The average Grand Tour stage takes five to six hours, more than half a working day of full-throttle racing, back to back to back over three frenzied weeks. But it’s not as straightforward as just getting to the start line and pedalling: the work begins long before that.
Welcome to Paestum, a quiet town peppered with ancient Greek temples on Italy’s Tyrrhenian coast that this year hosts the start of the Giro d’Italia’s stage six. Down a quiet side street are a long curve of team buses, with mechanics busily pumping up tyres and the world’s elite riders rolling up and down, weaving past oblivious passers-by queuing at the merch stand and gaggles of excited schoolchildren. It’s another day at the circus that is the year’s first Grand Tour, and The Independent is part of a small group of media following broadcaster TNT Sports behind the curtain. Although we nearly don’t make it, with an animated back and forth in Italian with the local police required before they reluctantly lift the cordon near the startline.
