On July 1st, 2011 a 19-year-old Italian rookie pro lined up at the Giro d’Italia Internazionale Femminile, a 10-stage race covering 945.9 km with nine road stages and one individual time trial. Her best result of the week would be 15th on the third stage, a stage won by the eventual winner of the pink jersey, one Marianne Vos. Thirteen years later that same Italian lined up again at the Giro, with many more years of experience, two stage wins at the Italian Grand Tour and a lot to prove. After eight days of racing, against all odds, she pulled on the final Maglia Rosa.
On Sunday, after 13 years of dreaming, Elisa Longo Borghini made her dreams a reality. She won the Giro d’Italia Women.
Longo Borghini has been such a fixture in the women’s peloton for so long that it’s hard to believe she took her first Giro stage win in 2020. She’s won the tricolour of Italy’s national champion 12 times, her first in 2014 in the time trial and the most recent just a few weeks before the Giro. When her Lidl-Trek teammate Elisa Balsamo wore the jersey in 2022 after Longo Borghini had worn it in 2021 it was almost a weird sight. The world is just used to Longo Borghini being the Italian national champion.
Like any rider as consistent as Longo Borghini, it’s taken years to get to where she is today. Many riders with a bit of talent, determination and the right set-up can impress, but few can deliver the kind of results Longo Borghini has over the last 13 years of her career.
Traditionally, Longo Borghini has gravitated towards the hilly races: the ones that aren’t too mountainous, but are hard enough to reduce a peloton. Her most iconic wins are usually done solo, with long-range attacks, like Paris-Roubaix in 2022 and her first Tour of Flanders in 2015. She can almost always make it into any elite selection, but winning from those moves is harder for her than it is for something with a decent sprint, like Anna van der Breggen, for example. During the Spring Classics, Longo Borghini is always in the winning move but often finishes third or below because her sprint hasn’t been as good as some others.
So she went away, and she worked on it. She started honing in on her weaknesses and improving them as much as she could. It won her the Tour of Britain in 2022. Going into the final stage she was tied for the overall with Grace Brown. Longo Borghini won the penultimate stage, and with it six bonus seconds, equaling her with Brown. In the final stage, a straight sprint won by Lorena Wiebes, Longo Borghini finished third. The result handed her enough bonus seconds to win the overall and was also the moment the world realized she does have a punch.
Before that Tour of Britain, Longo Borghini’s wins were mostly stages of UCI 2.2-rated stage races and the odd one-day race. One of her first major victories was Strade Bianche in 2017. Approaching the final climb into Siena, Longo Borghini powered away from Kasia Niewiadoma and Lizzie Deignan, past two earlier attackers Lucinda Brand and Annemiek van Vleuten, to win the race.
Unlike many other Italians, Longo Borghini spent only one year of her career on an Italian team. Instead, her early development was on the Norwegian Hitec Products team. There she became friends with eventual Trek-Segafredo teammate Audrey Cordon-Ragot. The two rode for Hitec until 2015 when they both joined the British Wiggle-Honda team alongside Mara Abbott, Giorgia Bronzini, and Jolien D’Hoore.
Longo Borghini rode for Wiggle-Honda for four years, and in that time she won Flanders, Strade Bianche, La Route de France, and both road and time trial national titles plus finished third in the Olympic road race. She had 11 victories in all from 2015-2018.
Her development as a rider really took off when she joined the fledgling Trek-Segafredo team in 2019. From then, she had the likes of Ellen van Dijk, Lizzie Deignan, and Trixi Worrack. With big goals and the sport rapidly evolving, Longo Borghini had her work cut out for her.
Her first win with the team was the WorldTour stage race Emakumeen Bira, where she took the fourth stage and the overall. A year later she won her first Giro stage. In 2021 she won Trofeo Alfredo Binda and GP de Plouay. And then, in 2022, she had a breakthrough.
It was a slower start for Longo Borghini in the early races but she flipped the script when she won Paris-Roubiax Femmes solo. She went on the win Tour of Britain, but it wasn’t the results that demonstrated the rider she had become, and who she would continue to grow into. Long-time fans of Longo Borghini’s style were quick to point out a new maturity in her riding, a confidence that had grown with her palmarès.
She had an up-and-down year following the stunning performances of 2022. The overall win at the UAE Tour and a stage win at the Giro were the highlights, a nasty crash following that stage win and then sepsis and a skin infection that took her out of the Tour de France Femmes all but ended her season.
When Longo Borghini returned to the peloton in 2024 it was with the confidence she had built not only at the start of her season but also with Lidl-Trek, combined with years of coming third. There was a moment, at the start of the season, when it seemed a new Longo Borghini had emerged. During Omloop Het Nieuwsblad, in the winning move with one teammate in Shirin van Anrooij, plus Marianne Vos and Lotte Kopecky. While they had the numbers advantage, Van Anrooij and Longo Borghini were outgunned; in a sprint, they were bound to fail. So they threw repeated attacks at the other two to try to get away. It didn’t work, but that’s not the point. It was the determination to try, to give it everything, that stood out.
At the Tour of Flanders, she displayed a fire that would carry into her third-place finish overall at the Vuelta, and eventually her overall victory at the Giro d’Italia.
Young riders can learn a lot from Longo Borghini: how to keep growing, even after others reach their peak. How to keep fighting when the sport throws everything at you. And how to remain poised and in control when a seemingly unshakable foe will not let go of your wheel, no matter how hard you try. Her patience and belief in herself is something everyone can admire.
Her Giro win was, of course, also thanks to her team at Lidl-Trek, but Longo Borghini herself will hang the Maglia Rosa in her home, on display for the world to see. Elisa Longo Borghini is having the best season of her career, so far. What’s next? Olympic Gold?
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