2009 Giro d'Italia, Stage 1 to Stage 11

The 2009 Giro d'Italia began on 9 May, with Stage 11 occurring on 20 May. The first stage, like it had been since 2007, was a team time trial, a stage where each member of the team raced together against the clock. Like most cycling Grand Tours do, the beginning of the 2009 Giro included a string of flat stages that were contested by sprinters. These stages were contested by Alessandro Petacchi and Mark Cavendish, among others, with Petacchi in victory becoming one of the only riders to defeat Cavendish in a sprint in the 2009 season.

At the end of the race's first week and beginning of its second were three hilly medium-mountain stages. These stages took the Giro through Austria and Switzerland before returning to Italy. Each of these stages took more than five hours to complete, and the rain that fell each day combined with the difficulties presented by the numerous ascents and descents made the courses potentially unsafe in the riders' opinion. This opinion was perhaps validated by the life-threatening injuries sustained by Pedro Horrillo in the eighth stage after he crashed while descending a mountain. While the ninth stage was meant to be a showy criterium in celebration of this being the 100th anniversary of the Giro d'Italia, the riders collectively protested the safety conditions of that stage and the ones before it. This meant it would be neutralized, with every rider receiving the same finishing time as the stage winner regardless of when they finished.

The tenth stage was the longest of this year's Giro, and one of its most mountainous. It, along with a stage later in the race, were both called the race's queen stage, its most difficult stage. Danilo Di Luca won this stage to pad his overall lead going into the second half of the Giro.

Legend[1]
	Denotes the leader of the General classification		Denotes the leader of the Mountains classification
	Denotes the leader of the Points classification		Denotes the leader of the Young rider classification
	s.t. indicates that the rider crossed the finish line in the same group as the one receiving the time above him, and was therefore credited with the same finishing time.