Grande Partenza, part 2: the illogical logistics of the Giro caravan

The Bulgarian chapter of the Giro d'Italia 2026 is done and dusted. Monday brings the first rest day for the peloton — but not for the entire caravan. For a significant portion of the hundreds of people who make this race happen, Monday is a full travel day, whether by plane, car or ferry. Or all three at once. Here is a look at the enormous logistical operation that is La Corsa Rosa.

"I'll be happy when I'm in Italy," said Unibet Rose Rockets sports director Marcel Kittel after stage 3, in which his sprinter Dylan Groenewegen finished third. Kittel was the last person we spoke to in Bulgaria — but far from the only one to utter that exact same sentence.

Arthur van Dongen is the man at Visma | Lease a Bike responsible for the entire logistical operation. "I'll be happy when I have everyone in Italy," was his version of the same sentiment. Getting everyone to Bulgaria — where there were, it should be said, reasonably good crowds — and now onwards to Italy is a genuine puzzle.

It all started on Monday and Tuesday the previous week, just getting the whole operation to Bulgaria in the first place. The race's starting area around Nessebar — and the nearby city of Burgas, the Giro's base of operations — is not exactly a European hub, which meant the puzzle had to be solved from the very beginning.

Whereas riders, staff and everyone else involved in a race like Barcelona — where the Tour de France starts this year — can choose from three nearby airports, the same definitely cannot be said for the Black Sea coast of Bulgaria. In mid-May, only the United Kingdom and Poland (and sporadically other airports) offer any regular direct flights to Burgas, which meant many teams diverted through Varna, two hours away by road, or even Sofia — more than four hours away.

Getting all that personnel to hotels on a Black Sea coast still almost entirely devoid of tourists was already a considerable challenge. And that is before you even consider the equipment that has to come with them. The shortest road route from the Low Countries — where many teams' service courses are based — runs through Serbia, which is not a member of the European Union. In the end, convoys had to be driven across multiple days and through heavy traffic via Hungary and Romania instead.

Visma | Lease a Bike, for example, took the logistical burden off their staff members by bringing in logistics partner Van Eijck to transport the team's vehicles to Bulgaria on car transporters. This allowed staff to travel by plane while the cars made the overland journey — the logical solution to a logistically illogical situation.

The caravan was also confronted with significant internal transfers within Bulgaria itself. The stage to Veliko Tarnovo meant several hours of additional travel time, with further windows cleared for the transfers to and from Plovdiv and ultimately Sofia.

On Sunday evening, the journey to Italy begins. RCS has chartered three flights for the occasion. Teams were initially allocated 18 seats each, but that allocation was revised upwards to 21 in the final days. The charters depart after 9 p.m. Bulgarian time and take one hour and forty minutes.

"We do a quick shower, eat quickly, then wait to fly to Italy," Ganna said for this Grande Partenza feature. "We'll be at the hotel around 11 p.m. and then we'll sleep well." The reason the stage did not finish earlier on Sunday, incidentally, was down to the time difference and Bulgarian primetime television — which paid for the right to have the Sofia finish shoot in prime viewing time, around 5 p.m. local on Sunday afternoon.

Those who cannot secure a seat on the charter face a wide variety of travel arrangements. At Visma | Lease a Bike, the decision was taken to split the staff, with a large portion of the support team already in southern Italy by Sunday afternoon. This is how most teams — particularly the better-resourced ones — handle the transfer. They have the luxury of getting two team buses to the destination in good time.

A team like Unibet Rose Rockets — which had no bus on Sunday, as Groupama-FDJ did not for the entire weekend either — headed instead to Greece, from where a ferry will carry the team's equipment and a portion of its staff across to Italy. They will not arrive at their team hotel until late on Monday evening.

At the Sofia finish line on Sunday, we saw with our own eyes what preparing for a journey like this actually looks like. Every team had stacks of boxes and large bike bags piled up outside, with every available pair of hands pressed into service to pack everything up as quickly as possible. A logistical operation for which RCS — who are estimated to have banked around €12 million from Visit Bulgaria — did compensate teams additionally.

That compensation was well-needed, given the frankly complex situation on global commodity markets at the moment. Anyone who has pulled up at a petrol station recently will already be aware of that — let alone a major organisation that has to drive buses, trucks and cars across the whole of Europe, and then fly a large portion of its people there on top of everything else, just to get everyone to the right place.

Logistically, none of this makes sense — and so yes, everyone will truly be relieved when the caravan sets off on Italian soil in Catanzaro on Tuesday. Grande Partenza Romania 2029, anyone?