Giro D'Italia
Colin O'BrienIn a manner perfectly fitting for cycling, the Giro d’Italia was inspired by a mixture of enmity, chance, cunning and risk. Sport had very little to do with it. Not in the pure, Corinthian sense, anyway, because fundamentally, the Giro was born to sell newspapers.
Whereas these days we associate the media with reportage and opinion, reaction to recent events and rumination on things soon to come, the nineteenth-century press tended to take a far more hands-on approach to filling column inches, whether through the serialisation of fiction or the staging of attention-grabbing events, such as the sponsorship of Hattie and Darwin McIlrath on their three-year, cycling circumnavigation of the globe by Chicago’s Inter-Ocean newspaper in the late 1890s.