Be it a stage race or a Classic, echelons are one of the most unpredictable elements to shape the final result of any competition. In the Vuelta a España and Tour de France, the appearance of abanicos or bordures on a flat first-week stage, in particular, can sometimes have devastating effects on a rider’s chances of overall victory.
So why don’t the dreaded echelons never feature in the Giro d’Italia – or at least, feature so incredibly rarely that some sports directors say they’ve never so much as come up in a pre-stage team meeting?
“I’ve never, as far as I recall, had to mention them to the team in the Giro d’Italia,” Stefano Zanini, a sports director since 2007 and himself a top former racer through the 1990s, tells Cyclingnews.
But what about other races in Italy? “Nope. They just don’t happen here.”
The Astana Qazaqstan director is far from being the only director to say the same at this year’s Giro d’Italia. “Echelons simply aren’t part of the picture,” Max Sciandri, another experienced sports director with Movistar, tells Cyclingnews.
“Echelons? In the Giro? No chance,” adds Philippe Mauduit, a Groupama-FDJ sports director who covered his first Giro in 2007.
The dearth of echelons in the Giro d’Italia certainly removes one of the most exciting features on flat stages in the Tour and Vuelta. To name but a few examples, just think of final winner Chris Froome’s narrow miss in the 2013 Tour de France when Alberto Contador and the QuickStep team blew the race apart on stage 13 on the flat roads out of Tours. Or when the boot was on the other foot in the opening stages of the 2009 TOur and Contador missed a split early on and Lance Armstrong came within seconds of taking the yellow jersey.
The latest race content, interviews, features, reviews and expert buying guides, direct to your inbox!
As for the Vuelta, echelons on the roads into Zaragoza and Albacete, not to mention the mass attack by Soudal-QuickStep in the 2019 race en route to Guadalajara which all but poleaxed leader and eventual winner Primož Roglič, have all helped spice up the Spanish Grand Tour.
But for all the narrow, twisting exposed roads in the northern Po plain in Italy or the flat south-eastern ‘heel’ of Puglia, across almost the entire country, (we’ll get to the one exception a little later) the one vital element for echelons is almost always lacking: strong enough winds.
“It’s simple geography,” Sciandri tells Cyclingnews, “so of course the lack of echelons happens in all races in Italy, not just the Giro.
“I remember in Tirreno a few years back when Marc Soler was with us and trying to do GC here, it was a really nervous day and I told him – don’t worry, this isn’t a country with crosswinds.
“Plus those incredibly flat sections like you get in France and Spain, they never really happen. You always get a corner, a town or a little climb, to break things up here in Italy. Or” – he jokes – “a pothole.”
“It’s flat here, but there’s no wind, or not enough,” Zanini says. “The occasions don’t come up, or the bunch doesn’t want to do it.”
“It’s curious because ventaglios [echelons] happen so much elsewhere, but I’ve never even thought of trying to do one. You need the right riders, and the right occasion, and that’s just not come up.
“The Italian topography, above all, is responsible,” Mauduit told Cyclingnews at the start of stage 3. “Sure, there’s flat, but there’s no wind. No wind equals no echelons. I’ve never discussed echelons in any race, even Milano-Torino where it’s flat.
“Look, we’re here in the middle of the paddy fields today in northern Italy, but even if you did get a breeze, you haven’t got so many long, straight, exposed roads either. So even where those kinds of roads do feature, there’s no wind.
“If you look at the natural disasters that occur in Italy, too – they can be because of floods, snow, earthquakes, whatever. But never because of the wind like in France or further north sometimes.
“I’m no geographer, but wherever you go in Italy, too, if there is a flat part of the country, there are almost always mountains nearby that break up the wind and protect the surrounding countryside.”
These grassroots opinions about the lack of wind are seemingly confirmed by the Global Wind Atlas site, which specializes in collecting global information for governments or companies seeking the most beneficial spots for wind farms. Together with the Balkans, Italy is one of the greenest (least windy) areas in Europe, according to the site – unlike all of northern France, Belgium, Holland, Britain and Ireland and much of eastern Spain where the winds blow much more strongly.
The consequence of this is not just that flat stages tend to be far less tense affairs in the Giro, at least until the final hour when there is a colossal increase in speed as the sprinters’ teams wind things up for their leaders.
It also has a knock-on effect on team lineups, which do not tend to bring so many riders for the flat as they do in the Vuelta or Giro. “Just look at UAE,” points out Sciandri, “They just bought [sprinter Juan Sebastian] Molano.
“In the Tour, you always know you need at least two rouleurs, in our case a guy like [now retired] Imanol Erviti so the GC guys can sit in behind him and he can go for ks and ks. Here, you just don’t need that.
“That partly explains why the stages play out so slowly here on the flat days,” Mauduit said. “If you’ve got a rouleur here, it’s to protect your leader a bit, not because you’re worried about the wind.
“So the line-up is different and that also explains in turn why when the Giro does have a stage that spins out of control, it’s much harder for the teams to bring things back to normal as fast as would happen in the Tour.
“They just don’t have as many riders to perform that role and that means when things fall apart in the Giro, they really fall apart. That’s part of its character.”
The other reason why echelons don’t figure so largely in the Giro is perhaps more to do with the make-up of the peloton. Although it’s not so much the case in recent years, historically the Giro used to be a race with more riders from Mediterranean countries like Italy and, to a certain degree, Spain, and a much lower percentage of riders from northern Europe.
“The winds here also only tend to blow in one direction, they don’t change so much as in northern Europe,” Marco Bonarrigo, a sports journalist on Corriere della Sera who has covered numerous Giros and other Grand Tours, tells Cyclingnews.
“But the main thing is that for echelons you also need a lot of Belgian or Dutch riders here who are specialists in those kinds of conditions, and many of them don’t come here because they’ve done the Classics and then they rest up for the Tour de France, skipping the Giro.
“So geography, tactics, team line-ups all make it harder for that kind of thing to happen. You have to find the right conditions, but it’s difficult.”
The one exception in Italy and where you can find those conditions is Sardinia – an island off its western side which is notoriously windy. It’s so exposed that Cabo Carbonara in the south-west corner is ranked as one of the ten windiest places in Europe, according to Weather Aware.
Or as Sciandri puts it more colloquially about Sardinia, “It’s like bloody Lanzarote” – a notoriously wind-blasted island in the Canaries archipelago in Spain.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the 2017 Giro d’Italia, which started in Sardinia is the one recent occasion that Cyclingnews has been able to track down as featuring a crosswind in Italy’s Grand Tour. On stage 3 the race blew apart in a howling gale, but although the stage winner Fernando Gaviria came home in a group of just four riders, all the key favourites finished in the same time in a group just behind.
But wind-wise, Sardinia 2017 is very much the exception to the rule, and with no wind, Giro flat stages can normally play out much more predictably. That’s unless Tadej Pogačar decides to do one of his late attacks, of course, but that’s another story.
