Few riders can claim they have had the better of Primoz Roglič in a Grand Tour, but Richard Carapaz is one of them. Back when he won the 2019 Giro d'Italia, and six years later, his EF Education-Easy Post team management are confident the Ecuadorian racer will be once again in the thick of the GC battle.
Carapaz had two difficult years in the Tour de France on the GC front - in 2023 he abandoned on stage 1 with a crash, and in 2024 in a notable uptick he secured both a stage win and the mountains ranking, but remained more uneven overall. However, at the end of the 2024 Vuelta España, Carapaz's delight at finishing fourth on GC was palpable, and he himself said it marked a return of his desire to re-conquer the Giro.
As he described it in an article on his team website this March, "At that moment, I decided to head back to the Giro d’Italia and try and win the race with EF Education-EasyPost".
To ensure he has the best options possible to do just that, EF Education will be racing the Giro with a well-rounded squad, including five-times participant Jefferson Alexander Cepeda, and Georg Steinhauser, the winner of one of the few mountain stages last year to escape the clutches of Tadej Pogačar - stage 17 to Passo Brocon. Three riders, too, will be making their debut: one-day specialist and former Tour de France stage winner Kasper Asgreen, Irish National Champion Darren Rafferty and British all-rounder James Shaw.
Sports Director Juanma Garate told Cyclingnews the team is hugely confident, too, about what their team leader can do.
"He's in excellent shape, I'd even say the best shape since he joined the team [in 2023]," Garate said about Carapaz in the countdown to the start.
"He's done his homework, and he also knows what it means to win this race. We're in the perfect position right now."
Carapaz has been slowly but steadily building to May, Garate said, with 10th place overall in the Volta a Catalunya then followed by a spell at altitude and the travel to the Giro d'Italia Grande Partenza in Albania. Like Roglič, Carapaz will be following the Italian Grand Tour with a return to the Tour de France, a combination of Grand Tours he has never done before in his career. But first, in any case, comes the Giro, a race in which he has never finished lower than fourth overall.
"He's not had any major problems or issues in the build-up, it's simply been very much one where we've gone de menos a más - from less to more," Garate explained.
"We were already hoping he would be in pretty good shape in March, so there wouldn't be a big jump between there and May. It's true that he had a few challenges with allergies and so on so maybe the results weren't quite as good as we could have expected. But it's been a steady line upwards, and the objective was always to be in top shape here."
As Garate points out, the tough challenges in the first long weekend in Albania - two hilly stages and a short but intense time trial - mean that there is no option for the GC favourites 'riding yourself in'. Rather, he says, you have to be ready to hit the ground running.
Perhaps even more importantly than physical condition, though, Garate confirmed that the fourth place overall in 2024 Vuelta a España marked a new beginning on the GC front for Carapaz in terms of his self-confidence. As he put it, when it comes to the battle for the overall, Carapaz - who has podium finishes in all three Grand Tours as well as his 2019 victory - has regained the GC momentum he had lost since 2022.
"Being able to fight for the podium against riders of the calibre of Roglič and Enric Mas (Movistar) all the way to the final time trial in Madrid was a real landmark for him," Garate said.
"And I was sure that he could come here again to the Giro to fight for the victory, because it was the natural step to take after his Vuelta result of last year. That's how Richard saw it, too, and it meant that what he did last September was the pathway to here in May."
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