The Giau is the hardest of the Dolomite passes and the least forgiving. The tower of Ra Gusela stands over the final kilometres, which is why the summit is one of the most photographed places in the range — and why almost every photograph of the climb looks the same until you are actually on it.
Ten kilometres, 923 metres, and almost no variation at all. What makes it hard is not a wall but the absence of one: every single kilometre falls between 8.6 and 10.0 per cent. There is no steep section to brace for and no shallow section to recover in. The gradient simply does not change for fifty minutes.
That makes it the purest steady-state test in this collection. On a climb with variation a rider can hide a mismatched bicycle in the transitions. On the Giau there are no transitions — one position, one cadence, one output, held until the top.
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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