He’s hoping to go better at this year’s race and is in great form after a solid spring. Hugh is coming off a second-placed finish at the Tour of the Alps. We caught up with the Brit before the start of the 2023 Giro.

Excited to be honest. It has been a different build to last year. I am in pretty good shape. I am feeling good, so I am looking forward to it. Hopefully I can do better than last year and not make the same mistakes. I’ll try to get a good result. What that result is, I don’t know, but with the team that we have and the way we have raced so far this year, we can aim high. There are going to be ups and downs like there always are at the Giro, but hopefully we can come through the other side of it as a strong team with a strong set of results between us.

Nothing specific. I have just had better consistency with better health really. Last year I was a bit unfortunate with a few health related incidents at bad times, and I think that lack of consistency at home in training just left me a little bit under par, so hopefully this year, having been healthy all spring and having good results to fall back on, I have got some confidence there behind me, so I think this year can be a good year. Of all the grand tours, the Giro has ups and downs, but I am optimistic at the moment and hope for something high.

With the exception of the time trialing, it's pretty normal for the Giro with a wide variety of stages that are all hard. There is no free stage. There are a few sprint stages that look quite nice. You can look forward to those, but there are a lot of stages where you can’t really decide what is going to happen—a breakaway or maybe a GC fight or a sprint or a small sprint, so there is a lot to look forward to and a lot to be ready for. It is going to be a hard three weeks, like it usually is. The last week looks tough, and to finish with a hard time trial—you could see something exciting on that day.

It’s the old cliché of take it day by day. If there is a day where you can make time, then you have to make time. If there is a day when you are saving time and limiting losses then you have to do that well. Every day, you have to take it as it comes, but if you look on paper, there are big stages in the final week, so to peak for them would be perfect, but equally in the first time trial and the time trial in the middle, you could definitely use being in form for those. Hopefully I can measure my effort over the three weeks and be done by Rome. I don’t want to have to start trying to make up places like last year or get back into the race in the third week. I would rather use that power and that strength to be doing something more productive in a way, but to be fresh in the final week, to arrive in the final week as fresh as possible, without losing any time or without losing much time is the goal.

Yeah. Absolutely. Considering who is here, and the way things are now in the racing, time trials are so important and if you have a bad day, you can lose ground to a lot of people now. It’s not like there are only one or two people who are good at time trialing. The whole top end of the peloton is good, so it is important to have good days on those three days. I have done quite a lot of work on my TT bike this season. I have done quite a lot of hours on it. So hopefully I will be as ready as I can be for those three days.

You’ve got to be there to really know. When you are there, everything just sort of makes sense, the culture. I think for the staff as well. It is maybe not the easiest grand tour with the traveling and longer drives and stuff but I think for them it is a nice race with nice hotels and food. It is a nice experience. And similar for the riders. The style of racing at the Giro is not old-fashioned, but at times it can be more relaxed and more traditional, like it was maybe ten, 15, 20 years ago. So that is nice as well. Just everything, the whole event: the pink, the starts with all of the balloons, and barriers and things is just nice. It feels right. The fans as well. Italy is a knowledgeable cycling country. The fans really appreciate seeing riders up close. In Italy, people are looking with their own eyes, not through a camera. I think they really appreciate that up close contact.