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Italian biking star Elisa Longo Borghini believes that the brand new place of the rebranded Giro d’Italia Girls within the 2024 calendar will bode properly for a powerful area within the run-up to subsequent summer time’s Olympic Video games.
New organiser RCS Sport formally launched the 2024 version of the race on Friday, –previously referred to as the Giro d’Italia Donne, however now referred to as the Giro d’Italia Women. Beforehand beginning in late June, in 2024 it’s going to have eight phases, from July 7-14.
It will imply it continues to overlap with the attention-grabbing males’s Tour de France. However with the Giro organisation now aligned with the lads’s occasion there are hopes that the extent of professionalism and media publicity surrounding the long-running ladies’s race will now align extra intently with that seen on the Might Grand Tour.
“For me, it’s the right mixture,” Longo Borghini advised Cyclingnews. “It’s the right race for simply earlier than the Olympics and I feel many different riders will most likely be doing the identical – a minimum of I hope so.”
The Giro organiser and dates aren’t the one modifications as whereas the course of the ladies’s race is but to be revealed, with that saved for a stand-alone announcement. It has been disclosed that there can be eight phases, as a substitute of the 9 of 2023 and ten of earlier editions.
“Individuals are at all times debating in regards to the size of those stage races however we confirmed on the Tour de France, that solely with eight phases it is a terrific showcase. So I actually don’t take a look at the eight phases of the Giro as one thing that we’re shedding. However certainly we’re gaining,” mentioned Longo Borghini, focussing on the larger image.
“We are going to acquire loads of media consideration, spectacle and spectators, after which being so near the Olympics it will likely be certainly attended by loads of large stars.”
For the reason that full-scale revival of the Tour de France Femmes in 2022, the normal proximity of the ladies’s Giro d’Italia to the French race has meant that whereas among the large names have taken on the double, equivalent to Annemiek van Vleuten (Movistar) and Longo Borghini (Lidl-Trek), others like Demi Vollering (SD Worx) have chosen to focus purely on the yellow jersey. The Tour de France Femmes, nevertheless, can be later this yr as a result of Olympics, with the ladies’s street race on August 4 and the French ladies’s tour working from August 12, as a substitute of in late July.
As to what Grand Excursions these large stars can be tackling in 2024 Longo Borghini, who has lined up for 12 editions of the Giro d’Italia Girls and twice stood on the general podium, is hoping for a difficult route for her thirteenth participation.
“I would like to see a tough Giro d’Italia as a result of we at all times say the Giro is the toughest race in essentially the most stunning nation,” mentioned the twin Italian street and time trial champion, making her affection for her homeland clear.
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