Sepp Kuss expects to play a critical support role for Visma-Lease a Bike team leader Jonas Vingegaard in the crunch climbing moments of the Giro d'Italia this May, but the rider from Durango warns that those key mountain moments are anything but easy to anticipate.
The Giro's innate lack of predictability for everybody from the top leaders down to the least high-profile domestique is something Kuss has experienced in person in a past edition, he told Cyclingnews during the countdown to this year's race.
"I remember in 2019 with [top favourite and early GC dominator] Primož (Roglič), he was looking super good until halfway through the race, and then the form started to go down, he got ill, the weather turned bad…"
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Roglič finally ended the race in third, so that was one lesson learned about the Giro for Kuss - the way that anything can happen and the Giro is never truly over, even when it seems like somebody has the race sewn up.
"You can never count anybody out, and it's the first Grand Tour of the season, too, so you never know how certain guys are going," Kuss said.
"So you have to be humble in the Giro, and ready every day."
With 15 Grand Tours to his name, not to mention an overall victory in the 2023 Vuelta a España, the 32-year-old has certainly been around the block when it comes to three-week races. But as he pointed out, the Giro is the Grand Tour he's done the least - only in 2019 and 2013 before - so even with so much experience, the Italian climbs in particular retain a certain sense of a voyage into the unknown.
On the plus side, too, Kuss is looking in good shape, having completed a solid training block at altitude on Mount Teide with Vingegaard. Like the Dane, too, Kuss's last race was the Volta a Catalunya, which could hardly have gone better for Visma-Lease a Bike as Vingegaard claimed a very comfortable win.
"The Giro is a race I haven't done so much, so in terms of reference points, I don't have so many," Kuss concurred.
"I don't know too many climbs in Italy, actually, so I've got to start ticking off the boxes,
"But I feel good in training, even if it's hard to say where I am exactly because I haven't raced too much this year.
"Then again, in any Grand Tour, you can definitely build into it as the race goes on. But for sure, there are already important stages in the beginning, so hopefully I'm ready already by then to help out.
"We'll see, but I'm looking forward to it."
Kuss argues that compared to the Tour, which he knows a lot better, the Giro has "less stress and less pressure from all angles. But it's a really unpredictable race, which makes it different [to July], more challenging."
One element of the 2026 Giro, though, has a very similar aspect to July for Visma - going in at the start. with one of the top contenders. As Kuss says, it's a position that they're used to and which they're ready to assume again.
"Most races we go to, we always have one of the favourites, if not the favourite," Kuss points out. "So we have a group that's experienced in that, and I wouldn't say it affects us negatively. In the end, it brings everybody up another level.
"You're prepared to take on the responsibility that it brings, having such a favourite for the race and the team. But then again, you have, like I said, more responsibility on you, so you have to be on it every day, too."
Given that Visma have such an overwhelming favourite like Vingegaard in their ranks, it almost makes sense to be leading the race in any case from as early a point, or at least to start the process of building up an advantage from the word go. As Kuss puts it, "It never hurts to try and make a difference when you have the legs in the beginning. "
"The way the course is laid out, you can go pretty deep in certain stages, and there are not so many consecutive mountain stages like you might normally have in another Grand Tour.
"So you don't have to measure your effort quite as much as normal, but of course, the third week is always hard. If you make too many efforts in the beginning, then you'll feel it in the end."
The Blockhaus on stage 7 is another of the many Italian climbs that Kuss doesn't know, but even so, he's already identified the 13.6-kilometre Apennine ascent as one of the first crunch points for all the GC contenders in this year's race.
"It's a tricky stage because it's really long, so it could be a really good day for the break, depending on who is interested in the peloton."
"But it's hard to say what'll happen, because the first real summit finish of the race, so there'll be a lot of guys that are really fresh and the differences won't be so big as they would be in the third week."
"It's a very long stage, too, and that'll bring out more gaps, and for sure on a climb that's that hard, if you have the legs, you can really go for it and not look back."
In all the fuss about Vingegaard, it's often forgotten that Kuss is a Grand Tour winner himself, but it isn't in the Visma-Lease a Bike Giro d'Italia strategy, he tells Cyclingnews, for him to be anything like a 'Plan B' should the Dane start to falter.
"It's all in for Jonas and and and we have the team, for helping with that,” Kuss says.
"There are not too many other teams with two leaders, maybe Red Bull or Ineos, but it's hard to say if the two-leader strategy would work in that sense."
One other personal goal, though, has not been shelved by Kuss, that of completing his 'set' of Grand Tour stage wins after victories in the mountains of the Tour de France and the Vuelta a España. While the priority is obviously working for Vingegaard, he recognises that taking that victory "is something I would love to achieve, but it's not something I'm, you know, overly fixated on."
"I think if the opportunity comes, I'd like to go for it. But I think all my other wins in the stage races and Grand Tours have come just by taking the opportunity as they come, without overly looking for it. So we'll go with that approach."
101st on the opening stage, Kuss came through the fraught first day of racing at the Giro unscathed. But as soon as the race returns to Italy, the mountains will be looming up fast - and Kuss will likely find himself in the thick of the action.
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