they got off their saddles with frozen claws for hands, near-frostbitten feet… and they wept like little boys.
it was 1988. The race was the Giro d’Italia, stage 17. the mountain was The Gavia.
the Giro had been failing in previous years from poor-management and dwindling television viewing figures. the organisers were desperate to reinvigorate the race, and so set about devising a route that would put the riders to the test and draw back the spectators. tnd so they included the Gavia climb – it hadn’t been ridden in a Giro since 1962, when the Luxembourg climber Charly Gaul won the stage.
this was the day when the Gavia came alive, the mountain throwing all it had with all its might at these interlopers, these frail and skinny men on bicycles who dared to have the temerity to believe that they could conquer such a beast.
the stage profile shows the difficulty that faced the riders even just in terms of the amount of climbing that they had to do. yet what a simple map cannot show is the conditions – it was snowing heavily before the riders even began the stage. and as anyone will tell you, if it’s snowing at 200m above sea level, you can be sure it will be snowing at the higher altitudes.
the Gavia. 2618 metres. massively steep and covered in snow.
Andy Hampsten, who came second on the stage and won the overall, the first American to do so, said simply that the riders, before the climb, were ‘scared.’
he attacked at the foot of the Gavia, where the road immediately rears up from the flat at a 16% gradient. he went on to ride up alone, catching an early breakaway, leaving the others trailing out behind him like confetti tossed to the wind. as the riders climbed the temperatures dropped violently – yet due to the effort required to get up the Gavia they discarded most of their warm weather clothing.
by the time the riders reached the top of they mountain they already knew – and had been fearing – what lay ahead….
the descent.
looking at the race footage, you can see the riders on the summit unable to zip up their flimsy, near-useless raincoats. their inadequate gloves were no protection from the cold – they had none of the hi-tech materials we can now rely on. spectators help them zip up, others rub their legs in vain attempts to get some heat into them.
you can imagine them – almost hear them – thinking “I want to stop… I want to stop…” the riders could barely hold their handlebars on the way down.
Hampsten: “…so I looked down at my legs and they were bright red with a sheet of ice on my shins… i thought ‘Man i’m in big trouble…’ i know there’s nothing on the mountain, if i stop, there’s no team car behind me because it’s too snowy – they can’t go, the Giro director was already down in the next village just hoping that the racers would make it through…”
about 15km from the finish line the snow turned to sleet, which meant the temperatures were slightly rising, but not by much. some riders got off their bikes half way down the mountain and climbed into any car they could find, imploring the owners to turn on their heaters to full. others simply crouched by the side of the road desperately trying to keep warm as they waited for help.
Hampsten was caught by the eventual stage winner Eric Breukink with about 8km to go, though the American held on to win the Giro d’Italia overall.
“after I crossed the finish line, i headed straight for our our soigneur, Julie. i was in such a rage trying to get down the mountain in one piece that when our team doctor, Max Testa, came up behind me and tried to put his jacket around me, i didn’t realize who it was and since he was keeping me from Julie and my warm clothes, i started punching him. eventually i got in the team car, which was running it’s heater full blast! when i started to warm up the pain started to come back. Mike then told me i had the jersey and the pain and the euphoria swept over me and i just started crying, laughing and shaking. a whole wave of emotions covering the range of finishing the stage to the realization that i would survive gave me a brief and refreshing emotional meltdown. . . .
“within 10 minutes of the finish, i was up on the podium. the pink jersey felt good. i slipped it on and all my doubts went away.”
speaking after the race, he said:
“today it was not sport… it was something beyond sport.”
The Gavia. Stage 17, the Giro d’Italia, 1988. Legend.
