The rider bringing the Maglia Azzurra to Italy after the Giro's Bulgarian start from Sofia, having claimed 5 of the 6 KOM scattered across the three stages from the Black Sea (the only one not his is Saturday's near the finish, taken by Vingegaard ahead of Pellizzari and Van Eetvelt) is a racer who embodies the concept of team loyalty like few others. Even before Ivan Basso joined the team starting in 2018, what was then a Continental squad named Polartec Kometa and is today a ProTeam named Polti VisitMalta was actually founded in 2013 as the youth cycling project of the Foundation of Alberto Contador and his brother Fran. That Junior formation included 14 riders: among them a promising climber named Enric Mas, but also a first-year rider who had started pedaling mountain bikes at age 6 thanks to his cousin Carlos and the previous season had become Spanish Juniors cyclocross champion. His name was, and is, Diego Pablo Sevilla.

Since then, this athlete has never left the structure. After "watching it be born" by being part of it from the very beginning, he has watched it grow and, with only a brief stint with a training camp with Quick Step in Calpe in 2017, he has grown alongside it and will continue to be part of it at least through 2027, the end of his current contract. As an Under 23 rider, he specialized on the road and refined his role as a brave breakaway rider and a teammate his companions can always count on.

If Mirco Maestri is today the "captain" of Polti VisitMalta, the most experienced element and continuous inspiration for his teammates, Diego Sevilla is the keeper of the team's deep soul. A graduate in Physical and Sports Education and married since September 2024 to Veronica, an early childhood educator from his same hometown (San Martin de la Vega) Sevilla, at the age of 30 and after 13 years under Contador's banner, is experiencing his finest moment: in the last two months he has won the mountains classification at Tirreno-Adriatico, trained at altitude on the Sierra Nevada, achieved his best career placement finishing 4th in the second stage of the Tour of Hainan, and is spending the opening of the Giro d'Italia constantly on the attack wearing the blue Mediolanum jersey. On the inaugural day he beat Manuele Tarozzi on the early mountain passes, the next day another route up front but this time with teammate Maestri; yesterday a three-man escape with another teammate, Alessandro Tonelli, and the same admirable Tarozzi, whom Sevilla now leads by 30 points in the mountains classification.

Young sports director Francesco Gavazzi, who assists Giovanni Ellena on the Polti VisitMalta team cars, had said as much to our Federico Guido for the BlaBlaBike podcast: in the first week, while the climbs aren't yet the "real" ones and there's still room for Professional teams' dreams of glory, that jersey is a realistic objective. Mission accomplished, one of the themes of the Giro's opening stages in Italy will be the defense of the Maglia Azzurra.