sentences:  Scic-Bottecchia finishing as the winners of the team classification, ranking each of the twenty teams contesting the race by lowest cumulative time.Thirteen of the fourteen teams invited to the 1979 Giro d'Italia participated in the race.Kas were forced to decline their invitation, in favor of racing the Vuelta a España, by the Spanish Federation which wanted the "best Hispanic" peloton to be competing in Vuelta that year.