Giro d’Italia: Thomas and Geoghegan Hart lead Ineos and British hopes

O ld Trafford’s Theatre of Dreams may be beckoning Sir Jim Ratcliffe as he closes on acquiring Manchester United, but in Italy the Eternal City is awaiting his Ineos Grenadiers cycling team, who start the 106th Giro d’Italia on Saturday.

Ratcliffe’s charges have not won the Tour de France since 2019 but its Italian counterpart, the Giro, has been a happier hunting ground, with wins by the Londoner Tao Geoghegan Hart in 2020 and the Colombian star Egan Bernal the following year.

The 2023 Giro begins on the Trabocchi coast, in the middle of Italy’s Adriatic seaboard, with an individual time trial and ends on Sunday 28 May in Rome. Over those three weeks, there will be multiple classified climbs, six high mountain stages and two more time trials, with the final “race of truth” falling on the penultimate stage.

Ineos Grenadiers’ identity has morphed in recent seasons and is a million miles from the all-conquering Team Sky that Ratcliffe took over in the spring of 2019. The four-time Tour winner Chris Froome is long gone, Nicolas Portal, the team’s talismanic sports director, died in 2020 and Sir Dave Brailsford, once ever-present on the team bus, is now rarely seen at races.

However, the British-owned team have been very much at the races this spring with, most notably, an assured overall win from Geoghegan Hart in a recent Giro warmup, the Tour of the Alps. The same lineup, augmented by the former World Time Trial champion Filippo Ganna, starts the Giro.

Yet unlike the Team Sky era, leadership duties remain fluid. The eight-rider roster includes two past Grand Tour champions, Geoghegan Hart and the evergreen and durable Geraint Thomas, who finished third in last year’s Tour de France.

Remco Evenepoel, Belgium Soudal Quick