RE STELVIO MAPEI 2026: The Full Stelvio Climb from Bormio, Unedited - TdP Stage 7

The Final Stage. The Final Climb. A New Personal Best on the Roof of the Giro.

This is it — Stage 7, the last stage of Tour de Pasta 2026, and there was only one way to end it: the Stelvio.

It starts the day before the gun even goes off, grabbing my race pack from the Mapei stand — Mapei has backed this race for 21 straight years, and their name is stitched into the identity of the event now known as the Re Stelvio Mapei. Race morning finds me rolling into Piazza V Alpini and Via del Forte, the square and street named for Italy's mountain infantry, the Alpini. It's not a random choice of starting point — just up the valley in Oga stands the old Forte Venini, built between 1908 and 1914 to guard these exact passes against invasion from the north, staring straight across at the same slopes the Stelvio's wartime trenches once scarred. A century on, we line up on that same ground for a very different kind of battle.

Then the gun goes, and the video hands you the whole thing, unedited: 21.097 km, 1,533 m of climbing, and 40 numbered hairpins snaking up the Lombardy side to 2,758 m — with power and speed overlays running the entire way so you can see exactly what the effort costs, not just what it looks like. This is the 41st edition of a race first run in 1985, and it climbs a road that's even older: engineers Carlo Donegani cut into this mountain by hand for the Austrian Empire between 1820 and 1825, using two thousand workers and enough gunpowder to blast through solid rock — still, two centuries later, the same bends carrying every rider up.

Every one of those bends leads to the Cima Coppi, the highest point of the Giro d'Italia's route, named for Fausto Coppi's legendary stage win here in 1953 — the day he broke a truce with race leader Hugo Koblet, attacked alone on the Stelvio, and rode into the history books for a fifth and final Giro title. It's the reason every cyclist who reaches this summit is, in some small way, chasing a ghost.

At the top: a hard-earned participation medal, and a number I've been chasing for a while — 1:37

, a new personal best. Then it's back down through Bormio, weaving past the thousands of riders still grinding their way up, a reminder that on a day like this, everyone's fighting the same mountain.

Stage 7 closes the book on Tour de Pasta 2026. Thanks for riding every stage with me.

Strava Activity: https://www.strava.com/activities/19279821987

🔗 Follow the journey: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/when_in_doubt_cycle/ Strava: https://www.strava.com/athletes/86551840 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@PaoloTagliaferri