The 2025 Giro d’Italia’s jaunt through the Apeninnes continues today with a second hilly stage, running from the coast at Giulianova to Castelraimondo.
Stage eight sets the tone for the majority of this Giro’s mountain stages, with its toughest climb slap bang in the middle of the day. There’s 3,800m of vertical gain in total - more than stage seven, but more spread out, with several uncategorised rises as well as four categorised climbs.
The 197km stage takes in the Teramo and Piceno mountains, with a category three climb at Croce di Casale to warm up the legs before the much tougher, category one Valico di Santa Maria Maddalena at just after the halfway mark. It’s 13.1km long and averaging 7%, but it gets tougher the further up you go, with more gentle lower slopes averaging 6% before a 7km section averaging 7% and hitting highs of 14%.
It’s followed by a long, technical descent before a succession of more climbing and more descending, including up to a category three climb at Montelago with around 50km to go.
From there the riders head onto a finishing circuit in and around Castelraimondo, a town that will be familiar to viewers of Tirreno-Adriatico, one of the spring warm-up races. The most notable of the later climbs are the short, steep ramp up to Castel Santa Maria (12–13% gradients for 2 km), which hosts today’s Red Bull kilometre, then a 12%, 800m wall at Gagliole.
The riders will have to be wide awake all day as there’s a technical descent down to the 2km to go mark, with a sharp right-hander inside the closing kilometre and a slightly uphill finish. One for the punchier sprinters and Mads Pedersens of this world, or will the breakaway finally get some luck?
Route map and profile
Start time
Stage eight is scheduled to start at 12.15pm local time (11.15am BST) and should conclude by 5.30pm local time (4.30pm BST).
Prediction
The up-and-down nature of the climbing today and the fact that the finale to the stage isn’t particularly tough should mean the GC contenders aren’t tempted to have another crack after yesterday’s summit finish showdown. That opens to the door to the breakaway; we’ve had a couple of doomed escape attempts so far this week but today might be their first real chance.
Does Paul Double, who impressed on stage seven, taking maximum KOM points, have enough in the legs to give it another go? Or will the likes of Josh Tarling and Ben Turner get involved? Could home favourites Lorenzo Fortunato and Christian Scaroni delight the local crowds with a win? Today really could be anyone’s game.
