1977 Giro d'Italia
The 1977 Giro d'Italia was the 60th running of the Giro, one of cycling's Grand Tours. It started in Bacoli, on 20 May, with a prologue and concluded in Milan, on 13 June, with a mass-start stage. A total of 130 riders from thirteen teams entered the 22-stage race, that was won by Belgian Michel Pollentier of the Flandria team. The second and third places were taken by Italians Francesco Moser and Gianbattista Baronchelli, respectively. Freddy Maertens won 7 of the first 11 stages before abandoning due to a crash on Stage 8B.
Maertens was one of five riders within 1:00 of the lead at the time of his abandonment. This followed his performance of winning 13 stages along with the General Classification at the Vuelta a month earlier.
Moser took the Pink jersey from Maertens in the first week and held it until the high mountains of stage 17 which ended in Cortina d'Ampezzo where Pollentier took a :03 lead by beating Moser by :25. Over the next few stages he built this lead up to about 2:00 before the final time trial where he won the stage by :30 over 2nd place Moser and sealed the Giro victory.
Amongst the other classifications that the race awarded, Sanson's Moser won the points classification, Faustino Fernández Ovies of KAS won the mountains classification, and Sanson's Mario Beccia completed the Giro as the best neo-professional in the general classification, finishing ninth overall. Flandria finished as the winners of the team points classification.
Teams
Fourteen teams were invited by the race organizers to participate in the 1977 edition of the Giro d'Italia. In total, 90 riders were from Italy, while the remaining 50 riders came from: Spain, Belgium, Switzerland, Denmark, West Germany, Australia, France, Great Britain, Norway, and Sweden. Each team sent a squad of ten riders, which meant that the race started with a peloton of 140 cyclists.Of those starting, 52 were riding the Giro d'Italia for the first time. The average age of riders was 27.29 years, ranging from 20–year–old Per Bausager to 36–year–old Franco Bitossi. The team with the youngest average rider age was GBC, while the oldest was Brooklyn. From those that started, 121 of them finish in Milan.
The teams entering the race were:
Pre-race favorites
The starting peloton did include the 1976 winner, Felice Gimondi. Freddy Maertens, Gianbattista Baronchelli, and Gimondi were seen by many news outlets to be the favorites to win the race.Route and stages
The route for the race was revealed on 19 February 1977.Classification leadership
There were four main individual classifications contested in the 1977 Giro d'Italia, as well as a team competition. Four of them awarded jerseys to their leaders. The general classification was the most important and was calculated by adding each rider's finishing times on each stage. The rider with the lowest cumulative time was the winner of the general classification and was considered the overall winner of the Giro. The rider leading the classification wore a pink jersey to signify the classification's leadership.The second classification was the points classification. Riders received points for finishing in the top positions in a stage finish, with first place getting the most points, and lower placings getting successively fewer points. The rider leading this classification wore a purple jersey.
The mountains classification was the third classification and its leader was denoted by the green jersey. In this ranking, points were won by reaching the summit of a climb ahead of other cyclists. Each climb was ranked as either first, second or third category, with more points available for higher category climbs. Most stages of the race included one or more categorized climbs, in which points were awarded to the riders that reached the summit first. The Cima Coppi, the race's highest point of elevation, awarded more points than the other first category climbs. The Cima Coppi for this Giro was the Valparola Pass. The first rider to cross the Valparola Pass was Spanish rider Faustino Fernández Ovies.
The fourth classification, the young rider classification, was decided the same way as the general classification, but exclusive to neo-professional cyclists. The leader of the classification wore a white jersey.
Another classification was the team classification, awarded no jersey to its leaders. This was calculated by adding together points earned by each rider on the team during each stage through the intermediate sprints, the categorized climbs, stage finishes, etc. The team with the most points led the classification.
There were other minor classifications within the race, including the Campionato delle Regioni classification. The leader wore a blue jersey with colored vertical stripes.
The Fiat classification, created the year before, was repeated again In all stages longer than, there was a banner at that point in the stage to designate a special sprint. The winner of the sprint in each stage received a Fiat 127 in this edition, as opposed to a Fiat 131 in its inaugural year.
Final standings
General classification
| Rank | Name | Team | Time | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 1 |  Michel Pollentier.png" />Michel Pollentier|BELnowrap|107h 27' 16"Points classification
|