Giro d'Italia - Louis Meintjes is looking to make an impact on the race
Global Peloton speaks to Meintjes on Giro-eve. South African considering retirement at the end of 2025 season
No African rider has ridden more Grand Tours in the history of the sport than Louis Meintjes, who takes on number 19 at the Giro d’Italia starting this weekend in Albania.
7th place at the 2022 Tour de France was his best overall result and he won a stage of the Vuelta a España into Les Praeres in the same year. However, this is just the third time that Meintjes will line up at the Italian three-week race, and the Intermarché-Wanty rider is going in with an open mind as to what he can achieve at the Corsa Rosa.
“If I just ride good and I'm fighting at the front in the mountain stages, it would already be on a personal level, it would be quite nice,” Meintjes tells Global Peloton on the eve of the race.
“Hopefully we will see by the end of the Giro if GC is still an option. It's not that I have a concrete goal of top-10 or a stage win or something like that. It's more just to make an impact on the race,” he adds.
It has been a slower start to the season for the 33-year-old, but the Giro was always the biggest target. Meintjes began his season in Spain but wasn’t at the required level to compete for wins. At the Giro’s warm-up race in Abruzzo, he began to feel stronger, and supported his team-mate Georg Zimmerman to the overall win.
Meintjes is unsure at this point how will compare against the other climbers in the race.
“I tend to start off quite slow, but he last few races, I already started feeling quite good. The legs were quite good in Abruzzo. It was just a day of bad weather, so the result doesn't really tell a good story, but at least the feeling was good.”
“I can't say right at the Giro I'm super, super confident, but I still feel pretty good. So if it's good enough, I don't know,” he says.
As is often the case, the route for this year’s Giro d’Italia is quite back heavy, with the biggest mountains and toughest stages coming in the final week, with fewer opportunities for climbers like Meintjes to score a result. He is looking to use all his experience to navigate the first two weeks without problems, before showing his legs where it really counts.
“That's something that makes you a bit nervous because yeah, sometimes either you feel not so good and you're not sure how you're going to perform or you feel good and it doesn't change or something bad happens before. It's a bit of a waiting game and it makes you nervous. You just need to survive the first week and then see and hope that it's good for later on.”
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Meintjes leads a varied Intermarché-Wanty team that also includes sprinter Gerben Thijssen and breakaway artist Taco van der Hoorn. In his 19th three-week race, he is by far the most experienced of the squad and is able to offer his younger team-mates, such as debutant Francesco Busatto, valuable advice.
“To say the truth, it doesn't feel like it's number 19 or anything,” he says reflectively. “But yeah, there's obviously some guys that are a bit more nervous or unsure of what's going to happen. There's always a little bit of advice you can give them…but it's just like day by day. If you don't survive today, then tomorrow doesn't matter.”
2025 is contract renewal year for Meintjes, but the South African says that he isn’t feeling the pressure of that looming deadline as he considers the next phase of his life.
Now in his 13th year as a professional, Meintjes says that he considering retiring this year, although he doesn’t quite see it like that.
“It's already been a long cycling journey. If I want to continue or not, it still needs to be decided as well. So it's been a really nice journey and there's still a lot of things I like about it. But yeah, I'm being realistic. If you look at the next chapter, there's still a lot to figure out. It's not that I'm super stressed about getting a contract or making plans or something like that.”
“I don't really think of it as retirement. It's probably just starting something new. I’ve got to keep on doing something. It's already been like the last few years, I've kind of already made peace. Maybe even you could say three years ago this is my last season. To me, mentally, it's not like the end of the world. I'm happy with what I've done before.”
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