Gaia Realini walks into the room, laughs, points to the cast on her arm, and laughs again. “Teammate! You’re my teammate,” she points – and giggles – to the reporter’s own cast. A little while later, when discussing her English proficiency, she howls again, another successful delivery of self-deprecation. When the topic turns to her family, she chuckles once more, as she does when discussing her hobbies. Sat in her charming and engaging company, it would be easy to mistake the baby-faced Lidl-Trek rider as a playful joke, but that would be foolhardy: Gaia Realini has ambitions of being the best in the world.
At 23 and in her third year as a WorldTour rider, the diminutive climber from central Italy will be assuming ever greater responsibilities in 2025, now that her compatriot and confidant Elisa Longo Borghini has departed for UAE Team ADQ. But that pressure and expectation doesn’t faze Realini – she’s going to be the best; she’s sure of it. She wouldn’t have finished third in both the Giro d’Italia and Vuelta a España Femenina, as well as fifth in her maiden Tour de France Femmes, if she wasn’t blessed with talent.
“They have more experience and are older than me, but I think I need one or two more years, maybe three, and the gap is closed for sure,” she says when discussing Demi Vollering and Kasia Niewiadoma, the standout GC riders at the moment. “I think this is my position.” She’s going to be a future champion of the sport? “Yes, yes,” she answers. “It might take three years to get more experience, but the Trek team believe in me, and I really have good teammates who also believe in me.” She’s pretty confident, comes the retort. “Yes,” she states, affirmatively.
Realini picked up a bike at the age of seven at the suggestion of her dad. “And I never stopped,” she says. “It was love at first sight. Until now it’s the same feeling as the first time. My first race was at the age of seven and I DNFed, and in my second race I won. I said, ‘OK, I think this is my sport’.” From the family house, where she grew up with her work-at-home mother and petrol station-working father, as well as her older sister – “we are really the opposite people: Gaia is A and my sister is B,” she says – Realini would tackle the Giro d’Italia-famed Blockhaus climb time and time again. “I always go to the Blockhaus. I tell my mum: ‘if you don’t see me after five hours, call the police, but for sure go to Blockhaus as that’s where I’ll be’.” At 27km, it was and still is the perfect training ground for a burgeoning lightweight climber.
Born in the summer of 2001, Realini was just two-years-old when national hero Marco Pantani passed away. His legend lives on in her and her country’s hearts. “My main inspiration is Pantani,” she says. “He was really, really strong on the climbs.” What she most resonates with, though, was his mental strength. “After big problems, he was always really strong in the head. The first point in cycling is your head. That’s my strength, too. The head is so important.”
She’s certainly not got any issues at adapting to her surroundings. Two years ago, she was effectively mute when it came to speaking English. “I knew nothing, really nothing. Only hello,” she says. “I didn’t really study, but Elynor Bäckstedt was my teacher on the team for the past two years. One time I understood one word, then the next time three words, and then four. Now I don’t understand all the words, but more and more.” She’s told her English is now impressive. “Chapeau, Gaia, eh, chapeau,” she laughs. At home, she can mostly be found with her feet up. “In this sport and job, there is stress, so when I’m without the bike,” she exhales deeply, “breathe, relax. Gaia is really easy off the bike.”
Chill off the bike, but a potent force on it. As soon as she signed for Lidl-Trek at the beginning of 2023, Realini wasted no time in announcing herself: she finished second to Longo Borghini at the UAE Tour, won her first pro race weeks later, and then won a stage and finished on the podium of the Vuelta. “For sure my best memory so far is when I beat Annemiek [Van Vleuten in the Vuelta]. That was incredible for me, my first year for a WorldTour team, and in a big WorldTour race, and against Annemiek who was world champion. It was big. She attacked first, and I was thinking: do I try, do I not try, have I got the legs or not, is this my moment? On the radio they were shouting, ‘Go Gaia, today is your day’, but I was thinking, ‘no, come on, this is impossible in the sprint’. But I tried my best and they were right: it was my day, it was my race.”
Third at the Giro and the first-ever Tour de l’Avenir Femmes followed, and she was only two minutes off the podium at the Tour de France last summer. It’s been a seamless ascent into the big time. “I will miss Elisa as she has been my point of reference in the last two years, but now it’s my turn to take responsibility in the bigger races, and I’m confident I can do it.”
Her preparation for the season took a hit when she suffered a hairline fracture on her right elbow in mid-January, a gust of wind from a passing truck sending her to the ground, but she’s not panicking. “2025 hasn’t started in a beautiful mood, but I’m confident,” she says. “I hope to get good results in at least one Grand Tour. Last year, I worked a lot for Elisa, and this year it’s my turn.”
On the way out, she cracks another joke. “Ah, the roller’s set up for me, huh,” she laughs as she sights a stationary bike. Gaia Realini, the future best in the world, is the joking assassin.
