The Mountains That Made the Giro: Italy's Greatest Race and Its Altitude Obsession

The Giro d'Italia was created in 1909 by La Gazzetta dello Sport, the Italian sports newspaper whose salmon-pink pages gave the race leader's jersey its colour. The first edition covered 2,448 kilometres across eight stages, with stage distances so long — some over 300 kilometres — that riders finished through the night. Luigi Ganna won that first edition. From the beginning, the Giro was a test of endurance rather than speed, and the mountains have always been where the test was sharpest.

The race visits France, Slovenia, and occasionally further-flung corners, but the soul of the Giro is Italian — and specifically alpine and Dolomitic. The high passes of the north, the ruined switchbacks of the pre-war cycling era, the limestone walls of the Dolomiti Bellunesi: these are not incidental to the race's character. They are the race's character.

Fausto Coppi and the Standard Being Set

Fausto Coppi won the Giro five times (1940, 1947, 1949, 1952, 1953) and is perhaps the figure around whom the race's mythology most concentrates. The "Campionissimo" — the Champion of Champions — raced the Giro in an era when rider welfare considerations were minimal and the mountains were used without apology. Coppi was a climber in the purest sense, able to separate himself from any field on the long alpine passes that the organisers routed the race through.

The Cima Coppi — the highest point in each year's Giro route — is named in his honour. It shifts year to year depending on which passes the route traverses, but it is consistently used by the organisers as a landmark stage moment. The climb that earns the Cima Coppi designation is typically the most aggressive altitude of the edition, and attacking on it carries symbolic weight beyond the time gaps at stake.

The Stelvio: The Highest Card the Race Can Play

Passo dello Stelvio sits at 2,757 metres, making it the highest paved pass in the Italian Alps. Approaching from Prato allo Stelvio on the eastern side, the road climbs in 48 switchbacks across a hairpin wall visible from the valley floor — an immediately legible symbol of what lies ahead. The western approach from Bormio is longer and somewhat less theatrical but still demanding at altitude. Both sides have appeared in the Giro.

The Stelvio first entered the race in 1953, and it has reappeared in subsequent decades as one of the organisers' most reliable dramatic instruments. Placing the Stelvio late in a stage — particularly late in a race when riders are depleted — produces the kind of selection that defines a general classification battle. The altitude suppresses power output for those not acclimated, the gradients average around 7–8% depending on the approach, and the pass's historical weight adds pressure that is more than physiological.

The section immediately below the Stelvio summit can receive snow in June. This is not a hypothetical; race cancellations and descents in blizzard conditions have occurred. In some years the organisers must decide whether to permit the descent, reroute, or neutralise a stage entirely. The Stelvio in bad weather is an entirely different undertaking from the Stelvio in sun.

Passo Gavia (2,621m) entered the Giro's permanent memory in 1988. The stage in question crossed the Gavia in early June snowfall with freezing temperatures and roads partially covered. The American rider Andy Hampsten took the race lead by crossing the summit in appalling conditions and descending in survival mode — riders borrowed newspaper sheets from spectators to insulate themselves against the cold on the way down. Hampsten held the lead through to Milan. The stage has been extensively documented and is considered one of the defining moments in the post-war Giro.

The 1988 Gavia stage is instructive for what it says about the race's relationship to the mountains: the organisers did not neutralise the stage. The riders raced. The chaos of the conditions became the stage, and the athlete who handled the chaos best won the Giro. This approach to extreme conditions — more tolerant of danger and discomfort than modern races — was characteristic of the era, and it is why several Giro stages from the 1980s and earlier occupy an almost mythological status in cycling's retelling.

The Mortirolo: Steepness as a Weapon

Where the Stelvio imposes through altitude and distance, the Mortirolo imposes through gradient. The climb from Mazzo di Valtellina covers approximately 12 kilometres at an average gradient around 10.5%, with sustained sections steeper than 14%. These are numbers that strip a field rapidly; the Mortirolo from the Mazzo side does not allow mediocre climbers to survive contact with the leaders for long.

The 1994 stage involving Marco Pantani and Miguel Indurain on the Mortirolo is one of the Giro's most cited moments. Pantani — who had been racing as a young professional — attacked Indurain, then the dominant stage racer in the world, and opened a gap that briefly undermined the Spaniard's general classification control. The result of that Giro was not decided on the Mortirolo, but the stage established Pantani as a climber of the first order.

Pantani won the Giro outright in 1998, and in the same year won the Tour de France — still the last rider to win both in the same season. His climbing style, standing on the pedals at a high cadence and attacking rather than controlling, suited the Giro's tendency toward steeper, shorter climbs rather than the longer, more measured alpine passes of the Tour.

Monte Zoncolan: The Hardest Climb the Race Owns

The Zoncolan from Ovaro — the harder of its two approaches — covers approximately 10 kilometres at an average gradient approaching 12%, with sections reportedly reaching 22% on the lower slopes. There are few climbs of equivalent sustained difficulty anywhere in professional road cycling. It first appeared in the Giro in the early 2000s and has since become a recurring feature that the peloton approaches with a specific kind of dread.

The Zoncolan does not suit all climbers equally. The lower slopes are so steep that technique and torque matter as much as pure power-to-weight ratio; riders who generate high force at low cadence handle it differently from those who depend on spinning. The climb's brevity relative to the Stelvio or Gavia means the race is decided in a narrow time window, and attacks that succeed tend to come in the steepest sections rather than the final kilometres.

The Dolomites and the Race's Aesthetic

The Giro's closing week typically moves into the Dolomites — the limestone-pinnacle mountain range of Trentino and South Tyrol that provides the visual register most associated with the race's photography. Passo Pordoi, Passo Fedaia, Passo di Giau, Tre Cime di Lavaredo: these are not merely stage finishes but backdrops that define how the race looks in the mind of anyone who has watched it.

The Dolomites' rock character — pale, deeply eroded limestone towers rising abruptly from forested slopes — is unlike the French or Swiss Alps. The passes between these towers tend to be shorter but steeper; the Tre Cime di Lavaredo finish, when used, delivers riders to a cirque below the three iconic towers on unpaved road. The visual impact of riders climbing toward that landscape is part of why the race has the audience it does.

Why the Giro Is the Giro

No other race asks what the Giro asks of its general classification riders. The Tour de France is arguably harder to win — the field is deeper, the pressure more sustained — but it does not carry the Giro's appetite for sheer vertical difficulty. The Stelvio, the Mortirolo, and the Zoncolan in a single week, in rain and possible snow, with the accumulated fatigue of three weeks in Italian legs, is a specific kind of suffering that the race's organisers have made a point of administering.

It is also why visiting the Giro's climbs as a cyclist is not a pilgrimage to a museum. The roads are open year-round for most of the season, the switchbacks are the same width and pitch they were in 1953, and the effort required to ride them is unchanged by the race's history. The Stelvio from Prato allo Stelvio in June, above the tree line and into the cold, is simply a very hard climb with a view — the mythology is a layer you bring with you.