After stage eight of his Giro d’Italia debut in 2000, Matt Stephens was a broken man.

“Today was the longest stage of the race and so far, for me, the hardest,” wrote the Brit in a diary he kept for that year’s Giro edition of Cycle Sport magazine. “We ended up doing 270 kilometres. Back at the hotel I sat in my kit for half an hour, too shagged to get changed, eating fruit salad and muesli and all the sweet contents in my room’s mini bar.” 

It was a sorry sight, made sorrier by the fact that Stephens, 30-years-old at the time, still had 13 stages left of his three-week date with pain. A knee injury following a heavy crash on the second day had left him limping around Italy, doing what he could to hang on for his Linda McCartney teammates until he was forced to abandon after Stage 16. 

The Giro had well and truly chewed him up and spat him out. But despite his suffering, Stephens would be back for more – albeit in a very different form.

“Hang on, I’ve done my homework! I’ve done 13 Giros. That includes riding one, being a reporter for GCN for four, then commentating on eight. So that’s 13, isn’t it?,” says Stephens when I ask if he can even remember how many Giros he’s encountered.  Despite the candid backdrop of his living room, free of cameras and microphones, he still speaks with the on-air enthusiasm for which his personality is renowned. 

Since his retirement from professional racing in 2011, the voice of Matt Stephens has become one of cycling’s most familiar sounds. As this year’s edition of the Italian Grand Tour gets underway,  the broadcaster and commentator speaks to Rouleur about why the race that once broke him might just be his favourite of the lot.    

Matt Stephens riding the Giro in 2000 for Team Linda McCartney (Image credit: Graham Watson) 

Rouleur: Is there an edition of the Giro which particularly sticks in your mind? 

Matt Stephens: I think last year’s final two stages with Simon Yates’s win were just incredible. We all couldn’t believe what we were seeing unfold before our very eyes, and then commentating on it and trying to come up with some rationale to explain to the viewers was really intriguing. At the end of The Breakaway show with Orla [Chennaoui] and Adam [Blythe], we were just like ‘what the heck?’ It was just a level of cycling that I don’t think any of us have really seen – it was in the animus of ‘vintage’, I think we can say!

Another that stands out is the 2020 edition, because of Covid-19. We travelled around Italy, where the government had obviously told fans to stay at home, and going to the finish with all the usual infrastructure but pretty much nobody there, just police and very few journalists was bizarre. I remember riding circles around the Duomo di Milano on my Brompton, and I was so transfixed at the emptiness that I actually hit the curb and fell off!

R: Commentating on the Giro is very different from actually racing it. What was it like to ride?

MS: Riding the Giro was really wild for me. I was 30, so it was quite late for me to do a Grand Tour. It was everything I thought it would be: emotionally challenging, physically very challenging, especially because of my crash.

I had to pull out at Stage 17, but being on the start at the Vatican where we were blessed by Pope John-Paul II was quite profound. We were in this religious little antichamber in the Vatican with Marco Pantani, Mario Cipollini, Eddy Merckx, and I’m there, just little Matt Stephens!

The race was just amazing, being in the field, riding in all different weather conditions, passing over the Gavia in the snow. I often think about the whole experience, especially the kind of pain and suffering I went through, and  the moments where I thought, ‘have I made the right decision to turn professional? That sort of thing. But I also remember all the joyous moments for the team – we had a big stage win and a second place. We had good fun despite the inordinate amount of suffering!

R: The race and the sport has obviously changed a lot since then. Which aspects of the Giro have stayed the same?

MS: The Giro still retains that very pure essence, and that for me is how connected you feel to the race. It’s not as big as the Tour de France, but it's still big enough to leave a big footprint, physically and spiritually. I think the thing is for me, you feel very connected to the race more than any other, a bit like the Tour of Flanders. 

What I really love seeing is that in every single village or town the race passes by, there is some sort of effort – even a modest one – to acknowledge the passing of the race, whether it's just pink balloons or a little bicycle with some pink flowers on it or something. 

You see people sitting in local bars reading Gazzetta [dello Sport], previewing the stage, and you get the sense of how and why it’s woven into the heart of society. It once divided a nation, but now I think it unifies a nation, and it’s really special. As a spectator, as a fan, you are part of the ingredients that the riders feed off. The Tour maybe less so, because it’s so shiny and enormous. 

R: On the topic of culture, do you have a favourite Italian dish? 

MS: Gosh, this is so hard because we get so many! The obvious one is pizza, which I love, but I think a good risotto, like an asparagus risotto done right – now that’s hard to beat!

R: Commentating for all 21 stages of the Giro is quite some feat. How do you keep going?

MS: I think I’m naturally somebody who doesn’t mind waffling on! I think me and Ned [Boulting] worked out that we did around 180 hours of commentary in total during the Giro. The days are long, but it’s great fun.

I love it, so I don’t find it too tiring. I think the days when you’re most exhausted is when there’s been an exciting finale, because then you’ve got to build back up again. But that exhaustion is quite euphoric in a way. 

Snacks are important too! And lots of coffee. Ned has a great word for snacks. He says, ‘let’s go and get some nonsense’, because commentators shouldn’t have it because it can wreak havoc with your voice pipes.

R: Can you talk us through the science behind those long days on the mic? 

MS: So, first, you need to be doing it with somebody who’s a good conversationalist, and you also need to be unafraid to go off on lots of different tangents. You can draw on things that happened to you and your personal experience, for example about a long drive last night, we stopped at this beautiful little taverna or whatever, because you are actually living the race. You're part of it, you're on the road with it.

There's not many lead commentators that were ex-pros, but you do need an ex-pro to lean on, to draw on their experience of racing. And then you need an inquisitive mind to sort of keep asking each other questions about possible scenarios that might unfold. 

You can also go through the more granular details about the race itself, and also about the culture, the cuisine, the history around the race  – but you do need to be with somebody who's happy to just waffle really! The hard ones are the flat sprint stages through maybe quite ordinary countryside, where there’s not a lot going on. 

R: What stage are you most looking forward to this year? 

MS: The Giro always seems to do this, but stages 19 and 20 are going to be the hardest stages. The Dolomites stage is an area that I know really well, and in stage 19, there’s just under 5000 metres of climbing that’s horribly hard. That neck of the woods is my favourite place in the Dolomites, and it’s a classic Dolomiti stage. 

And then the penultimate stage, two times up the Piancavello, where Tadej [Pogačar] dominated in 2024 – but the fact he’s not there means we’ll have a slightly more open race. Anything can happen in those final two stages, so hopefully the narrative won’t have a foregone conclusion. 

R: Can we get your GC prediction for this year’s race? 

MS: I think Vingegaard is gonna win it, and I think that will help him in the Tour. It’ll take the pressure off if he wins the Giro, because he’s then got the complete set of Grand Tours ahead of Tadej. The coaches have looked at the way he actually gets better with a Grand Tour in his legs, so I think, as long as he rests up afterwards, it might actually help his shape in July. I think from a psychological vantage point, it puts him in a really good position. 

R: If you had one word to describe the Giro, what would it be? 

MS: Beautiful. It’s just beautiful.