Pordoi is the easiest of the four passes on the Sella Ring and by some distance the most decorated. The Giro d'Italia has crossed it more often than any other pass and has named it Cima Coppi — the highest point of the race — more often than any other climb. The monument to Fausto Coppi stands at the summit, facing back down the road from Arabba.
Nine kilometres, 644 metres, seven per cent. Every kilometre falls between 6.4 and 7.5. It is the shortest climb in this collection and the most even, and the hairpins are wide enough that the gradient never really changes through them.
Which makes it the one you ride fast rather than survive. On the Giau the difference between two bicycles is measured in how much is left at the top; here it is measured in seconds, at a high seated output held for half an hour. That is a much narrower test, and a much less forgiving one.
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.
Find the book
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