Christian Meier’s lead-up to the Giro d’Italia

One word truly describes the Giro d’Italia, epic. Known as the hardest grand tour of them, the Giro never disappoints with long, hard stages, stunning scenery and mad tifosi. The “epicness” continues on fronts that may not be apparent to the fans: long transfers, late nights and logistical conundrums.

After the Ardennes, I had a few days of good recovery before doing a small training block just to try and carry over my fitness while still arriving fresh and ready to tackle a three-week racing load. With a week of nice weather in my home base of Girona, training was easy. I spent my remaining time  relaxing and hanging out with my wife before heading out on the road for close to a month.

This year, the Giro starts in Naples in the south of Italy, which is where the logistical conundrum starts. Usually when a Grand Tour features a team time trial early in the race, teams will arrive four days in advance (or more) to preview and train on the course. The TTT is an important event to practise and recon. This year the team time trial is on the second day of the race. It’s on a small island just off the coast, making training on the course next to impossible. Naples is a huge city, which makes simple training difficult and slightly dangerous as the roads are busy and the drivers in the south of Italy don’t necessarily have the reputation as the safest of drivers. The Orica-GreenEdge team has resorted to doing laps on a somewhat quiet section of road. For these reasons, the team decided to come to the start two days ahead of the start. During those two days,  we completed the UCI blood controls and team presentation.

Our goals for the Giro are pretty simple, stage wins. We are hoping Matt Goss can give us a victory on a sprint stage. We’ll look to Peter Weening for breakaways on the hillier stages. With the epicness of the Giro, we’ll have our work cut out for us.

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