By anyone's measure, this year's Giro d'Italia has been an incredibly attritional race.
As of the final rest day of this year's 3,489-kilometre slog around a sodden Italy, 44 of the 176 starters had withdrawn from the race.
Freezing temperatures, relentless rain and an untimely COVID-19 outbreak have all contributed to a miserable experience for the riders at the first Grand Tour of the season.
"I have to get the Giro to Rome," race director Mauro Vegni told Dutch website sporza.
He said there would be an investigation as to what organisers could have done differently over the first two weeks of a rain-affected race, saying it was the weather that worried him more than COVID-19.
But compared to how riders had it in the "heroic" era of cycling, the riders have it easy now.
When 90 per cent of the riders pulled out
All of cycling's Grand Tours are tough: three weeks of toil across huge distances and varying terrains and weather conditions.
In the early days of single-geared bikes and horrible roads, the races were even tougher.
It took 26 editions of the Tour de France before more than half the riders that set out reached the finish, and 17 editions of the Giro.
But the 1914 edition of the Giro d'Italia took it to a whole new level: Of the 81 riders who started the race in Milan, just eight made it back.
It was a horrendous ordeal in any case — the riders travelled 3,162km in just eight stages, with five gargantuan individual stages in excess of 400km — but foul weather comparable to this year's edition and primitive roads and equipment made it a whole lot worse.
Angelo Gremo won the first, 420km-long stage from Milan to Cueno via the 2,000-metre pass of Sestrière in a shade over 17 hours.
Just 36 other riders were able to finish as rain and sleet made riding almost impossible — and nails strewn across the road in a deliberate act of sabotage made things even worse.
On the sixth stage of the race, another blizzard hit the race, where previous stage winner and race leader Giuseppe Azzini disappeared.
A search party found him a day later, sheltering in a barn.
Race director Armando Cougnet is reported to have said: "As long as one rider finishes the race, that's enough for me."
The most comparably abysmal Tour de France was the 1919 edition — the first after the Great War — and the first where the leader of the race was distinguished by a yellow jersey. Only 10 of the 69 starters finished.
What has made this year's Giro d'Italia so hard?
The weather has been so appalling in Italy during this year's race that the 13th stage was curtailed from 199km to just 75km due to fears for rider safety on the narrow Alpine descents.
There was an argument that the same should have happened on stage 10.
"This year's Giro has just been mayhem," said Adam Hansen, the president of the Professional Cyclists Association, in an interview with Eurosport.
"Stage 10 was a disaster, in my opinion.
"We had 20 guys go within a 24-hour period due to sickness."
Hansen said the riders had tried to shorten stage 10 as well, but were overruled by race organisers.
Is this unusual?
In the modern era? Absolutely.
Not since 1995 have so many riders pulled out of a Giro d'Italia at this stage of the race.
During the 1990s though, there were far more withdrawals — although that was down to the strict enforcement of time-cut rules in the mountain stages.
Over the last 20 years, the dropout rate at the Giro d'Italia has tended to sit at anything between 20 and 30 per cent.
What's made this Giro so dramatic has been the weather.
"At the end of the day, it's us, the riders, who go out there and put our bodies on the line, race down dodgy descents in the cold and wet, and get sick," said Welsh rider and former race leader Geraint Thomas.
"There was a good discussion [about reducing the length of stage 13] and both sides compromised.
"That's what worked well. Both sides were happy at the end of the day."
Who has pulled out?
A quarter of the riders that started have now withdrawn, including overall race favourites Remco Evenepoel, Domenico Pozzovivo, Filippo Ganna and Tao Geoghegan Hart.
That outbreak wiped out more than half of his Soudal QuickStep team, which now has just three riders left.
Geoghegan Hart crashed out of the race on stage 11, breaking his hip as he fell on slippery roads.
Australian stage winner Kaden Groves (stomach problems, stage 12) and compatriot Callum Scotson (COVID-19, stage 10) have also departed, leaving seven Aussies in the race.
Monday is a rest day, after which there are six stages until the race reaches Rome on Sunday, May 28.
