-Scott, Cannondale-Drapac took the low-cost RyanAir flight from Bologna. Conversations waiting in line to board centered around their journey by planes, trains, and automobiles.
Mechanics and other staff members went over with the team trucks and buses on overnight ferries from ports near Rome, Livorno, and Genoa. The boat trip alone takes seven hours.
Those difficulties, combined with Italy’s economic crisis forced the Giro di Sardegna to squeeze the brakes after the 2011 edition was won by an emerging Peter Sagan. The race’s books record victories by Rik Van Looy, Jacques Anquetil, Giuseppe Saronni, and Eddy Merckx with four.
“We had our camp there in Olbia, it was perfect with the empty roads in the off-season and beautiful countryside,” said Paolo Barbieri, press officer for Liquigas at the time and now with Bardiani. “But, it just became too difficult to get there for us.”
Those same difficulties keep the Tour de France organizer from going to its big island of Corsica. Only once has it done so, for the occasion of the race’s 100th edition.
That same distance, with the Tyrrhenian Sea acting as a giant hurdle, limited the Sardinian cyclists. Aru, only one of six professionals to come from the island, would take flights every weekend as an amateur to race on the mainland.
“It means that you have to be ready to make sacrifices to reach your dreams,” Aru told VeloNews a few years ago. “The sea limits you. If you want it, you have to go further, you have to reach the mainland. That’s not just for cycling, that’s for any career. Being Sardinian and having the desire to be a pro cyclist, means that you have to leave home when you are 18 years old.”
The island pleasures make any trip to Sardinia worth it. Aru spoke of Purceddu, a traditional plate of pork salted well and spit-roasted for hours. One usually washes it down with Cannonau red wine. If that does not convince a visitor, the warm salty air and ocean views will.
The post Giro faces unique challenges for Sardinian start appeared first on VeloNews.com.