The Gavia is the narrowest of the great Italian passes. For long stretches the road is barely wider than a car, unguarded on the valley side, and cut through unlit rock tunnels. It is remembered above all for 5 June 1988, when the Giro crossed it in a blizzard and the stage stopped resembling a bicycle race.
From Ponte di Legno it climbs 1,319 metres in sixteen kilometres — an average of eight per cent, the steepest average of any climb in this collection. The gradient is not evenly distributed. Kilometre seven touches 11.4 per cent, kilometre fourteen touches ten, and the pitches between them rarely drop below seven. Only the final kilometre to the summit at 2,622 metres offers anything like relief.
At that altitude the air carries roughly a quarter less oxygen than at sea level, and every watt matters more than it did at the bottom. A frame that loses energy into its own flex is expensive here in a way it is not on a shallower road.
Photography
Michael Blann
Rider
Every SWI is laid up for one rider — their weight, their power, the way they actually ride. One uninterrupted carbon shell, formed in a single mould, built for a body rather than a size chart. It is the whole reason the same mountain feels different underneath two frames.
Michael Blann
For the people who live beneath them the great European ranges are simply a way of life. For everyone else they are scenery. For a cyclist they are none of those things — they are an appointment with your own limits, and the reason a road that goes nowhere useful is worth riding at all.
Michael Blann has spent years photographing the climbs that made the sport: the Alps, the Dolomites, the Pyrenees, the Ardennes. The pictures are landscape photography of a very high order, but the book is really about what those places do to the people who ride them — an argument built from light, weather and altitude, with recollections from professional riders threaded through it.
If you have ever ridden one of these roads, or intend to, it is the closest thing to being back on it.
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