'Beyond my wildest dreams' – Sarah Gigante’s rocky road to the top step of the stage 4 podium at the Giro d’Italia Women

Wandering around the streets of the small town of Buninyong at the Road National Championships back in January 2018, it was clear that much of the attention was on the WorldTour riders returning home to the heat of the Australian summer for the races. But outside of the top professionals in pursuit of a national champion's green and gold jersey, one name kept cutting through: Sarah Gigante, who at 17 was already showing signs of being a Giro d’Italia Women stage winner in the making.

A dominant clean sweep of the U19 Australian women’s titles that year was too hard to ignore, particularly when it started with a criterium where she lapped the field and ended with an emphatic solo win in the road race - and where her mum, grandmother and extended clan of aunts and uncles were cheering proudly roadside.

Back then the teenager from the Brunswick Cycling Club was just heading into her final year of school – her academic achievements matching up to her stellar start to the year on the bike. And as we sat and did an interview at a picnic table across from the finish line after she completed the triple junior title haul she had a level-headed response to where she hoped cycling would take her.

“I’ll just keep having fun and if that takes me to Europe that’s cool, but if it doesn’t that’s cool too,” Gigante said in the interview, published on Ella CyclingTips at the time.

Her friendly demeanour and evident joy and enthusiasm for racing, however, shouldn’t be mistaken as when it comes to racing her determination and killer instinct on the bike wins out.

Even in 2018 among the camaraderie of the close-knit U19 bunch she recounted the moment where she crushed her rivals in the national championship criterium by going solo and then lapping them with a devilish grin and chuckle: “That was the coolest moment, you know, just making people hurt”.

That tenacity within a race was something her more seasoned Australian rivals quickly discovered when she stepped up into the elite ranks in January 2019 as an 18-year-old.

The young rider seemed to be almost good-humouredly accepted in the lead bunch packed with WorldTour professionals at the combined U23 and elite women’s Australian National Championships road race as it worked its way around the hilly Buninyong circuit. She may even have been seen as a novelty ambitiously pursuing the U23 title in her first year in the category, rather than as a serious threat to the hopes that every last one of them had about spending the season wearing the green and gold bands of an Australian champion.

However, she duly went on to not only claim the U23 title but also beat forces within the sport, like Amanda Spratt and Sarah Roy, to the top step of the elite podium. Her youth and inexperience only once again became clear as she fumbled with popping the champagne cork, although her good-natured rival Spratt was just as quick to jump in and help her out then as she was to congratulate her after the promise of big things to come turned into a reality on the Pianezze summit finish in Italy on Wednesday.

From that moment when an 18-year-old Gigante claimed the top step of the podium in the elite race at the Australian National Championships, a European cycling career looked less like a possibility and more like a certainty given how well she had stacked up among seasoned professionals. Still, even with the early promise and clear display of prowess, it has been no easy road to Grand Tour stage glory.

Lining up the hurdles

Gigante has now made it to the top step of a Giro d'Italia Women stage podium, with Wednesday's Giro victory being her first European-based WorldTour win and a welcome addition to the Tour Down Under stage and overall victory she claimed in Australia in 2024. Furthermore, that journey is perhaps made even more meaningful by just how hard she's had to fight to get there.

The road to the top may have looked clear when Gigante claimed the elite Australian road title in 2019 as an 18-year-old and it certainly helped open the door to Gigante’s first professional contract with TIBCO- Silicon Valley Bank in 2020. That, however, turned out to be a tough year to launch for an Australian-based rider. Gigante managed to slot in three early European races but her return home in March was the end of her first professional season, with borders slamming shut amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

She then launched into the 2021 season with the enthusiasm, if not the actual category, of a neo-pro, only for a crash at La Fleche Wallonne in April to cut her European season short. Gigante did manage to make it back in time for the Olympic Games in Tokyo – taking eleventh in the time trial – then was faced with myopericarditis. Still, she’d done enough to attract the interest of one of the top teams in women’s cycling, Movistar, signing with the Spanish squad for three years.

The 2022 season started a little later than normal for the recovering rider but she quickly brought her new Movistar team a victory on its Spanish home soil, at the 1.1 ranked Emakumeen Nafarroako. However, things would go downhill from there. Injuries and health problems once again curtailed this season and the next, but so did the fact that once she had rebounded in 2023 – itching to make up for lost time – there was little opportunity to test her PB-hitting form and gain that all too important European race experience.

The top-tier team’s roster was packed and few chances were coming her way so the decision was made to seek opportunity elsewhere. An agreement was struck for the Australian to end her contract early and join AG Insurance-Soudal for 2024 instead.

Smooth sailing, finally?

Gigante’s first race with AG Insurance-Soudal, which morphed from a development squad to a Women’s WorldTour team, netted a spectacular stage victory atop Willunga Hill at the Tour Down Under in 2024 and the overall win too. The tears of joy and relief spread beyond the rider, her ever supportive mum and brother as the home crowd celebrated the fairytale finish. Gigante’s unwavering determination had yielded the results she and others had long anticipated she was capable of achieving. It looked like her luck had finally turned.

The spectacular start to the season led to other impressive results, with Gigante coming seventh overall in her Tour de France Femmes debut, but the Victorian was increasingly noticing that her power on the time trial bike compared to the road bike wasn’t what it had been and that she was feeling some numbness in her legs. Then as the season was ending the pain kicked in.

Gigante discovered in December the cause was iliac artery endofibrosis, which meant challenging surgery which would leave her facing a tough recovery but also missing her Tour Down Under defence and the first half of the 2025 season.

It was another blow just as everything looked to be on track but, just as Gigante has done time and time again, she got on with the task at hand, returning to fitness, by working her way up from walks to indoor training and then finally hitting the roads once again.

Along the way the markers were promising, with a Strava QOM on Tawonga Gap delivering an early confidence boost as she trained her way back to form in Australia and returned to Europe earlier than expected, feeling “fitter and stronger than before” as she pinned on a number at the Tour of Norway, where she came third on her first day of racing for the season.

The proof of just how strongly Gigante has returned, however, was clearly laid out for all to see on stage 4 of the Giro d'Italia Women when the race moved into the mountains and the Australian showed that she was back with not just enough power to match some of the best in the world on the climbs but also enough to beat them.

At 1.7km to the line, on the climb to Pianezze, Gigante launched from the leading group of four – which included defending champion Elisa Longo Borghini (UAE Team ADQ), Marlen Reusser (Movistar) and Antonia Niedermaier (Canyon-SRAM) – and no one could respond as she rode away solo.

There was no doubting just what that victory meant to the rider as she powered across the line 25 seconds ahead of Longo Borghini and Reusser, moving up to third overall in the process and also into the lead of the mountains classification. There was no grimace of pain through those final gruelling metres as it was kept at bay by the widest of grins.

“When I saw the others were struggling on those tough gradients, I attacked,” said Gigante in a statement from her team, AG Insurance-Soudal.

“I kept going and couldn’t believe what was about to happen in the final kilometre, when I looked behind and there was nobody there. It’s beyond my wildest dreams.”

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