Grand Tour review 2026: Visma edge UAE, Red Bull lead the GC charge and Picnic hit new lows

Fourteen stage wins. That is where Team Visma | Lease a Bike finished after this year’s three Grand Tours, one more than UAE Team Emirates-XRG and twice as many as anyone outside the big two.

Five of those came from Jonas Vingegaard at the Giro, with Sepp Kuss adding another before Visma opened the Tour by winning the team time trial. Then came the Vuelta, where Matthew Brennan won five stages and Wout van Aert two.

UAE’s 13 wins were even more concentrated around one rider. Tadej Pogačar took five stages at the Tour and another three at the Vuelta before his crash forced him out of the race. Jhonatan Narváez added three at the Giro, while Isaac del Toro and Igor Arrieta contributed one each.

Put into perspective, Visma won 22.6% of the 62 Grand Tour stages raced this season, with UAE taking 21.0%. Together, they accounted for 27 stage wins, almost 44% of the entire Grand Tour season.

There was hardly anything between them elsewhere either. Visma collected 47 stage top tens across the three Grand Tours. UAE finished with 42.

Soudal Quick-Step ended the year with seven wins, exactly half Visma’s total. Uno-X Mobility were next with four.

More striking, though, is what happened at Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe and Lidl-Trek. They finished the season with 48 and 49 stage top ten finishes respectively, more than almost anyone else in the peloton, yet both converted that consistency into just two victories.

Between them, the two teams recorded 97 top ten finishes and 29 podiums, but only four wins. That means barely four percent of their top ten finishes ended in victory.

It says a lot about the difference between being present and actually finishing the job. Red Bull and Lidl-Trek were in the mix, but compared with Visma and UAE, they simply did not turn enough strong days into wins.

Red Bull did not come close to Visma or UAE in terms of stage victories, but no team was as consistent at the sharp end of the GC. Jai Hindley finished third at the Giro, Remco Evenepoel second at the Tour and Primož Roglič second at the Vuelta.

Decathlon CMA CGM were not far behind. Felix Gall finished second at the Giro and third at the Vuelta, with Paul Seixas taking fourth at the Tour, making Decathlon the only other team to have their best placed rider inside the top five at all three Grand Tours.

Bahrain Victorious deserve a mention too. They did not reach a GC podium, but collected four top ten finishes across the three races, more than any other team. Afonso Eulálio finished sixth at the Giro, Lenny Martinez fifth at the Tour and Jakob Omrzel seventh at the Vuelta, where Santiago Buitrago also made the top ten.

For the first time in years, both Visma and UAE had to cope with losing their Grand Tour leader. For Vingegaard at the Tour and Pogačar at the Vuelta, it was the first time either had been forced to abandon a Grand Tour early.

UAE had already suffered a similar setback at the Giro, where Adam Yates dropped out early. As a result, the Tour was the only Grand Tour in which the team managed to place a rider near the very top of the GC.

Visma still salvaged strong results elsewhere. Kuss finished fifth at the Vuelta, while Davide Piganzoli took 13th at the Tour after Vingegaard’s withdrawal.

At the other end of the table, Picnic PostNL stand out for all the wrong reasons.

They raced all three Grand Tours, but across the entire season they failed to win a stage, never reached a stage podium and recorded just four top ten finishes. Of the teams that completed the full Giro, Tour and Vuelta programme, nobody came close to producing fewer results.

Their GC numbers were little better. Picnic managed only one top 30 finish, with their best riders finishing 57th at the Giro, 87th at the Tour and 27th at the Vuelta.

Lotto-Intermarché and NSN Cycling Team also went through all three Grand Tours without a stage win, although both were far more visible. Lotto collected 16 top ten finishes and three podiums, while NSN managed 26 top tens and three podiums.

The contrast becomes even more striking when looking at teams that only raced one Grand Tour.

Unibet Rose Rockets collected eight top ten finishes at the Giro alone, twice Picnic’s total across all three races. Team Polti VisitMalta managed seven in Italy, while TotalEnergies also recorded seven at the Tour and even placed a rider tenth overall.

It is hardly an isolated problem. The Dutch team currently sits 30th in the UCI ranking, with their struggles in the Grand Tours reflecting a difficult year across the board.