Old-school racer Vincenzo Nibali gears up for what may be his last Giro d’Italia

The Giro d’Italia begins on Friday and Vincenzo Nibali is not going to win it. We should probably be clear about that at the outset. Nibali has won it twice before, in 2013 and 2016, but that was a younger and hungrier man.

Now he is 37, has not won a race of any real repute in three years and missed a big chunk of training time after catching Covid earlier in the year. When Nibali says his main goals are to ride for his Astana-Qazaqstan teammate Miguel Ángel López and hopefully pick up a couple of stages, he is not bluffing.

And yet one is reminded of something else Nibali said a few years back, when he was on top of the world and the Italian press and public were demanding why he was not winning more. Nibali could have explained in painstaking detail the hundreds of little victories and minuscule alignments that have to go your way before you can even think about winning a bike race, or the unique difficulties of prevailing when the entire peloton has put a target on your back. Instead he simply said: “To be beaten is not the same as failing.”

Perhaps no sport imparts that lesson more beautifully than cycling, a sport of teamwork and selfless sacrifices, of daring attacks and doomed heroism, where the first person over the line is often the most incidental detail of all. As he approaches what may well be his final Grand Tour on home soil, few riders have embodied that maxim quite like Nibali, a man who for all he has won over the years – all three Grand Tours, 15 stages, two Giri di Lombardia, Milan-San Remo – will be remembered above all for the way he made people feel.

This year the Giro will return to Sicily and Nibali’s home town of Messina. For all Italy’s pedigree in the sport, Sicily has never really been