13 Apr 2022

“Whoever is going to compete in the Giro has to defend uphill and have a team that climbs well”

Giro d’Italia U23
From 11 to 18 June

The 2022 Giro d’Italia U23 already has a menu. The great stage race of the category presented this Wednesday in the beautiful Teatro Comunale Ebe Stignani of Imola the route of 2022, a 45th edition that will be contested between 11 and 18 June. There will be seven stages, plus a rest day, which will cross the northern part of the Italian peninsula from east to west and will include visits to six of its regions: Marche, Emilia-Romagna, Veneto, Trentino, Lombardy and Piemonte.

The mountains will once again play a fundamental role in the development of the race, especially in the two big stages. The third stage, with a summit finish, will take on the Mortirolo by a new route, the Passo di Giuspessa (1.855 km), after having previously climbed the Passo del Tonale and Aprica. The stage will end, after a long and steep climb, at Santa Caterina Valfurva. On the penultimate day, a single stage with the finish at Colle di Fauniera, at 2,480 metres.

In between, with no days of fighting against the clock, there will be no shortage of stages with ‘spicy’ routes, such as the second with the finish in Pinzolo or the fifth, the finish in Peveragno. “But it will be the Fauniera climb that will decide the Giro”, reflects director Dario Andriotto.

Rafa Díaz Justo, director of the U23 squad: “The Giro never leaves anyone indifferent. It always has very tough routes, even more so with the level of participation that this race has. There are two particularly hard stages, so demanding and complicated that they lay the foundations for us to talk about a race if not for climbers then at least for cyclists who climb very well. Of course, whoever is going to compete in the Giro has to defend himself uphill and have a team that climbs well, although there are also several stages designed for the volata”.

The participation of the Giro U23 will be composed by 35 teams, 18 Italian and 17 foreign ones among which will be the EOLO-KOMETA Cycling Team of the Contador Foundation. The ExtraGiro organisation, which took over the race in 2017, has received yet another year a multitude of applications to take part in the race, almost 70 requests. In the last years Pavel Sivakov, Aleksandr Vlasov, Andrés Camilo Ardila, Thomas Pidcock and Juan Ayuso, all of them professionals, have won the final general classification.

The stages.

11 June: Gradara – Riccione (163.8 km).

12th June: Rossano Veneto – Pinzolo (168 km).