It’s very hard for the casual cycling fan to follow the sport. There are so many teams. There are so many players (joke). Each of the top teams is capable of sending a different squad to each event. Multiple events can be happening at the same time. All the riders look the same in their kit and sunglasses and helmets. Only the commentators, who watch many many hours, can tell them apart.

And then there’s the unfortunate fact that cycling is now behind a paywall, lumped in with a bunch of other sports. I made the decision years ago not to bother following sport (it saves a lot of time/heartache), so even with my mild interest in cycling, we come up against the paying-for-a-load-of-stuff-you-don’t-watch, which is how the streamers really make their money, I suppose. But is my mild interest in cycling worth £30, even for one month. No, it is not.

The Giro d’Italia, always early in the season, is the first of the Grand Tour events. It’s never the warmest. You’d think Italy would be warm, but not in the mountains in May it’s not. There’s snow on the caps, there is hail, there is rain, wind.

If the Tour de France is the peloton gliding past fields of sunflowers, the Giro is the peloton shivering over snow-capped mountain passes wearing inadequate clothing.

This year’s Giro has looked brutal over its first week. It started with three days in Bulgaria, which looked unreal. If the sun had shone, it might have been the perfect advert for the Bulgarian Tourist Board. But the sun did not shine. There were slippery roads, there were crashes, there was darkness at the break of noon.

Into Italy they came, and the weather has not improved. I grow ever more dismayed at the risks the riders are expected to take. In Naples, the finish (in the rain, natch) was over slate cobbles that were as slippery as ice. Even on a dry day, I question the use of cobbled surfaces. But in the wet? It’s murderous. Add to the cobbles and the rain the street furniture, badly designed barriers with feet that stick out into the road, and it really seems as if the organisers are trying to kill someone.

It has been carnage on the road over the first week, with several big crashes, and a number of riders put in hospital.

This is ridiculous.

How am I following the Giro, you ask? Well, Ned Boulting, the former ITV commentator, has his podcast. He’s apparently employed as the “global feed” commentator by the organisation, but you can’t get hold of that really in the UK. The Giro is on TNT Sports, which you access via HBO Max. Confusingly, you can get HBO Max through a Now subscription, but that does not include TNT, which you get via the HBO proper.

TNT put up a short (7-8 minute) highlight reel on YouTube, and there’s an official one, too, I think. So you can watch an eight minute version of a 200+ kilometre stage, and then listen to Ned’s podcast, and maybe read one the reports (e.g. the Guardian’s). By the way, Ned does his podcast after spending five hours commentating with no breaks, since the “global feed” people don’t have the budget to have more than Ned and his co-commentator Jacopo Guarnieri on the payroll. You realise how looked-after the ITV team was, since they rarely did more than an hour or two at a time before getting a break.

Anyway, that’s it. YouTube videos, podcast, written reports. It’s the first time I’ve really watched much of the Giro and I have to say, it does not look like a pleasant experience. It does not make me want to visit Italy. The whole thing looks a bit low-rent in comparison to the Tour de France.

Come the TdF, my plan is to pay for a VPN and watch on French telly on my laptop. This may or may not work. And I’ll hopefully be in France for the final four days, anyway. It’s the only time our telly ever gets used over there!