Ride to redemption

JENNIFER LORENZINI/REUTERS - Simon Yates is held aloft 

by his Visma-Lease a Bike teammates after winning the Giro d’Italia

Victory for British cyclist Simon Yates in Giro d’Italia

Britain’s Yates completes Giro triumph to banish pain of 2018

Carapaz and Del Toro chose to let Yates win the Giro

2 Jun 2025 - The Guardian

Jeremy Whittle

Simon Yates arrived in Rome yesterday, was blessed by Pope Leo XIV and then completed a miraculous overall victory in the 2025 Giro d’Italia, seven years after his race lead had traumatically dissolved with victory in his grasp.

The Lancastrian rider’s remarkable turnaround in Saturday’s final mountain stage, in which Yates leapfrogged the 21-year-old Giro debutant and race leader, Isaac del Toro, and podium rival Richard Carapaz to take a near four-minute overall lead, was one of the most stunning in Grand Tour racing.

This was Yates’s McIlroy moment, a career catharsis that banished the pain and humiliation he had endured on the Colle delle Finestre in 2018. Seven summers after the monstrous climb cracked his career apart, the mountain that had broken him became the setting of his redemption.

As Yates, of the Visma-Lease a bike team, savoured the closing moments of the 2025 Giro, yesterday’s final stage was won by his teammate Olav Kooij, who out-sprinted the Australian Kaden Groves to take their team’s third stage win of the race.

Yates is the third British rider to win the Giro, after Chris Froome in 2018 and Tao Geoghegan Hart in 2020. By coincidence, the successes of all three were founded in the mountains of Piedmont. Yates’s reversal of fortune was thanks to his own aggressive racing and the canny tactics of his team, but also to the bizarre tactical feud between Del Toro, of UAE Team Emirates, and the EF Education-EasyPost leader, Carapaz, that played perfectly into his game plan.

It wasn’t quite X marks the spot, but when Yates rose out of the saddle on the Finestre’s narrow bends, a few turns of the pedal from where Froome had dismembered his race leadership in 2018, he was evidently a man on a mission.

That year a dominant Yates had appeared destined to win the Giro, yet endured one of the worst humiliations in the race’s history, suffering a complete collapse on the gravel hairpins of the Finestre and finishing almost 40 minutes behind the flying Froome.

That humiliation derailed Yates, although he recovered in time to take that year’s Vuelta a España, his first Grand Tour success. Yet there was no real thought of settling scores with the mountain until the route of this year’s Corsa Rosa, climaxing with a return to the Finestre, was announced.

It was, Yates said, “in the back of my mind,” to come back to the climb that left him broken, to “close a chapter” and to show what his real capabilities were. Aided by the hard work of his teammate Wout van Aert, his redemption was writ large as he reversed his overnight deficit into a winning margin of just under four minutes.

In contrast to 2018, Yates rode discreetly throughout this year’s Giro, progressing from 21st place after the opening stage to a holding position in the top three as he entered the Giro’s final week. When he did finally show himself on the Finestre, it was decisive.

In the end, Carapaz and Del Toro, both of whom looked capable of chasing Yates on the steep gravel slopes, found themselves caught between a rock and a hard place. Whether through hubris or tactical misjudgment, they chose to let the British rider win the Giro, rather than join forces to try to stop him.

Yet that view is also something of a disservice to Yates, because without him seizing the initiative with his relentless attacking, they would not have been forced to make that decision at all.

Third overall before the stage to Sestriere, Yates was also risking it all, gambling that his stamina would take him to the finish line and that he would not be caught. “Are they still together?” he asked anxiously on his race radio of Carapaz and Del Toro, as he climbed further ahead, through the Finestre’s final hairpins. And they were, tightly locked in a game of poker that had no winner.

Del Toro will hope that, like Yates, he one day gets another chance to claim the maglia rosa of Giro leadership. Carapaz, meanwhile, the winner of the race in 2019, adds yet another top-three placing to past podium finishes in the Tour de France and Vuelta.

But tactical nuances are only a small part of the story and the deep, primal sobbing that poured out of the usually stoic Yates, as he collapsed into tears beyond the finish line, revealed just how personal this was for him. Even an hour later, as he fulfilled his media duties, his eyes were still brimming. Professional cycling’s most romantic race had the most romantic conclusion. The rest was just la polemica.

***

How they finished Top 10

1 Simon Yates GB 82:31:01 Team Visma Lease-a-bike

2 Isaac del Toro Ita +3:56 UAE Team Emirates XRG

3 Richard Carapaz Col +4.43 EF Education Easypost

4 Derek Gee Can +6.23 Israel- Premier Tech

5 Damiano Caruso Ita +7:32 Bahrain Victorious

6 Giulio Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe Pellizzari Ita +9:28

7 Egan Ineos Bernal Grenadiers Col +12:42

8 Einer Rubio Col +13:05 Movistar Team

9 Brandon McNulty US +13:36 UAE Team Emirates XRG

10 Michael Storer Aus +14:27 Tudor Pro-cycling team

***

‘A win that will go down in cycling’s annals as one of the most improbable heists the sport has witnessed’

Lancastrian completes improbable heist as his distracted rivals lose plot

William Fotheringham

The Mexican standoff is a much-loved cinematic device, but the stalemate beloved of western movie script writers has rarely, if ever, decided one of cycling’s Grand Tours. The 2025 Giro d’Italia was the exception, appositely as the biggest loser was an actual Mexican, Isaac del Toro, with the unassuming Lancastrian Simon Yates the two-wheeled equivalent of the bandit who skips off with the loot, while two other bandits – in this case Richard Carapaz and Del Toro – stare each other down waiting for the other man to blink.

Yates’s second career Grand Tour win, forged on the Colle delle Finestre on Saturday afternoon in a peerless display of courage and cunning, and sealed 24 hours later in Rome, will go down in cycling’s annals as one of the most improbable heists the sport has witnessed.

The endless joy of the Grand Tours – Spain, France, Italy – is that they throw up all kinds of scenarios, but there have been few, if any, where the decisive plot line was a frozen stalemate between the cyclists in first and second places, each waiting for the other to move while a third man skipped away to victory. This was probably the most bizarre act of self-immolation in a Grand Tour since 1989, when

Pedro Delgado wrecked his race on day one by getting lost en route to the start of the prologue time trial.

To understand how this happened, the first key element is Yates himself. Now 32, his career has been marked by two qualities: patience and sang-froid. His ability to wait for the right moment, and to seize that moment, has been the hallmark of his best wins, going back to his earliest triumphs: his 2011 stage win in the Tour de l’Avenir, his 2013 world title in the points race on the velodrome in Minsk, and his Tour of Britain stage win later that year.

When he threw caution to the winds, at the Giro in 2018, it backfired spectacularly at the end of the three weeks, in no less a place than the Colle delle Finestre; when he won the Vuelta a few months later, he had learned the lesson and bided his time. That it has taken so long for him to take a second Grand Tour can be largely summed up in one word: Slovenia. Seven years ago, no one would have predicted the rise and rise of Tadej Pogacar and Primoz Roglic. Yates first looked like a potential winner on the day that Del Toro took the race lead, the gravel-road stage into Siena, and he had ridden the perfect race since then, never losing enough time to rule him out, never putting his cards on the table.

It took more than guts and patience; it needed the other pieces of the tactical jigsaw to slot into place. His team, Visma-Lease-a-Bike, did what they had to do best: sending a satellite rider ahead in the day’s main escape in case of need.

Most days, the pawns had had limited impact; here, the strongest and most versatile, the Belgian Wout van Aert, was in the perfect position to help Yates to mess with Del Toro’s and Carapaz’s minds.

Neither the Mexican nor the Ecuadorian had a teammate in place alongside Van Aert, an egregious blunder, because if either man had had an equipier to hand at the key moment – at the foot of the descent off the Finestre with 36km remaining when Yates was still within reach – it could have tipped the balance.

Unwittingly, Carapaz’s EF Education team slotted in another piece at the foot of the Finestre, where the EF domestiques ensured that the peloton would hit the climb at warp speed, paving the way for Carapaz to attack Del Toro.

In the event, the Ecuadorian was unable to dislodge the Mexican, but their violent acceleration achieved something more insidious: it burned off Del Toro’s teammates, who had defended his lead impeccably for 11 stages.

By the time they rejoined

Del Toro, Yates was long gone. Once Yates had flown the coop at the foot of the Finestre, it was Del Toro’s job, as the race leader, to pursue the Lancastrian, whether or not he had any teammates with him. But he knew that to do so would expose him to a late attack from Carapaz, who had started the day only 43sec behind. And Carapaz was equally aware that if he chased, Del Toro might be the beneficiary.

It needed either to seize the initiative, or for one team manager to issue an ultimatum to his rider. Without that, the upshot was the absorbing but unedifying spectacle of the pair freewheeling as Yates forged ahead with Van Aert – unedifying that is, unless you were a Visma team member, a British cycling fan or a connoisseur of the bizarre twists that bike racing unfailingly produces.

***

GB’s Grand Tour winners

5 Chris Froome
Tour de France 2015, 2016, 2017; Giro 2018; Vuelta 2017

2 Simon Yates
Giro 2025; Vuelta 2018

1  Bradley Wiggins

Tour de France 2012

1 Geraint Thomas
Tour de France 2018

1 Tao Geoghegan Hart
Giro 2020

***

Jeremy Whittle

‘I’m incredibly proud of the whole team’

‘I’m in disbelief I have managed to pull it off ’ 

   - Simon Yates, Giro d’Italia winner

Simon Yates reflected on a “sweet success” he had targeted for much of his life after a coup in Saturday’s final mountain stage ensured he would ride to victory in the Giro d’Italia.

At 32, the Lancastrian had not been tipped to add to his sole Grand Tour victory, the 2018 Tour of Spain, but in the mammoth stage over the Colle Delle Finestre, he confounded those expectations to win the sport’s second most prestigious race, after the Tour de France.

“It’s a huge moment in my career,” Yates said after the Giro’s closing stage in Rome. “I’m incredibly proud of the whole team over the three weeks. It’s a sweet success. I’ve spent a lot of my life targeting this race. There’s been a lot of setbacks. I’m in disbelief that I have finally managed to pull it off.”

Yates, who had been on the verge of winning the 2018 Giro when he endured a collapse in the pivotal mountain stage, is the third British rider, after Chris Froome and Tao Geoghegan Hart, to win the Italian race. The Lancastrian arrived in Rome wearing all-pink kit with matching pink bike, in honour of the Giro’s maglia rosa, and was shepherded safely through the final processional sprint stage to secure final victory.

Ahead of him his Visma-Lease a Bike teammate Olav Kooij took the final stage in a sprint. “We couldn’t wish for a better final weekend,” Kooij said. “Yesterday was really amazing for the team and today I had to give everything that was left in the legs.”

Yates’s Giro-winning attack on the crucial climb of the Finestre, the mountain that proved his undoing in 2018, exploded the overall standings. On social media Geraint Thomas said: “What is going on?!”, as he watched Saturday’s drama between the three key protagonists – Yates, Isaac Del Toro and Richard Carapaz – unfold.

Reminded that Yates had far more experience of Grand Tour racing than the 21-year-old Del Toro, Thomas, winner of the 2018 Tour de France, was scathing. “Do you need experience to realise that third place is pulling away and that, if you stop pedalling, he’s going to take time out of you? My son Macs would know that, and he’s five years old.”

Even Yates seemed overwhelmed by the scale of his achievement on the mountain that had once proven his downfall. “I always had in the back of my mind that maybe I could come here and close the chapter, to try to show myself the way I know I can do.”

He admitted he did not believe such a dream scenario was possible. “I am not really an emotional person, but coming to the finish I couldn’t hold back the tears.”

Del Toro, who had appeared like Yates in 2018 destined to win the race, hid his disappointment. “Yates was the most intelligent,” the Mexican said. “It was good for his team and how they played the tactics.”

But Carapaz, Giro champion in 2019, rounded on the Mexican. “In the end, Del Toro lost the Giro,” the Ecuadorian said. “He didn’t know how to race and in the end the smartest [rider] won.”

Juan Manuel Gárate, Carapaz’s EF Education EasyPost sports director, sought to justify the lack of any serious pursuit of Yates. “There came a moment where you had to decide: ‘If Yates goes, let him go. If Del Toro doesn’t follow, he loses the GC.’ To win, you have to play the game. And with that comes the risk of losing.”