After a stellar race in 2021, and a wonderful spring classics season, I'm pumped for the Grand Tours to kick off for 2022. We have a choice of broadcasters in Australia, and this year I'm excited to hear Robbie McEwen commentating on GCN+.

This year's Garibaldi (the Giro d'Italia road book) includes the metres climbed for each stage again, giving us an opportunity to get a better sense of the difficulty as well as the distance to be travelled. As I've been collecting this data across multiple tours and years, it makes for an interesting point of comparison.

Consistent with my approach last year, I'm making the data I collect available to download for you to use for your data experiments - I've love to hear what you've done with it!

Below is the first instalment of charts from the road book - as always you can mouse over each of the elements of the charts for more information. If you'd like to compare this year's route to last year you can find the analysis of 2021 here. There will be more to come...

A comparison of distance and climbing

This chart compares the climbing metres of each stage with the distance travelled. The size of the circle is a ratio of vertical over distance to reflect average metres climbed per kilometre (larger circles being 'steeper').

It's all over the place

The chart below compares the climbing metres of each stage with the distance travelled. My initial impression was surprise at how long all the stages are, but like last year, there are four days that are greater than 200km, and the average daily distance is about the same (2022: 164.1km vs 2021: 164.3km). This year there are two 5,000m climbing days (only one in 2021), with the queen stage ascending the Mortirolo. This should be made more interesting as it's on a Tuesday, meaning 'rest day legs' will have a chance to throw a spanner in the works.

It will be interesting to see how many sprinters drop post stage 6, given there's not much for them until stage 11. Will Caleb Ewen hang on to stage 18 to contribute to a reversal of Lotto Soudal's well publicised relegation risk? Will we get to watch climbers sprint in Treviso? LOL.

Comparing to prior Grand Tours

This year's Giro has almost 4,000 metres more climbing than last year's edition.