Cycling news - Giro d'Italia and Vuelta a Espana clash as UCI announces revised calendar

ByEurosport

Updated 05/05/2020 at 16:14 GMT

The Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) has announced its revised 2020 calendar for the WorldTour and UCI Women’s WorldTour following the COVID-19 crisis.

Simon Yates vainqueur en solitaire de la 11e étape du Giro à Osimo devant Tom Dumoulin

Image credit: Getty Images

The Giro d'Italia will start on October 3 and finish on October 25, while the Vuelta will be held from October 20 and run through until November 8, meaning the two Grand Tours will overlap one another.

The Tour de France remains pencilled in for August 29 to September 20, although French sports minister Roxana Maracineanu stated on Tuesday that "there is no guarantee that the Tour de France will go ahead this year".

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A number of the top one-day races will also be held in October, with four of the five Monuments taking place between October 4 and October 31, making for a frantic month of cycling following the pandemic that has brought almost all of world sport to a halt since March.

Action-packed October 25

Milan-Sanremo will be held on August 8, Liege-Bastogne-Liege on October 4, the Tour of Flanders on October 18, Paris-Roubaix on October 25 and Il Lombardia on October 31, with the UCI Cycling Road World Championships set to run from 20 September to 27 September.

A race-packed month of October is headlined by the last Sunday of the month - October 25 - with Paris-Roubaix, the final stage of the Giro and the fifth stage of the Vuelta all set to take place.

The UCI calendar begins on August 1 with Strade Bianche and finishes with the final stage of the Vuelta on November 8.

"Since the interruption of the cycling season in March, an intensive consultation process involving the principal representatives of the families of men’s and women’s professional road cycling – organisers, teams and riders – has been carried out at the initiative of the UCI in order to draw up new calendars," read a statement on the UCI's website.

"We note that the situation is a changing one, which could mean the UCI may need to adjust the calendar to take into account the development of the pandemic," added the statement.

The 2020 UCI Women’s WorldTour only staged one event - the Cadel Evans Great Ocean Road Race Elite Women’s Race (Australia) - before the pandemic took hold and the Ronde van Drenthe (the Netherlands), Trofeo Alfredo Binda Comune di Cittiglio (Italy) and OVO Energy Women’s Tour (Great Britain) are all absent from the revised calendar having been cancelled.

The revised calendar on the women's side contains 18 events with five stage races and 13 one-day races, with the calendar starting on 1st August with Strade Bianche and finishing on November 8 with Ceratizit Madrid Challenge by La Vuelta.

The changes in the calendar have allowed for the 'Hell of the North', Paris-Roubaix, to make its debut on the Women’s UCI WorldTour running alongside the men's event of the same day.