Davide Piganzoli explains the biggest difference between the Giro and the Tour

“At the Tour, it is difficult to find a quiet moment,” Piganzoli told Bici.pro. “There was never a day when we really rested. At the Giro, there were moments when the peloton slowed down. Here, that hardly ever happened.”

Piganzoli had little time to prepare for that experience. He was called into Visma | Lease a Bike’s Tour squad shortly before the start after an infection in an elbow wound ruled Wout van Aert out of the race.

Piganzoli had already been told he would ride the Tour before winning the Route d’Occitanie. His work at the Giro had been enough to convince Visma.

“The team told me I was the rider who had shown most clearly that he could help Jonas,” Piganzoli said. “That made me very happy. It was an important sign of trust."

Vingegaard crashed on stage 15 and abandoned with a fractured collarbone. For Visma, the race for yellow was over. Piganzoli, by then the team’s highest placed rider, was given the freedom to look for a stage win.

“It was a shame about Jonas, especially because it happened on one of the stages we had targeted,” he said. “After that, we tried to make the best of the situation.”

With little to gain or lose in the general classification, Piganzoli held something back in the time trial at Thonon les Bains and saved his legs for the final week. The Giro was still catching up with him.

“I was really tired until the end of the second week,” he said. “The final rest day helped and I started to feel better, but the fatigue came back in the last two stages.”

He went on the attack on stages 19 and 20, then switched to helping Sepp Kuss when it became clear he did not have the legs to contest the win. Piganzoli eventually finished 14th in Paris over an hour behind Tadej Pogačar.

The Giro and Tour in the same season had taken their toll.

“Doing both is certainly difficult,” he said. “Now I need some time to recover.”

The pressure, however, had been greater in Italy. The Giro had been part of his programme from the start of the season and carried more personal expectation.

“I had prepared for the Giro from the beginning of the year,” Piganzoli said. “I wanted to show the team that I could do the job they had given me.”

His Tour call came late, and he arrived with fewer expectations.

“I was quite relaxed,” he said. “I knew I was in good shape. From the numbers I had done at the Giro, I thought I could stay with the first 15 or 20 riders here.”

He finished inside that range, but quickly noticed how much deeper the field was in France.

“At the Giro, when I went to the front and set the pace, there might be five or ten riders left,” he said. “Here, I looked behind and there were still 50.”

“Mentally, that can be a little discouraging.”

Visma had still believed it could beat Pogačar before Vingegaard’s crash, despite a deficit of around four minutes.

“As long as Jonas was in the race, we were riding to win the Tour,” Piganzoli said. “We were not riding for second place.”

The team felt a long, sustained effort in the third week could suit Vingegaard better than repeated accelerations in the first two weeks.

“Jonas finds changes of rhythm more difficult, but on a steady pace we thought we could do something,” Piganzoli said. “At Le Markstein, when he started riding on the front, Pogacar looked less brilliant than usual.”

The crash ended that plan. Piganzoli still left Paris with 14th place, a first Tour in his legs and a much clearer idea of what separates it from the Giro.

“Racing here with riders of this level helps me grow,” he said. “It gives me a lot of motivation to keep improving.”