Issue 09: the last hour of the Stelvio
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GRAN FONDO
ISSUE 09 · THE PASS
The last hour of the Stelvio
Two thousand riders left Bormio at six in the morning. By eleven the road had reduced the whole day to one question.
Keep turning the pedals, or stop and be driven down. There is a van, it is warm, and for nine kilometres of the climb it is never more than twenty minutes away.
The Stelvio does not do anything dramatic to a person, which is the problem. It is not steep enough to break you outright. It holds at seven and a half percent for twenty-four kilometres and lets you talk yourself out of it slowly, one numbered switchback at a time, each sign counting down in a way that is either encouraging or cruel depending on the hour.
The feed station at Trafoi is the real summit of the event. It sits with nine kilometres still to climb, it has coffee, and it has a van going back down to the start. Every year roughly one rider in nine gets off the bike there, and almost none of them are the ones struggling most.
The top of the pass at nine in the morning, from the photographer's car.
Nobody quits on a hard section. They quit on an easy one, where there is finally enough air to think.
Dario Benzi, four-time finisher
Benzi has been at the top of that pass in four different decades and has never once seen a rider stop on a steep ramp. His theory is that difficulty is a kind of anaesthetic, and that the dangerous part of any long day is the flat bit in the middle where the body stops shouting and the mind gets the floor.
He also thinks the feed station is in the wrong place, and has said so to the organisers every year since 2011. They have not moved it. The coffee, he concedes, is very good.
ALSO IN ISSUE 09
A workshop visit in Brescia, a defence of the triple chainring, and the results table with every finishing time in it. Issue 10 goes out in October.
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