'He's still very, very hungry' - Behind Jonas Vingegaard's Giro-Tour double bid

It feels a long time ago now, as Jonas Vingegaard arrives in Bulgaria as the unimpeachable favourite for the Giro d’Italia, but his year began amid a vague sense of drift. 

Before Vingegaard had even turned a pedal in anger in 2026, he had lost his long-term coach Tim Heemskerk and key climbing domestique Simon Yates. The start of his season, meanwhile, was delayed after a separate sequence of misfortunes. 

Vingegaard suffering an unusual training crash when he appeared to be trying to ride away from a following fan, and a subsequent illness meant he withdrew from an anticipated clash with Remco Evenepoel and Isaac del Toro at the UAE Tour.

Although Vingegaard was just months removed from victory at the Vuelta a España, and although he had been the only rider to come remotely close to giving Tadej Pogačar a race at last year’s Tour de France, his place in the hierarchy was suddenly under question. 

2020s cycling is relentless that way, but sports director Marc Reef is adamant that the external noise never really penetrated the Visma | Lease a Bike camp. The succession of bad news was merely coincidence rather than carelessness. 

“Maybe in that one moment certain things came together for him, and I can imagine that, from the outside, it looks like there’s something going on,” Visma | Lease a Bike sports director Marc Reef tells Domestique. “But from speaking to Jonas at the end of last season and then seeing him at the training camp in December, we saw how motivated he was, how much he was into the team, and how much energy and good vibes he was spreading to the whole group.”

Once Vingegaard belatedly got his season under way at Paris-Nice, any doubts about his status were quickly allayed. Evenepoel has grand ambitions after moving teams and Paul Seixas is burning through the stages of his development, but Vingegaard’s crushing victories at Paris-Nice and the Volta a Catalunya underlined that he still remains the man most likely to challenge Pogačar’s pre-eminence in July.

Vingegaard had long made a habit of delivering exhibitions at early-season stage races when he’s fit and well, and Reef downplays the idea that he especially needed such victories this year to salve morale bruised by a difficult winter. 

“He’s a winner, so he was racing to win bike races that he had never won before, like Paris-Nice,” Reef says. “But the way he won it, that gave a lot of confidence to the team. And it’s only a week gap to Catalunya, so to win that one too by beating a lot of strong guys with a big advantage, that only gives more confidence for the period that’s coming.”

What’s coming is, depending on one’s point of view, either the most audacious challenge of Vingegaard’s career or a sobering dose of realism. By riding making his Giro debut this year, Vingegaard is looking to complete a full set of Grand Tour victories, but the corsa rosa also presents an obvious chance to take something tangible from his season before heading into July as a distinct outsider against this stratospheric iteration of Pogačar.

Then again, very similar things were being said of Pogačar in 2024 when he opted to line out at the Giro after suffering crushing back-to-back defeats against Vingegaard at the Tour. After sweeping the Giro, a retooled Pogačar snatched the Tour crown back from Vingegaard, racking up six stages along the way.

Visma insist that Vingegaard’s decision to ride the Giro is inspired partly by his desire to make history by winning all three Grand Tours and partly by the team’s credo that he will perform better in July with a three-week race already in his legs.

“He was looking for new motivation and a new trigger,” Reef says. “And we were really behind that idea. Last year when Jonas did the Tour and the Vuelta, we saw that his level was improving slightly in the second Grand Tour, so that was an extra reason to go for it this year.”

Vingegaard will have gone almost six weeks without racing when he sets out from Nessebar on Friday, but the long break – much of it spent training at altitude – seems unlikely to have any negative impact. In 2024, he had a much more significant layoff, in every sense, between his severe crash at Itzulia Basque Country and the Tour, and he was immediately up to speed during the Italian Grand Départ. 

The bigger unknown is the Giro itself, which will be entirely new to Vingegaard, and two-time winner Gilberto Simoni is among those to suggest that some unexpected obstacles might cascade into his path across the three weeks.

Visma, mind, have plenty of experience in that regard. Primoz Roglic won the Giro for the team in 2023, seizing the race at the last from Geraint Thomas after some indifferent displays early in the race, while Simon Yates produced a late heist on the Colle delle Finestre last year just when the podium looked the summit of his ambition.

“Every Grand Tour has its own character,” Reef says. “The thing about the Giro, and I’ve experienced it myself with Primoz and Simon, is that it is really unpredictable, and that is what we need to be ready for. The Giro is never over until it’s over. We have to be ready to race all the way to Rome.”

The expectation, of course, is that Vingegaard will make a fast start, and he will surely look to lay down early markers on the summit finish at the Blockhaus on stage 7 and the time trial to Massa at the start of week two. “For sure, we have an idea how we want to race, but that’s something that you guys will see as we go,” says Reef.

Regardless of whether Vingegaard is in pink or not, it’s easy to imagine Visma carrying the bulk of the responsibility for controlling the race, not least with João Almeida absent and unable to lead UAE Team Emirates-XRG.

Vingegaard’s supporting cast has been selected accordingly. Victor Campenaerts will have key role in shepherding him through the opening week, while Sepp Kuss and Wilco Kelderman should be to the fore in the mountains, along with young Italian talent Davide Piganzoli.

“Even with all the riders that were initially on the roster, we would have been the main favourite, and that’s still the same now, and we don’t walk away from it,” Reef says of his team’s responsibilities. “We are 100% prepared for this race, we need to be ready to do everything.” 

In another era, Vingegaard’s tilt at the Giro-Tour double, on the back of crushing wins at Paris-Nice and the Volta a Catalunya, would be the story of the season, but the graph has been skewed by Pogačar’s astonishing levels of performances over the past two and a half years.

Vingegaard has made an imposing, flawless start to 2026, but he has still been utterly outshone by Pogačar’s annexation of three more Monuments, plus Strade Bianche and the Tour de Romandie. 

He must be used to it by now, but there’s an argument that Vingegaard’s achievements have been underrated simply because Pogačar’s dextrous talent demands so much of our attention. As well as his three Grand Tour victories – two of them at the expense of Pogačar himself – Vingegaard rarely misses in week-long races and he’s on the cusp of notching up a half century of career wins.

“If you compare it to the standard of Pogačar, then everybody, of course, is a little less, because is doing what he wants, attacking from far,” Reef says. “But Jonas is a different type of rider and a different person, and he has already achieved something big if you compare it to the history of cycling. 

“And besides the Grand Tours and all the other stage races that he won, the way he has fought back after huge setbacks is something that really marks him out. I think it’s something that people don’t see from the outside, but we do and we rate him very highly.”

That resilience brought Vingegaard to second place at the 2024 Tour just weeks after a crash at Itzulia Basque Country that left him in intensive care with a collapsed lung, as well as broken ribs and collarbone. But despite that remarkable comeback, Vingegaard confessed recently that he was still affected by the crash until the beginning of this year. 

“I feel like I’ve spent the last two years fighting my way back to that level, to being in some way the Jonas I was before my crash,” Vingegaard said. “I feel, without consciously knowing it, that it has had a greater influence than I thought.”

Danish reporters have also sensed that Vingegaard seems more at ease in the spotlight than at any point in his career to date. The reticent interviewee we saw en route to his two Tour victories has been replaced by a quietly more expansive and confident speaker, as TV2’s Søren Reedtz noted after Paris-Nice. “Can interviews in March tell us anything about his Tour chances in July? Certainly not,” Reedtz wrote. “But to me it tells of a man who seems content with his place in life and his form on the bike.”

Reef doesn’t dismiss the idea, putting it down to Vingegaard growing into his role as a leader, both at Visma and in the peloton. 

“When you grow year by year and situation by situation, I think that it does something to a person and also to him,” Reef says. “And when you realise that you’re one of the strongest riders, that boosts your confidence, of course. This year, he’s calm, he’s confident, and he’s more relaxed. 

“But above all, with this approach that we are having this season, he’s really, really motivated. He’s been in cycling a long time, he’s already won a lot, but he’s still very, very hungry…”