2026 Giro route has been pitched at Vingegaard and Evenepoel – but will they swing at it?

Fifteen years ago, after unveiling the notoriously demanding 2011 Giro d’Italia route, then-director Angelo Zomegnan defended himself against the charge that the corsa rosa was so difficult that it was scaring off the best stage racing talent in the world.

“The Giro has to be hard, it has to be difficult,” Zomegnan insisted. “If the riders want an easy race, with no climbs, no descents, no rain or wind, they should go elsewhere in May.”

If Zomegnan sounded bullish, it was probably because he had already struck a deal to bring Alberto Contador, the outstanding Grand Tour rider of his day, to the Giro, but events in 2011 would still bear out the criticisms levelled against such an extreme route. 

Contador duly won a Giro that would later be stricken from his palmarès when he was belatedly sanctioned for his 2010 clenbuterol positive, but his May exertions left him visibly short of his best for the Tour, where he laboured to a later-revoked fifth overall. 

Serious attempts at the Giro-Tour double were rare over the next decade. Contador got halfway there in 2015, as did Chris Froome in 2018, but both men found their usually sharpness irretrievably blunted come July. By the 2020s, it seemed the grandees of the peloton had been warned off the notion of doubling up altogether. Egan Bernal never even considered it when he won Giro in 2021.

That was until 2024, when RCS Sport finally realised the only way they were ever going to get Tadej Pogačar to ride their race was to design a course that would allow him to hold something in reserve for the Tour. Reducing the total altitude gain by 8,000m on the previous year persuaded Pogačar to take the plunge, and a dominant Giro-Tour double followed.

That experience clearly informed Mauro Vegni’s thinking this autumn as he drew up the final Giro route of his tenure as race director. After failing to attract Jonas Vingegaard a year ago, Vegni and RCS have made another clear play for the Dane by dialling back the total climbing relative to 2025. 

Above all, the high mountain stages are fewer than in recent past, with only two - stage 14 to Pila and stage 19 in the Dolomites - offering extreme tests of endurance. They have also made a very deliberate appeal to Remco Evenepoel by inserting a 40km time trial at the start of the second week. 

The question when the lights went up in Rome on Monday afternoon was obvious: has Vegni done enough to convince Vingegaard and Evenepoel to take a tilt at the maglia rosa in 2026?

At first glance, it’s hard to argue that RCS Sport haven’t done their bit. The total climbing on the Giro is just over 49,000 metres – not as low as the 45,907m Pogačar faced in 2024 but still a reduction on last year’s 52,325 and nothing like the excesses of editions past.

Still, it’s reductive in the extreme to look at a Grand Tour through the optic of total altitude gain. The configuration of the route and, specifically, the distribution of mountain stages are ultimately of greater significance.

On this metric, too, this Giro looks built to appeal to a rider with designs on a double. The opening half of the race is relatively gentle in terms of climbing.  When ASO presented the 2026 Tour in October, they billed the route as being “in crescendo,” saving the hardest for last, and a similar principle has been applied by Vegni and his replacement Stefano Allocchio.

There is a summit finish on the Blockhaus on stage 7 and a tough day in the Apennines on stage 9, but the most arduous days all come late in the race: the trek through Val d’Aosta on stage 14, the mountainous jaunt into Switzerland on stage 16, the Dolomite tappone on stage 19 and the double ascent of Piancavallo on stage 20. Even then, the Carì and Piancavallo stages are not as demanding as had initially been rumoured this Autumn. And, of course,  there is no guarantee the Dolomite stage will be raced in full given the obvious risk of inclement weather at that altitude in May.

If Vingegaard really wants to try to complete the full set of Grand Tours without compromising his Tour de France hopes unduly, it’s hard to imagine he’ll find a better opportunity than this year, at least in terms of course design. RCS Sport has pitched a route directly into his strike zone – it’s clearly hard enough for him to win it but not so extreme as to immediately scupper his prospects of a Tour podium (at least) in July. 

In the coming weeks, Vingegaard and Visma | Lease a Bike must decide whether to take a swing at it or save themselves for an all-or-nothing showdown with Pogačar at the Tour. It will be interesting if Richard Plugge, a proponent of the thwarted OneCycling project, opts to wean Vingegaard off his Tour-centric vision of cycling.

Similar questions will be pondered at Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe, where there must have been more than a touch of deflation at the relative paucity of time trialling kilometres on the 2026 Tour route. After the opening team time trial in Barcelona, the lone individual test is just 26km in length and it comes on stage 16 – by which point it might already be almost incidental to the big picture if Pogačar keeps on doing Pogačar things in 2026.

Although the Giro only has slightly more individual time trialling (the 40.2km test from Viareggio to Massa on stage 10), its positioning on the route makes it of significantly greater strategic importance.

Evenepoel’s 2022 Vuelta a España victory owed much to his crushing victory in the stage 10 time trial to Alicante, which helped him amass an imposing overall lead. The Tuscan time trial on the 2026 Giro presents Evenepoel – the three-time world champion in the discipline – with a clear and obvious opportunity to place a hefty down payment on final victory. Like the 2022 Vuelta, Evenepoel could ride to defend his lead thereafter, dosing his efforts carefully rather than chasing the race. Of the mountain stages that follow, perhaps only the Dolomite tappone would seriously worry Evenepoel.

But although Evenepoel has publicly floated the prospect of trying the Giro-Tour double, he has also made a point of voicing disappointment at rumours that the corsa rosa would only feature one time trial. The implicit message seemed to be that his head could be turned by the addition of a second time trial, but that hasn’t materialised.

Rather than build a race expressly for Evenepoel, RCS Sport has clearly tried to hedge its bets. The clear intent is to attract both Vingegaard and Evenepoel to the race and thus avoid the kind of procession experienced with Pogačar in 2024 – even if UAE’s Giro leader, whether it’s Isaac del Toro or João Almeida, would obviously fancy giving them a run for their money. The reality, of course, is that Vingegaard and Evenepoel could both decide this Giro route isn’t entirely to their liking, and they might instead opt to throw everything at the Tour.

Yet focusing on the Tour, at least if Pogačar maintains his entirely unassailable 2025 levels, seems a lot like an exercise in damage limitation. Vingegaard and Evenepoel would essentially set out from Barcelona racing for second and third place behind this particular vintage of Pogačar, and their hopes of victory would rest on either overreach or ill fortune on the part of the defending champion.

Racing the Giro carries the obvious risk of compromising their Tours, but there is also a far greater chance of reward in Rome in May than there is in Paris in July. 

Vingegaard and Evenepoel both know the odds, but it’s still not clear if they’ll take the gamble.