Altitude, Colle delle Finestre and an open field: Simon Yates presents his case for Giro d'Italia glory

In a wide open field of general classification contenders, could it be Simon Yates who wins the 2025 Giro d’Italia?

Making his first Grand Tour appearance for Visma-Lease a Bike, in the race he came so heartbreakingly close to winning in 2018, Yates is back at the Italian race for a sixth time.

Though the likes of Primož Roglič (Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe) and Juan Ayuso (UAE Team Emirates-XRG) are deemed the favourites to win the maglia rosa, in the absence of Tadej Pogačar and Jonas Vingegaard the race for pink is expected to be far more competitive than recent editions of the Tour de France, for example.

Profiting from the lack of a dominating rider could be Yates. “I’ll be trying to do the best GC possible, but at the moment I’m not gonna put a name on what that is exactly. Hopefully that’s high-up in the top-10,” said the 32-year-old, who finished third in the 2021 edition and has six Giro stage wins to his name.

“I saw something the other day that there were quite a few previous winners of the Giro here, so it’s a pretty stacked GC in that regard.” It’s true, as well as himself and Roglič, former Giro champions Jai Hindley (Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe), Richard Carapaz (EF Education-EasyPost) and Egan Bernal (Ineos Grenadiers) are also competing.

“But there aren’t any standout guys like Jonas or Pogačar here, so it’s going to be hard racing. With so many guys here with previous experience of winning Grand Tours, it’s going to be interesting."

As ever, Yates expects to put time into some of his rivals in the mountains, but to cede time elsewhere. “In the time trials you can lose or gain a lot there, but it really depends on the parcours so you have to be focused and switched on, especially in this Giro. You can never really win this race early doors, but you can lose it.”

After the race’s start in Albania, the first major test for the peloton will be a mountain-top summit finish on stage seven, and then stage nine's foray onto the gravel roads of Strade Bianche. “It neither scares me or excites me,” Yates said of the dusty white roads. “It’s not my favourite type of parcours, but it should be OK. We have a strong team for that stage to try to protect me.”

Yates has only ridden twice for his new team since joining in the winter, performing steadily if unremarkably at March’s Tirreno-Adriatico and Volta a Catalunya. To date, he’s content with his decision to switch teams after 11 years with the GreenEdge team.

“It’s been good so far. I was there or thereabouts, around the top-10 [in the aforementioned races] but my main goal has always been the Giro for this part of the year," he said. "I feel in good shape and like I said before it’s a big change from what I was used to do with Jayco, but something I needed to make.

“There have been more training camps and I’ve been to altitude. Going to altitude isn’t nothing new, but for a long time I was doing my own altitude camps, but with this team they’re very organised and very dialled in. I hope it’s going to make a small difference.”

Though Yates has happy memories of Grand Tour racing – he recovered from Giro heartache in 2018 to win that year’s Vuelta a España – he has also suffered his fair share of misfortune. He knows that the key to performing well in the forthcoming 21 stages is as much down to Lady Luck as it is his own condition.

“With my records in Grand Tours, I’ve had a lot of bad luck over the years, and even in last year’s Tour de France I got Covid early doors,” he said. “I’m just going to do the best performance I can. I need to make it through without any bad luck.

“The Giro is more out of control, there’s more real racing and anything can happen. The weather can change dramatically which can affect the race and make the difference too. You just have to take everything in your stride and really get on and deal with it.”

Stage 20 of the race, the last day to make a difference, will see the Giro peloton cross over the Colle delle Finestre, the setting of Yates’s toughest moment in his career, when he spectacular lost the lead of pink in 2018, and his compatriot Chris Froome launched a blistering, race-winning attack 80km before the finishing line.

“I’ve never ridden it since,” Yates confirmed. “It’s a long, long way away and we’ll see how we get there, but for sure it will maybe be emotional to be back. It’s a moment in my career that’s ever present, let’s say. Let’s see what happens this time.”