It hurts, it's always painful to pull the plug, but at some point you must find the courage. The question is heavy and elementary: what's the point of keeping it alive like this? It becomes therapeutic obstinacy, it becomes cruelty. For those who knew it in the full of its vitality, when it was born and grew in the name of Sergio Zavoli, it's terrible to find it at the end of the race in these conditions. You can't look at it, melancholy takes over. Enough, for heaven's sake: pull the plug on the "Trial". Or at least, if you don't have the courage, change its name. A definition like "Post-race Interviews" would suffice: clearer and more honest. More than anything, it would respect the glory of the "Trial Stage", which truly put on trial, with lots of defendants, lots of troublemakers, lots of defenders, up to the final, unappealable verdict of the public. Now, it's just a "Decomposition Trial".

An odyssey of agony. The host Alessandro Fabretti, rated 10 only for dandy jackets, clearly wore the clothes of Pangloss, the guardian of Voltaire's Candide, placed there by the great writer-thinker to represent the theory of his enemy Leibniz, according to which we always live in the best of all possible worlds. Fabretti is the Pangloss of the Giro: after seeing and re-seeing Zavoli, he has perfectly learned how not to do it. While the Rai pioneer acted as a stimulator, throwing in diabolically themes and facts to discuss, essentially being the dynamiter of debate, Fabretti takes his salary and the masters' compliments to always say great stage, great Giro. Debate, discussion, dissent, criticism? Suffocated in the cradle. Exterminated at birth.

To totally guarantee that nothing escapes this idyllic line regardless, here are the choice of commentators: Davide Cassani and Daniele Bennati. They both start with Da, Davide and Daniele, must be the surgical criterion that led to their selection: put together they represent a clear return to Da-ism, a current that sublimated nothingness. Cassani could even say something of his own, a minimum of judgment, in fact he is used very little by the cautious Pangloss. It is clearly seen that Pangloss prefers the other, his favorite, the perfect prototype of the commentator to whom you can ask everything, even a blood donation, but never an opinion. Grandiose was the episode about the most beautiful stage of the Giro, the only one worthy of the name, thanks to the White Roads: the theme of the possible Del Toro-Ayuso dualism is approached in the flattest and most orthodox way, like a notarial register, they tell you yes that for UAE it could become a problem, they tell you that according to classic cycling Del Toro's attack is not logical, they also tell you that however in modern cycling everything is different, in short, they tell you everything that every good fan already knows better than them, but telling us clearly and decisively which side they are on, what they would do, who is promoted and who is not, indeed, would be a "Trial", who is acquitted and who is convicted, not even in a dream. Prudence, cowardice, sloth: their only mission is not to create problems and not make enemies. Just imagine if someone from above might give you an unpleasant phone call...

The atmosphere, thus, is inexorably tired, weak, limp. Pure chloroform. You can only endure it in one way: waiting for the connection to interviews with riders and technicians, from backstage or from buses, those are indeed digestible and interesting. Too bad they have nothing to do with a "Trial Stage", with any trial.

That is now only a melancholic memory of glorious times. Not because they are distant, but because they were lively, dynamic, fresh. I invite everyone to do a test: let's watch an episode with Zavoli, Taccone, Zandegù, Ormezzano, etc. etc. Then let's watch this trinity of sleeping pills. In the end tell me who is old and who is young.