The Giro d’Italia’s underway and someone’s leading it and that someone is Isaac del Toro. Will he still be leading it after they’ve spent 90% of the final week riding uphill? Probably not, but never say never.
- Stages 1-9
- Stages 10-15
- Stages 16-21
The first phase of this Giro is a peculiar thing when viewed as one part of the whole. It will have been either massively consequential or almost entirely irrelevant depending whether or not things have gone badly for any given rider. There’s been enough tough racing that some are out of the reckoning already, but those final stages loom figuratively and literally large given the sheer number of mountains they’ll bring.
While that means plentiful opportunities for early frontrunners to utterly implode, I’m not convinced it also opens opportunities to vault up the leaderboard. Not onto the podium anyway. Looking at the standings, it’s hard to identify too many convincing bolters lurking outside this top 10.
The likes of Thymen Arensman and Derek Gee have Grand Tour top 10 finishes to their names, but they’re not the kinds of riders you envisage tearing the race apart to make dramatic comebacks. Not to be unkind, but if one of them were in, say, eighth place, then you’d probably bet on him finishing eighth. They’re those sorts of riders.
What about Isaac del Toro?
First things first: hats off being called Isaac del Toro and hats off for being Mexican. That’s a great name and an interesting country of origin from a road cycling perspective.
If you haven’t yet tired of all this headwear removal, hats off for hanging with the top riders too. On Stage 9, when pre-race favourite Primoz Roglic suffered more of the crashes and punctures that so often seem to be his lot in life, del Toro took the race lead by heading out on his own across the white gravel roads of Tuscany. (Well, not quite on his own – Wout van Aert cadged a lift and nicked the stage win and a good proportion of the headlines. It was del Toro who did pretty much all the work to deliver that though.)
Here’s a great shot of him on one of the gravel sections.
Just a great, great time to be utilising one’s lungs to their maximal capacity.
That del Toro was in a position to go into the lead in that Stage 9 dust-up was down to having matched everyone on previous tough days, such as when he finished second on the summit finish on Stage 7.
Does that make him a legitimate contender? Well, a couple of years back he did win the Tour de l’Avenir, the under-25s race that has previously brought us the likes of Egan Bernal and Tadej Pogacar. At the same time, he finished behind Juan Ayuso on that summit finish. At 22, Ayuso is only a year older than del Toro, but he already has third and fourth place finishes at the Vuelta a Esapana to his name. He is also – and this is pretty important – del Toro’s teammate and leader.
So while del Toro may or may not have moved ahead of Adam Yates in the Team UAE hierarchy at this race, Ayuso probably still has the edge on a ‘been there, done that and by the way I’m ahead of all the riders who aren’t on our team’ basis.
Del Toro is, in short, a bit of an unknown quantity – not just to us, but to himself and his team as well. Just to put that in clearer context, tomorrow’s 28.6km time trial will be the longest he’s ever raced.
What’s next?
The second week kicks off with a couple more general classification skirmishes: the aforementioned time trial and then a hilly affair on Wednesday (Stage 11).
Stage 13 (Friday) might be an interesting finish, but shouldn’t prove too consequential in the grand scheme of things.
Stage 15 (Sunday) has a couple of big climbs and then quite a long chunk of flat to finish. If they’d plopped this stage in the final week, the main contenders wouldn’t bother, but someone might go buck wild with the next rest day in the offing.
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