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

The Giro d’Italia starts on Friday and Vincenzo Nibali will not win it. We should probably be clear about that right from the start. Nibali has won it twice before, in 2013 and 2016, but it was a younger and hungrier man.

Now 37, he hasn’t won a race of real repute for three years and missed a large chunk of training time after catching Covid earlier this year. When Nibali says his main goals are to ride for his Astana and Qazaqstan teammate Miguel Ángel López and hopefully win a few stages, he’s not bluffing.

And yet one is reminded of something else Nibali said a few years ago when he was on top of the world and the Italian press and public were asking why he wasn’t winning more. Nibali would have the hundreds of small victories and tiny alignments you must achieve before you can even think about winning a bike race, or the unique difficulties of asserting yourself when the entire peloton has a goal on your back, can explain in meticulous detail. Instead, he simply said, “Being beaten is not the same as failure.”

Perhaps no sport conveys this lesson more beautifully than cycling, a sport of teamwork and selfless sacrifice, daring attacks and damned heroism, where the first person over the line is often the most irrelevant detail of all. As he nears what may be his final Grand Tour on home soil, few riders have embodied that maxim quite like Nibali, a man who, despite all he’s 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 conveyed to people.

This year the Giro returns to Messina, the hometown of Sicily and Nibali. Despite Italy’s sporting origins, Sicily was never really a cycling area. In fact, opportunities were so limited growing up there that Nibali was forced to leave his home country at 14 and move to Tuscany to try and make it as a professional rider. And so those familiar streets and slopes now have a double meaning for him: a reminder not only of the life he created for himself, but of the life he left behind. After winning the Tour of Sicily last October, he collapsed in the arms of his teammates, crying like a child.

That emotion was never far from the surface, on or off the bike.

Vincenzo Nibali celebrates as he crosses the finish line at the end of the second stage of the 2014 Tour de France between York and Sheffield. Photo: Eric Feferberg/AFP/Getty Images

Perhaps this is why crowds, and Italian crowds in particular, are reacting to Nibali in a way that few cycling crowds anywhere do. This is a bruised and bruised sport, one whose heroes are summarily burned and disgraced, where no one is ever quite sure what they are seeing and therefore no one is ever quite sure how to feel. But win or lose, people feel things about Nibali. They want to greet and praise him. They want to sprint up mountains and catch the beads of sweat off his face. You want to believe.

For the Italian public, he represents something else. No Italian has won the race, male or female, since Nibali’s last Giro win in 2016. A sixth consecutive foreign winner would represent the country’s longest drought in history. The dominant language of the peloton is now English. The overwhelming flow of money into the sport comes from outside Europe – Bahrain, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, the United States. Italy hasn’t had its own WorldTour-level team in six years, and despite its rich heritage, it’s hard to resist that sense of decline – a sport it once dominated but now belongs to everyone else.

For his part, Nibali was never a rider of my time. But as younger competitors begin to overtake it, as the sport begins to professionalize and insulate itself, there is an occasional whiff of nostalgia. He has often bemoaned the tyranny of data, the way some people try to reduce this panorama of tactics and intuition to a game of wattage and power curves. For Nibali, the first and best marginal gain has always been racecraft: the instinct not only to suffer and win, but also to honor and entertain.

Perhaps Nibali has won races so many times that he had nothing to win at all. Uphill or downhill, cobblestones or the open road, over six hours or three weeks, Nibali always relied on his ability to read a race, plan its turns and breaks, his “desire to attack, to try without calculating”. , as he once put it. Milan-San Remo may no longer be the classic among sprinters, but Nibali’s victory in 2018, which disappeared over the top of the Poggio and kept his lead to the finish, still stands as one of the most sensational shocks.

The victories have begun to dry up in recent years. Still, you can be assured that Nibali will launch an attack at some point during this year’s Giro, and you can be equally assured that the reception that greets him will be worthy of any over the next three weeks. Perhaps even on the slopes of Etna, the slopes he hurtled down alone as a child but now come alive with the sight of bicycles, a revolution he inspired in large part. Being beaten is not the same as failure.