'Inappropriate' – Giro pushes back against early Tour de France date in 2028

Giro d’Italia organiser RCS Sport has questioned plans to bring the start of the 2028 Tour de France forward by a week to avoid a clash with the Los Angeles Olympics. 

On assigning the 2028 Grand Départ to Reims earlier this week, Tour organiser ASO also announced that the race would start on June 24 in order to avoid too much overlap with the Olympic Games, which begin on July 14.

Speaking to Domestique at the Giro d’Italia, RCS Sport CEO Paolo Bellino complained that ASO had decided on the date of the Tour unilaterally, pointing out that the UCI calendar has not yet been devised for 2028. Bellino also confirmed that RCS is still lobbying the UCI to have the Giro start a week later than its current slot. 

“I find it inappropriate for the Tour to announce its start date without inserting it into an international calendar approved by the UCI,” Bellino told Domestique in Imperia. “Right now, we’re not moving because we’re in the slot that we’ve always been in, and we certainly can’t move to an April start. 

“With the Olympics that year, we need to find an agreement on a comprehensive international calendar and not one that’s only about the Tour de France. Making an announcement like that without having agreed it at international level first is a bit unusual.

“We’ve known for some time that the Olympics are when they are, but we also want to move the Giro back by a week, so in that case, there would be only two weeks between the Giro and the Tour.”

This season, as per recent tradition, there are five full weeks between the end of the Giro on May 31 and the start of the Tour on July 4, though the gap between the races has occasionally fluctuated over the years due to external factors. 

In 2021, for instance, the Tour started a week earlier due to the Tokyo Olympics, leaving just four weeks between the events. In 2018, there were six weeks between the races as the Tour moved to a later date to avoid a clash with the World Cup.

The 2028 Tour will be the earliest since 1966, when the race began on June 22. That year’s Giro ran from May 18 to June 9.

RCS has repeatedly lobbied the UCI for a later date for the Giro in recent years. The organiser argues that the change would help offset the risk of weather-enforced route changes in the high mountains, and it also wishes to ensure that the Festa della Repubblica national holiday on June 2 falls during the Giro each year, just as the Tour coincides with Bastille Day.

“We’ve again asked the UCI to have the Giro start a week later, and we want to do that from 2027,” Bellino said. “We haven’t spoken about 2028 yet, we’re only talking about 2027, but we’ve made the request. I’m very confident, because they’ve been saying for years that it’s ok, so now let’s hope that next year we can do it.”