- La Vuelta 25, from Turin to Madrid (23 August-14 September), is the 300th Grand Tour in the history of cycling and the 95th to start in Italy (after 93 Giro d’Italia and the 2024 Tour de France), a first for the Spanish race, which completes its tour of the main cycling countries after France, the Netherlands and Belgium.
- Piedmont, host of the start of La Vuelta 25, is also the region of origin of Angelo Conterno, the first of the six Italian overall winners of the event (in 1956), before Felice Gimondi (1968), Giovanni Battaglin (1981), Marco Giovanetti (1990), Vincenzo Nibali (2010) and Fabio Aru (2015).
- Italy’s Giulio Ciccone, winner of the Clasica San Sebastian, gears up for La Vuelta 25 with ambition.
Fausto Coppi, the cycling icon from Piedmont, isn’t part of the closed circle of champions who have won the three Grand Tours (there are seven of them: Jacques Anquetil, Felice Gimondi, Eddy Merckx, Bernard Hinault, Alberto Contador, Vincenzo Nibali and Chris Froome) because he only made one appearance in La Vuelta, in 1959 (withdrawal on stage 15), at the very end of his career, at almost forty years of age and only eight months before he passed away.
However, the organisers had unsuccessfully asked him to take part in the eleventh edition of the event, in 1956, to complete the line-up of kings made up of Frenchman Louison Bobet, the three-time outgoing winner of the Tour de France, who flew down to Biarritz in his private plane, Swiss rider Hugo Koblet, who arrived in San Sebastian in his gleaming Alfa Romeo, and Belgian rider Rik Van Steenbergen, the king of the classics in the post-Second World War decade.However, it was another cyclist from Piedmont who won that year, to everyone’s surprise. At the time, La Vuelta was being contested by national teams and Angelo Conterno, 31, was less of a leader for Italy than Giuseppe Buratti, King of the Mountains the previous year. The star of the squad was the other rider from Turin, Nino Defilippis, a sort of mentor, albeit a younger one, to Conterno who had started cycling late and was considered an old fox in the peloton, nicknamed ‘penna bianca’ (white feather) because of his lock of white hair. He took the lead of the general classification from the second of the seventeen stages and never relinquished it. Trailing in the second half of stage 10 after a team time trial won in Barcelona by the French team, Bobet and Koblet eventually lost interest and pulled out. Van Steenbergen focused on the points classification, while the Spaniards Federico Bahamontes and Jesus Loroño, convinced that they could turn the tables, were unlucky. In the end, Loroño was thirteen seconds short of victory, while Conterno defended his amarillo jersey despite suffering from pneumonia and a fever of forty degrees.
Until the international cycling calendar was modified in 1995, taking part in La Vuelta was not a matter of course for Italian champions, as the event finished in May just before the start of the Giro d’Italia, their national tour. But in 1968, Felice Gimondi set himself the challenge of following in the footsteps of Jacques Anquetil and winning all three Grand Tours, as he had already won the 1965 Tour de France and the 1967 Giro d’Italia at the age of 25. The 23rd edition of La Vuelta has gone down as one of the most exciting of that golden decade in cycling, and one of the closest in sporting terms, with a duel in the final third of the race between Spain’s José Pérez Francès and Gimondi after Dutchman Jan Janssen, German Rudi Altig, Briton Michael Wright and Spaniard Manuel Martín Piñera had successively worn the amarillo jersey.
In contrast, the 1981 edition was a very limited success, with nine teams taking part, including only two leading foreign teams, the French Miko-Mercier and the Italian Inoxpran. As a result, Frenchman Régis Clère led the general classification for the first eight days and Italy’s Giovanni Battaglin for the remaining thirteen. Above all, the Venetian entered the record books as the rider to have won the two Grand Tours closest in time: La Vuelta, which finished on May 10, and the Giro, which began on May 13! Prior to 1995, Eddy Merckx was the only other rider to win the Giro-Vuelta double in the same year (in 1973). Since then, Alberto Contador has also done it, but by winning in Italy in June and in Spain in September (2008).
Marco Giovanetti is not far from Battaglin in the annals of history, having successively finished on the final podium of La Vuelta (winner) and the Giro (third) in 1990, and also taking part in the Tour de France (withdrawal on stage 5). He is the only Italian winner of La Vuelta being a member of a Spanish team, SEUR. They took advantage of the budding rivalry between Banesto and ONCE, which was to make Spanish cycling full of life in the 90s.
Of the 299 Grand Tours contested to date, the Italians have won the most: 85 (compared to 51 for the French and 48 for the Spanish, who follow on the winners’ tally). But what used to be common has become rare. The thread of history was broken almost ten years ago with the two winners of La Vuelta coming from the Mediterranean islands: Sicilian Vincenzo Nibali, the first rider to put on the current red colour of the leader’s jersey [La Roja] in Madrid in 2010 and the last Italian winner of a Grand Tour (Giro d’Italia in 2016), and Sardinian Fabio Aru, who dethroned Dutchman Tom Dumoulin in the Sierra de Guadarrama on the eve of the grand finale in 2015.
A candidate to take over at the start of La Vuelta in Piedmont? Giulio Ciccone recently won the Clasica San Sebastian. Spain inspires him!
