GIRO D'ITALIA
British rider was seen on the front throughout Geraint Thomas’s push for pink, and experienced the Giro’s unrelenting pain
Ben Swift has raced nine Grand Tours, so is no novice to the difficulty of 21-day racing. However, this year’s Giro d’Italia has been one of the toughest the Yorkshireman has ever raced.
Asked if it’s the hardest, the Ineos rider said: “In terms of weather conditions, yes. It has been a bit of a strange race – we were waiting for it to kick off. It was a bit of a slow burn. The final week was hard.”
Over the first fortnight of the race, days with rain were much more common than days without. Flooding was such in the north of Italy that the Emilia Romagna F1 GP was cancelled. And in all this, a bike race carried on.
“It’s been pretty wet, but I’m from the UK so it’s not so bad,” Swift said. “The weather conditions affect people quite differently, and fortunately I’ve done quite well in it. It’s all about the mood and the atmosphere, and it’s quite depressing before you go out. It’s the same for everyone, and you’ve just got to get on with it.
“You never know what to expect with the weather. I was looking for the difference to last year, and it was 30- degree average, but this year it has been 10 degrees, you don’t know what you’re going to get.”
The weather made the race incredibly difficult in a number of different ways. By stage 19, 51 riders had dropped out of the Giro, leaving 125 in the race, the fewest since 2003, when 96 men finished.
With Covid and other illnesses ripping through the peloton, the wet weather made immune systems even weaker, making the riders even more susceptible to viral infection. One of Swift’s teammates, Filippo Ganna, was forced to leave in the opening week with Covid.
The other big problem the weather caused was wet roads, which meant crashes. One crash could have been pivotal in Ineos Grenadiers’s race, with Tao Geoghegan Hart crashing out on stage 11 with a fractured hip, and Pavel Sivakov succumbing to injuries from the same crash later in the race.
“It’s hard [losing team-mates] but it’s professional sport at the end of the day,” Swift said. “We’re all working hard. I saw Tao there, and once I knew he wasn’t getting up, you’ve just got to leave him. It��
