It was what no one wanted to happen, but everyone knew was going to happen. In the days preceding the start of the Giro d’Italia in Albania, cycling, so often a divided sport, had been united, cohesive in its collective thinking: the race hadn’t even started and already everyone just wanted to get to Italian roads as quickly as possible.
Few teams completed a recon of stage one’s hilly finishing circuit due to traffic conditions, with race organisers RCS giving teams alternative training routes; more than half of the 23 competing teams have been stationed in the industrial outskirts of Tirana, Albania’s capital city, where road quality is questionable and frequently littered with potholes; and some teams had even come across stray dogs wandering into their paths while out riding in the preceding days. Publicly, there was no criticism of the host country, but privately, there was discontentment.
It’s not to say that all is bad – the road surface on the roads being used by the race is more than passable, and there’s an acceptance that cycling has to embrace globalisation as it seeks to develop into new markets – but the accumulation of aforementioned events meant that very few members of the peloton had been looking forward to the three stages in Albania, with excitement replaced by fear and apprehension.
Add into that the usual nerves that permeate through the entire bunch in the opening stages of a Grand Tour, especially such an open race like this year’s Giro without a clear favourite and hierarchy, and it was inevitable that the stage would see multiple crashes – “three or four and plenty of people with ripped bib shorts,” said EF Education-EasyPost’s Darren Rafferty – and even see some riders leaving the race before it has reached its home territory.
With 5.3km remaining, on a the fast and twisting descent down from the climb of Surrel – on, it has to be pointed out, clean asphalted roads – Jay Vine (UAE Team Emirates-XRG) Geoffrey Bouchard (Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale) and Mikel Landa (Soudal–Quick-Step) crashed hard, the latter two abandoning after just four hours of racing. Landismo extinguished in an instant. And they weren’t the only notable names to take a tumble: Vine’s teammate and one of the race favourites, Juan Ayuso, crashed midway into the stage, along with Picnic PostNL’s Max Poole.
The peloton on stage one of the 2025 Giro d'Italia in Albania (Photo: Zac Williams/SWpix.com)
“There were a few of us who fell on a roundabout and we just slid out,” Poole told Rouleur afterwards, confirming he landed on his shoulder but thankfully avoiding too much damage; he eventually finished eighth in the sprint won by Lidl-Trek’s Mads Pedersen. “It was stressful out there. First day of a Grand Tour, no one knew the roads, but they knew they were not so great. And the style of the finishing circuit created some of it [the stress] too. It was like a racing circuit, and it was nervous because of that. It wasn’t crazy dangerous, but it was just the style of the race.” Rafferty told a similar account. “It was about as nervous as you’d expect it to be,” he said.
None of the GC riders attacked on the finishing loop, preferring instead to leave it to the rouleurs and the fast men who can climb. But that didn’t mean they all survived intact. Thymen Arensman, Ineos Grenadiers’ co-leader, lost 1:45; Vine remounted after his crash but rolled in more than four minutes adrift; and both Luke Plapp of Jayco-AlUla and Pello Bilbao of Bahrain-Victorious shipped almost six minutes each.
Recreate this same parcours – one long but gradual climb in the middle, followed two ascents of a category three climb in the final 40km – in the second or third week of the race, once the nerves have calmed down and an order has been created, and it would pass without many, if any, casualties. But on the opening weekend of the race, in a foreign land that has never before hosted top-level cycling events, and it was just like they’d all been forecasting and fearing it would be: chaotic and stressful.
Cover image by Tim De Waele/Getty Images
