Rog aiming to do a Pog by winning the Giro-Tour double. First up is conquering Italy again.

MILAN (AP) — Anything Pog can do so can Rog.

Primoz Roglic will try to step out of the shadow of the all-conquering Tadej Pogacar by emulating his Slovenian compatriot when the Giro d’Italia starts on Friday in Albania.

Last season, Pogacar, who rides for UAE Team Emirates, became the first cyclist in 26 years to win the Giro and Tour de France in the same year.

Now Roglic and his Red Bull Bora Hansgrohe team have their eyes on the double.

“You can get some inspiration by looking at how UAE approached it, and seeing the ideas,” team head of performance Dan Lorang says. “You have to focus on yourself, but it would be stupid to close the eyes and not look left and right.

“You get inspiration when you see what’s possible, and that’s motivating. Pogacar proved the Giro and the Tour is possible.”

In the absence of cycling’s dominant duo, Pogacar and two-time Tour winner Jonas Vingegaard, Roglic is the favorite going into the Giro — although it is unlikely to be the demolition job it proved last year, when the question almost from the start was not if Pogacar would win but by how much.

In the end, Pogacar won by the race’s biggest margin of victory in nearly six decades. The previous year, Roglic won the Giro by one of the smallest margins.

Five-time Grand Tour winner Roglic will head into the gruelling three-week race backed by a strong team that includes 2022 winner Jai Hindley and last year’s runner-up Dani Martínez.

“The goal is to win, of course,” Lorang said. “Having Primoz on board now changes things for us. He knows how to win three-week stage races and the Giro.

“We planned for a victory at the Giro from winter until now.”

Other favorites

Pogacar won’t be one of Roglic’s main rivals at the Giro but one of his teammates will be.

With a reputation as the rising star of Spanish cycling, Juan Ayuso will regard anything less than a podium finish a disappointment.

Ayuso told Italian newspaper Gazzetta dello Sport that he wouldn’t see it as failure if he failed to win on his Giro debut. He wasn’t finished. “But at the same time, I’m not saying that I would be happy with a podium, either. It would be a disappointment not to finish in the top three, because I would consider that a step backwards.”

It will be a fight between experience and youth.

The 22-year-old Ayuso is already a winner in Italy this season after success at the week-long Tirreno-Adriatico but he was pipped on home turf by the 35-year-old Roglic at the Volta a Catalunya.

This Giro won’t just be a two-man race, however. There are other potential winners, up-and-comers and those with tested general classification potential.

The peloton includes five former Giro winners — beside Roglic and Hindley were Nairo Quintana (2014), Richard Carapaz (2019) and Egan Bernal (2021). All have their names etched on the Trofeo Senza Fine (Trophy With No End).

Route

There’s a saying that you can’t win the Giro in the first week but you can certainly lose it.

There is no major set-piece mountain battle in the first half of the race unlike in other editions, and — as usual — a brutal final week.

But riders will still face plenty of difficulties right from the start. Three tricky stages in Albania are followed by the Giro moving to the heel of Italy and the route snaking north.

Stage seven sees the first summit finish and two days later there is a mini Strade Bianche on the white, gravel roads of Tuscany.

The winner of the maglia rosa will be decided in the Alps, which hosts four of the five hardest mountain stages in the final week and more than 9,000 meters of climbing in the two days before the climax in Rome.

The 3,443-kilometer (2,140-mile) route ends on June 1 and includes a homage to the late Pope Francis by passing through an area of the Vatican rarely seen by the general public.

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AP cycling: https://apnews.com/hub/cycling