'Halfway there' - Vingegaard plots next step of Giro-Tour double attempt

In Rome on Sunday evening, Jonas Vingegaard acknowledged that it was only half-time. Although he had just completed a full set of Grand Tour victories by winning the Giro d’Italia, this was just the first leg of a tilt at the double. The Tour de France, and a sixth July rendezvous with Tadej Pogačar, is just five weeks away.

“Together with the team, we decided to attempt the Giro-Tour double in November,” Vingegaard said, according to La Gazzetta dello Sport. “We’re now halfway there, and we believe in it more than ever.”

The Giro-Tour double is the Everest of Grand Tour racing. Nobody gets there by accident. Fausto Coppi was the first to conquer the summit in 1949 and he did it again in 1952. Jacques Anquetil emulated him in 1964, and then Eddy Merckx achieved the feat in 1970, 1972 and 1974.

Bernard Hinault garlanded his era of Grand Tour dominance with Giro-Tour doubles in 1982 and 1985. Stephen Roche claimed both races during his year of years in 1987, when he added the World Championships for good measure.

Miguel Induráin was the first to achieve doubles in successive years in 1992 and 1993, though he fell short of the hat-trick in 1994. Marco Pantani reached his apotheosis by winning the Giro and Tour in 1998.

In the 21st century, however, attempting the Giro-Tour double fell out of favour. Riders like Ivan Basso, Alberto Contador and Chris Froome made attempts, but all paid a price for their efforts in May. There were growing murmurs that it might no longer be possible in modern cycling.

Pogačar gave lie to that assertion in 2024, winning six stages en route to annexing the Giro, and then doing exactly the same at the Tour in July. When it became clear last winter that RCS Sport was building a Giro route expressly to facilitate a tilt at the double, Vingegaard and Visma | Lease a Bike decided to take up the challenge as Pogačar had done two years previously. 

Vingegaard had just won the Vuelta a España after placing second at the Tour, and both rider and team insisted that his condition had been better in his second Grand Tour of the season. They returned to that theme every time the Tour was mentioned during the Giro, and Vingegaard did so again in Rome on Sunday.

“I’ve already noticed that if I do two Grand Tours in a row, I go better on the second one,” Vingegaard said. “Time will tell, but I’ve come out of this Giro in good shape, clearly improving since I started it. I see that as a very good sign.”

That was the big gamble, of course. Giro victory depleted Contador’s resources for the Tour in 2015 (as it had done in 2011, when his win was rescinded in any case), and Froome also fell short at the 2018 Tour after his tumultuous Giro triumph.

Pogačar, however, had made it through the 2024 Giro without anyone laying a glove on him, and the race proved an ideal springboard towards the Tour. Vingegaard and Visma would have hoped for a similarly tranquil Giro, and that’s what they encountered.

Vingegaard was without peer on the race, and apart from a sub-par time trial on stage 10 and a couple of days nursing a cold, he seemed to escape from the Giro without betraying any real signs of distress.

“If you get out of the Giro completely on your knees and you need to take two weeks of rest to be able to train again, then it wouldn’t be a good preparation. But I believe that I’m not on my knees. I have a good feeling coming out of this Giro as well,” Vingegaard told reporters in Piancavallo on Saturday evening. “So I also believe in the whole training here and I also feel like I improved a lot throughout this Giro itself. I actually think that it’s the best preparation for me and for the team.”

The thought was echoed by his teammate Sepp Kuss, who will also be part of Vingegaard’s supporting cast at the Tour. The American helped himself to a stage win at Piani di Pezzè on Friday and he was adamant that his Giro exertions wouldn’t be costly in July.

“If I hadn’t been on the Giro, I would have been at an altitude camp in May,” Kuss said, according to L’Équipe. “I think that would have been at least as tiring, and I prefer to race.”

Back in 2015, Contador raced – and won – the Route du Sud between the Giro and Tour, a flex that didn’t do him any favours in July. Not surprisingly, Vingegaard will mirror Pogačar’s more cautious 2024 approach in his double attempt. Like Pogačar two years ago, he will not pin on a number again until the Grand Départ in Barcelona on July 4, and he already has a precise plan for the next five weeks.

Vingegaard starts his Tour build-up with a rest period, including a few days in Rome with his family, before he returns home to Denmark to train. Matteo Jorgenson and a sizeable chunk of Visma’s Tour squad will be in action at the Tour Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes next week. 

After the race, they will join Vingegaard, Kuss and Victor Campenaerts at a pre-Tour training camp in the squad’s habitual June base of Tignes. They will spend two weeks there before tapering towards the Tour, which gets under way with a team time trial in Barcelona.

The final verdict will be rendered in Paris on July 26, of course, but the first leg of Vingegaard’s double attempt could hardly have gone more smoothly. 

“I’m in a good place. I think that if I compare how I was in the Tour last year and how I came out of the Tour, I’m at a better level than I was last year,” Vingegaard told TV2 on Sunday. “I’m coming out of the Giro fine, and I think there’s something to build on towards the Tour.”