With a rest day before the Dolomites, this was the General Classification: 1. Jens Heppner
2. Cadel Evans @ 48 seconds
3. Tyler Hamilton @ 1 minute 6 seconds
4. Francesco Casagrande @ 1 minute 7 seconds
5. Dario Frigo @ 1 minute 11 seconds
Francesco Casagrande kept inventing new ways to lose the Giro. In stage fifteen he ran Colombian rider John Freddy García into the barriers while sprinting for King of the Mountains points. He got nothing more for his nasty riding than a ticket home. Now three of the Giro’s top riders were out. Cipollini won a rain-soaked sprint for number 38.
I’m sure Cipollini was not looking forward to the next stage, but he stuck it out. Stage sixteen, il tappone, had four major passes to negotiate: Staulanza, Marmolada, Pordoi (the Cima Coppi) and the Campolongo.
Pérez-Cuapio, who still posed no threat to the Classification riders, made a gutsy move on the Marmolada and managed to stay away over all three of the remaining major passes, riding in alone to Corvara in Badia where the champagne was waiting for him. Back in the peloton the contenders arrived at the base of the Pordoi together. Pietro Caucchioli executed his grand move to take the lead with a well-timed attack and then made contact with a teammate who had been off the front. But, his teammate had been away for too long and had no more gas in the tank; Caucchioli was on his own. Meanwhile, Paolo Savoldelli set the road on fire descending the Pordoi and passed Caucchioli. He came within 53 seconds of Pérez-Cuapio at the end with Frigo finishing two seconds later. Pantani, suffering from bronchitis, abandoned at the feed zone.
As expected, the first day in the Dolomites cost Heppner his lead. And who was the leader now? Ex-mountain biker Cadel Evans, who had been brought to the Giro to help Garzelli. Here was the new General Classification:
1. Cadel Evans
2. Dario Frigo @ 16 seconds
3. Tyler Hamilton @ 18 seconds
4. Aitor González @ 24 seconds
5. Pietro Caucchioli @ 32 seconds
6. Paolo Savoldelli @ 48 seconds
The Financial Police, finding that raiding cyclists’ hotel rooms was an easy way to catch malefactors, went hunting again, conducting ultimately fruitless searches of teams that had raised their suspicions: Mercatone Uno, Mapei, Panaria and Saeco.
No one could have predicted the twists and turns of this Giro. Stage seventeen, the final day in the high mountains, supplied enough surprises for an entire three-week race. The Dolomites weren’t letting the racers leave without enduring a serious caning in the form of the Gardena, Sella, Santa Barbara, Bordala and Folgaria climbs.
Pérez-Cuapio thought he was on a roll and took off again, this time on the Santa Barbara. Pavel Tonkov instantly gained his wheel and the pair soon had a two-minute lead. This was where Pérez-Cuapio discovered that he wasn’t Superman. After three weeks of aggressive racing behind him and about ten kilometers to go before the stage’s end, his legs exploded. Tonkov said “Adios” and motored up the Passo Coe for the stage win in Folgaria while Pérez-Cuapio lost more than ten minutes.
The same Passo Coe that put paid to Pérez-Cuapio’s stage win ambitions cracked the Giro wide open when the maglia rosa group hit it. First Dario Frigo started turning squares. In an instant he went from second place in the Giro and looking like a possible overall winner to a man who could barely turn the pedals. Then, wham! Giro leader Cadel Evans hit the wall. In those last few kilometers he lost seventeen minutes. Evans, climbing on pure determination, crossed the line in a daze and kept riding right past his waiting soigneur.
Savoldelli, sensing that the moment had arrived, jumped away with Hamilton on his wheel. And now Hamilton couldn’t maintain the pace and had to let Il Falco go. Two minutes after Tonkov, Savoldelli crossed the finish line and claimed the Pink Jersey. Hamilton lost almost two minutes to Savoldelli in those final kilometers.
The new overall standings: 1. Paolo Savoldelli
2. Pietro Caucchioli @ 55 seconds
3. Tyler Hamilton @ 1 minute 28 seconds
4. Juan Manuel Gárate @ 1 minute 39 seconds
5. Pavel Tonkov @ 3 minutes 8 seconds
Before the final time trial, the sprinters had another drag race, this time in Brescia. Cipollini made it five for this Giro and 39 for his career.
At 44.3 kilometers and with lots of curves and always slightly uphill, the final time trial required a good all-around bike rider. If Hamilton were to take the Giro lead, he would have to gain about two seconds per kilometer on The Falcon, a tall order given that Savoldelli was looking stronger with every passing day and Hamilton had shown real fatigue in stage seventeen.
Two time trial specialists took the first two places, Aitor Gonzáles and Serguei Gontchar. But Savoldelli, the rider who looked so young the Italians nicknamed him “Babyface”, came in third. Hamilton, usually good against the clock, lost 13 seconds and the Giro was Savoldelli’s.
The final rush into Milan was Cipollini’s, making six stage wins for the year and bringing his total to 40, still one shy of the great Binda.
Savoldelli, who had suffered from back problems for a couple of years, wasn’t on the likely-winner lists. Yet his second place in 1999 with almost no team support should have been a warning that this man was not to be ignored. Savoldelli was a complete rider; his descending skills were legendary, but his climbing and time-trialing were also world-class.
La Gazzetta lamented the inglorious doping-caused departure of six riders along with the race’s other troubles, and forgetting other, more troubled editions, called it the most unfortunate edition in its history.
Final 2002 Giro d’Italia General Classification: 1. Paolo Savoldelli (Index-Alexia) 89 hours 22 minutes 42 seconds
2. Tyler Hamilton (CSC-Tiscali) @ 1 minute 41 seconds
3. Pietro Caucchioli (Alessio) @ 2 minutes 12 seconds
4. Juan Manuel Gárate (Lampre-Daikin) @ 3 minutes 14 seconds
5. Pavel Tonkov (Lampre-Daikin) @ 5 minutes 34 seconds
Climbers’ Competition: 1. Julio Pérez-Cuapio (Ceramiche Panaria-Fiordo): 69 points
2. José Joaquim Castelblanco (Colombia-Selle Italia): 33
3. Pavel Tonkov (Lampre-Daikin): 25
Points Competition: 1. Mario Cipollini (Acqua & Sapone-Cantina Tollo): 184 points
2. Massimo Strazzer (Phonak): 166
3. Aitor González (Kelme-Costa Blanca): 106
Pantani was handed a penalty of 3,000 Swiss francs and an eight-month racing suspension over the insulin syringe found during the 2001 San Remo raid. This was just the sporting penalty; a criminal investigation regarding the syringe continued. Pictures of Pantani in 2002 show the effects of the stress, the cocaine and the performance-enhancing drugs that had been pumped into his veins to keep him racing during the three years since his squalificato. He had aged visibly.
2003. The 86th Giro departed slightly from previous editions by scheduling the first five stages in the southernmost regions of the peninsula. The 17,300 meters of total elevation gained weren’t great by Giro standards, but with five hilltop finishes the climbers had plenty of chances to assert their superiority. Simoni was exonerated from the cocaine doping charges. His explanation that a present of candy from Peru triggered the positive was accepted. He was back to racing and raring to go. His form was excellent, with victories in both the Giro del Trentino and the Giro dell’Appennino.
Garzelli served a suspension after his Probenecid positive and stopped riding for five months. He started racing in April. He must have been doing something right because he took the first stage of the Trentino tune-up and finished second overall to Simoni.
Neither of the two unexpected heroes of the 2002 Giro, Savoldelli and Evans, entered. They had both signed with the German Telekom outfit and were focusing their efforts on getting ready for the Tour de France.
Again, Pantani was going to give the Giro another shot. After serving his eight-month suspension, he had been training diligently in Spain. Everyone wanted a piece of Pantani: sponsors, race promoters and prosecutors. Although he was in adequate physical condition, the real truth was heartbreaking. He was by this time a cocaine-addicted, paranoid, bipolar mental basket-case who was in no state to withstand the stresses of high-level professional racing.
And again, no Spanish teams entered.
Cipollini, showing the effects of his time off the bike, was denied his heart’s desire when young Alessandro Petacchi out-sprinted him in Lecce, earning both his first-ever Giro stage win and 2003’s first Pink Jersey.
If there were questions about Garzelli’s ability to be competitive in a major stage race given his recent return to racing after his suspension, he stopped a lot of tongues when he easily took the stage three uphill sprint ahead of Casagrande and Petacchi. The heavy roads were expected to shell all the sprinters but Petacchi wasn’t giving up his Pink Jersey without a fight and got to spend another night with his maglia rosa while Garzelli moved into second place.
The warm sun of Sicily seemed to slow the riders. The first three hours of stage five were ridden at the easy pace of 29 kilometers per hour, but there is never anything easy about the final hour of a Giro stage, which is normally blitzed at just slightly faster than the speed of sound. Petacchi finished off the southern stages with another stage win, again denying Cipollini one of the two stages he wanted so badly, allowing Petacchi to take his lead back to the mainland.
After five stages the General Classification was thus: 1. Alessandro Petacchi
2. Stefano Garzelli @ 49 seconds
3. Francesco Casagrande @ 59 seconds
4. Franco Pellizotti @ 1 minute 4 seconds
5. Gilberto Simoni @ same time
The transfer to the mainland brought the race to Maddaloni, just north of Naples. From here the race would point almost directly to Northern Italy and the high mountains. After being outsmarted in the sprints by Petacchi, Cipollini was refreshingly frank about his lack of recent success, taking the blame and ruing that he was getting on in years.
So far the climbers hadn’t been able to strut their stuff, but the Terminillo ascent at the end of stage seven should solve that problem. As the peloton started the climb, Garzelli had his teammates up the pace. Almost immediately Frigo, Vuelta winner Aitor González, Pantani and Casagrande were dropped. Further up, Simoni had his remaining gregari lighten the field a bit more. Then it was down to Garzelli and Simoni. Simoni tested Garzelli with several accelerations. This jumping and pausing slowed their pace and allowed Andrea Noè to join them, making the stage finish a three-up sprint. Under these conditions Garzelli was almost unbeatable. Exactly one year after he won at Limone Piemonte, Garzelli had won the year’s first crucial stage and taken the overall lead.
The real contenders were now in the open: 1. Stefano Garzelli
2. Gilberto Simoni @ 31 seconds
3. Andrea Noè @ 44 seconds
4. Marius Sabaliauskas @ 1 minute 28 seconds
5. Franco Pellizotti @ 1 minute 36 seconds
He had to get one eventually, and in Arezzo Cipollini finally won his stage and equaled Alfredo Binda’s 41 Giro stage wins.
NAS continued its program of making sure that the riders kept their dope out of their hotel rooms by searching the rooms of the Formaggi Pinzolo team. They came up empty-handed.
The next morning Cipollini got the unwelcome news that his Domina Vacanze team (as well as Pantani’s Mercatone Uno squad) was not invited to the Tour de France. With the emotion of that rejection fueling his ride, Cipollini made it two stage wins in a row, making him the absolute Giro stage win record holder at 42.
Starting in Montecatini, west of Florence and going northeast over the Apennines into Emilia-Romagna for a finish in Faenza, stage ten’s rugged profile promised a hard day in the saddle.
A break of sixteen riders, mostly good journeymen, took off on the day’s first climb, the Croce di Calenzano while Garzelli’s boys worked to keep them from disappearing too far into the distance. When the break hit the penultimate climb, Monte Casale, Simoni’s teammate Leonardo Bertagnolli escaped. Shortly thereafter the peloton arrived on the Casale and Simoni got out of the saddle and just rode away, quickly gaining 30 seconds. Strangely, this move seemed to generate no interest on Garzelli’s part.
Up ahead, Bertagnolli was waiting for Simoni and on the final climb, Simoni made contact with him and two of the other breakaways, Norwegian road champion Kurt-Asle Arvesen and Paolo Tiralongo. Now it was a smooth-working team of four good riders gutting themselves to stay away from a chase group that expected the maglia rosa to do almost all of the work. The result? Arvesen won the stage and Simoni’s third place in the stage was good for an eight-second time bonus. When Garzelli came in 25 seconds later, he was no longer the Giro’s leader. Simoni’s tactical exploit had made him the Pink Jersey by two seconds.
The new General Classification: 1. Gilberto Simoni
2. Stefano Garzelli @ 2 seconds
3. Andrea Noè @ 56 seconds
4. Franco Pellizotti @ 1 minute 38 seconds
5. Pavel Tonkov @ 1 minute 52 seconds
Cipollini’s Giro went from joyous triumph to painful misery. The next day’s stage took the Giro to the start of the high mountains, a pan-flat run to San Donà di Piave held on a rain-soaked day.
Looking for stage win number 43, Cipollini’s lead-out train was churning giant gears as Isaac Galvez tried to pass up the inside of a hard left hand corner. The wet, oily streets didn’t hold his tires and he slid into Cipollini, taking them both across the street and into the barriers. After an evening’s visit to the hospital, Cipollini withdrew from the Giro. Later Cipollini said this crash effectively ended his career.
Simoni had been complaining that so far the climbs had been inadequate. The steeper the road, the greater his advantage. With the Fuessa, Sella Valcalda and a new-to-the-Giro hilltop finish at Monte Zoncolan, stage twelve would advantage the hell out of him. Marco Pantani mounted a 28 on the rear of his bike while Simoni had prepared a spare machine with a triple crankset to handle the Zoncolan’s final kilometer of 22 percent gradient.
A small group arrived at the Zoncolan climb together. Local rider Marzio Bruseghin had tried his luck with a gutsy earlier escape and still had a small gap. Riding tempo at the front was…Mercatone Uno! Pantani was feeling good and asked his teammates to keep the pace high and breakaways in sight.
It wasn’t until the Zoncolan pitch became a wall that Simoni made his move. When he jumped away the others could only work to limit their losses. Garzelli kept him to within 34 seconds, but Simoni was the rider of the day. Pantani was looking like third place, until Casagrande and Yaroslav Popovych crawled by him on the near vertical hillside. That was still good enough for fifth place, ahead of Pérez-Cuapio.
Simoni now had a 44-second lead on Garzelli and Pantani had pulled himself up to ninth place at 5 minutes 56 seconds.
Stage fourteen was another climber’s fest. After crossing three major passes, the contending riders found themselves together at the foot of Alpe di Pampeago, nine kilometers of 9.6-percent gradient. At about halfway up, Simoni tested the climbing legs of the others and then eased to let things come together. Popovych tried his luck and then it was over when Simoni did a smashing counter-attack and sped by everyone. Garzelli’s response to Simoni’s explosive accelerations had been consistent. He didn’t get rattled and rode as if he knew that he had to do the climbs at his own pace and not try to match a specialist on his own t
urf. This time Simoni’s stage win cost Garzelli 35 seconds. Pantani was not as brilliant as he was in stage twelve, but still finished a credible twelfth, two minutes behind Simoni.
Garzelli was expected to close the gap to Simoni in the stage fifteen 42.5-kilometer individual time trial. The route followed the Adige River south to Bolzano and should have presented a rider with Garzelli’s sterling time trial skills a golden opportunity, but the lack of competition in Garzelli’s legs was beginning to show. Instead of gaining time, he lost more ground to Simoni who seemed to be getting better with every passing day. That left the General Classification thus:
1. Gilberto Simoni
2. Stefano Garzelli @ 1 minute 58 seconds
3. Yaroslav Popovych @ 4 minutes 5 seconds
4. Andrea Noè @ 5 minutes 16 seconds
5. Raimondas Rumsas @ 6 minutes 11 seconds
After all this intense racing there were still the Alpine stages to ride. Arguably the year’s tappone, stage eighteen had four major passes including the Esichie/Fauniera—the 2003 Cima Coppi—and ended with a hilltop finish at Valle Varaita. Following the Esichie, Simoni reduced the field on the Sampeyre with a red-hot blast up the mountain. Over the top of the Sampeyre as snow began to fall, Simoni managed to drop Garzelli, having only Popovych, Frigo and Georg Totschnig for company as they rode in the wheeltracks of the lead cars. Popovych bombed the descent and arrived at the bottom ahead of the trio. At the start of the final climb, with Simoni on his wheel, Frigo caught and dumped Popovych. After doing most of the work he out-sprinted Simoni for the stage win.
The Story of the Giro d'Italia: A Year-by-Year History of the Tour of Italy, Volume 2: 1971-2011 Page 24