'Italy isn't the same' - The Giro is Vingegaard's to lose, but it's rarely that simple

The noises emanating from the Visma | Lease a Bike camp weren’t entirely positive over the winter, with Jonas Vingegaard losing his longstanding coach Tim Heemskerk and delaying the start of his season due to illness.

But once he pinned on a number, the doubts quickly started to recede. Commanding triumphs at Paris-Nice and the Volta a Catalunya confirmed what we already knew and what some often seem to choose to forget: Vingegaard is one of the very best riders in the world right now and one of the very best stage racers the sport has seen.

It remains to be seen if Vingegaard’s 2026 condition will suffice to regain the Tour de France crown from Tadej Pogačar, but it looks more than good enough to win the Giro at the first attempt. The sense of inevitability about that endeavour has sharpened further over the past few days with the news that João Almeida (UAE Team Emirates-XRG), who pushed Vingegaard so close at last year’s Vuelta a España, has been ruled out of the Giro.

Mikel Landa (Soudal-QuickStep) has also signalled his absence, while it seems only a matter of time before EF Education-EasyPost confirm that Richard Carapaz, third a year ago, will not be fit enough to race.

With Pogačar, Isaac del Toro, Remco Evenepoel, Florian Lipowitz and (perhaps) Paul Seixas all focused firmly on the Tour, the list of potential rivals for Vingegaard is dwindling. On the evidence of last week’s Tour of the Alps, Giulio Pellizzari (Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe) looks best equipped to challenge Vingegaard, while Egan Bernal (Ineos) has also shown distinctly encouraging signs. 

But it’s also true that neither man was really competing in the same bike race as Vingegaard at last year’s Vuelta, and a podium finish here would already mark a notable success.

In the absence of a rider of his exalted levels, then, the Giro is clearly Vingegaard’s to lose. But is it a foregone conclusion?

Two-time Giro champion Gilberto Simoni insists it is not. Yes, Vingegaard has won the Tour twice and placed second three times, and yes, he is chasing a full set of Grand Tour wins next month, but Simoni is adamant that the corsa rosa poses a different challenge to anything the Dane has encountered so far in his career.

“The Tour de France is a difficult race because it’s intense, but the Giro d’Italia is complicated as well as hard. They’re not the same thing; we can’t say that,” Simoni tells Domestique at the Tour of the Alps, where he has been quietly impressed by Pellizzari’s progress.

“Vingegaard is certainly the favourite, he’s the star name of the Giro. But whether he’s going to win it or not, well, we’ll see after the first two weeks…”

In particular, Simoni points to the possibility of wretched weather at the Giro. Vingegaard may hail from rainswept Glyngøre, but some of his best work has come on days of soaring temperatures in the white heat of the Tour. By contrast, the bulk of his time losses to Pogacar on his sparkling 2021 Tour debut came during the cold, rain-soaked passage through the Alps. On the other hand, Vingegaard mastered some miserable conditions on the pivotal stage of this year’s Paris-Nice, questionable sartorial choices notwithstanding.

“In Italy in the month of May, your first opponent is the weather,” Simoni says. “Then there are some very specific kinds of climbs and descents and routes and landscapes. Italy isn’t the same from north to south, the roads change, the difficulties change, and above all, the weather changes. In May, the weather is a real rival.”

Tudor directeur sportif Matteo Tosatto knows a thing or two about the inherent unpredictability of the Giro. During his time at Ineos, he guided Tao Geoghegan Hart to a surprise victory in 2020 and a year later, he saw how pre-race favourite Egan Bernal endured a late scare from an unexpected source before carrying pink to Milan. 

As a rider, meanwhile, Tosatto was by Alberto Contador’s side when he won the 2015 Giro as the almost unbackable favourite, but only after all sorts of obstacles tumbled into his path across the three weeks. Above all, Contador got caught up in a game of whack-a-mole as Astana launched onslaught upon onslaught across the three weeks. Come the Colle delle Finestre on the final weekend, an exhausted Contador even risked losing a race he already appeared to have won several times over. 

“In a lot of races these days, when riders like Pogacar, Van der Poel, Evenepoel or Seixas are on the start line, you might say you’re racing for second place from the off, but you’d never say that at the Giro d’Italia. Never,” Tosatto says. 

“With all due respect to Vingegaard, it’s the first Giro he’s ever done, and it’s not the Tour or the Vuelta, so there is a bit of the unknown for him. He’ll come up against teams that are well prepared. Anything can happen.”

The point is echoed by EF Education-EasyPost sports director Tejay van Garderen, who twice placed fifth overall at the Tour, but whose GC challenge on the 2017 Giro proved a trying one. The American did, however, salvage a fine stage win in Ortisei from that Giro, where he witnessed its nuances firsthand. 

Even if the WorldTour era has created a touch more uniformity among Grand Tours, Van Garderen believes that the Giro remains resolutely different to the Tour in at least one critical aspect – the strength in depth of the teams. A race where the break almost always has a fighting chance of going to the distance can quickly spiral beyond the control of any one squad.

“The Giro is a gruelling, hard race, but everyone sends the best of the best to the Tour,” Van Garderen says. “So even if a team has one of the best riders, they might still keep some of the best support riders in reserves for the Tour, so that leaves it a bit more open for breakaways.”

That’s certainly the case for Vingegaard and Visma, who will hold Matteo Jorgenson and Wout van Aert in reserve for the Tour de France. Vingegaard will still be backed by a redoubtable team, likely the strongest in the Giro, but it won’t be straightforward to bolt the race down without forming some alliances.

“We always joke around that the Giro is a gift shop for the break, apart from when Tadej Pogačar was there with UAE and they steamrolled every breakaway and he won 10 stages or whatever…” Van Garderen says. “But typically, in the Giro, teams have to be more conservative, because they don’t have the same depth. You see a lot more riders going up the road and having their chance at a stage victory, as opposed to the Tour where everything is so locked down.”

Many of these same arguments were put forward before Pogačar’s Giro debut in 2024, mind, only for the Slovenian to be utterly untroubled across his serene three weeks in Italy. His lone setback came on the opening day, when he was surprisingly outsprinted by Jhonatan Narváez to the first pink jersey. Pogačar took it off him the next day at Oropa, and by the end of the first week, the race had become a public training camp for the Tour.

With Almeida now confirmed absent and with Pellizzari still an emerging force, it seems difficult to picture anybody truly discommoding Vingegaard, based on both past pedigree and current form. The prospect of a Pogačar-esque procession from Vingegaard looms large over this Giro, even if Simoni pushes back firmly against the idea, maintaining that his armoury is not as complete as that of the world champion.

“They’re two different riders,” says Simoni, winner in 2001 and 2003, but surprisingly beaten by his teammate Damiano Cunego in 2004. “Pogačar is a much more proactive rider, whereas Vingegaard is a rider who is very good on certain types of courses – but not on all of them. And in Italy, you need to be good everywhere…”

Tosatto is in broad agreement. Vingegaard is the man to beat, of course, but he is not convinced that he will spend May in a race of his own in quite the same way that Pogačar did two years ago. However, he acknowledges that much will depend on the approach of rival teams. If they find common cause, they can potentially trouble Vingegaard. If they race one another for podium places, they risk giving Visma an easier ride.

“I don’t mean to diminish Vingegaard in any way, but I don’t see it being like two years ago, when Pogačar came and was the untouchable favourite,” Tosatto says. “Yes, Vingegaard is the number one favourite here, but I think there are teams who can put him in difficulty.

“But there is a caveat to that – the teams that are ‘inferior,’ so to speak, need to work together to put him in difficulty, and that’s not a certainty because these days there’s always the question of UCI points and teams maybe aren’t willing to risk losing a position on GC to try to win.”

Van Garderen, on the other hand, is less convinced than Simoni about any flaws in Vingegaard’s make-up. The only department where Vingegaard really suffers is in a direct comparison with Pogačar, but his own track record is little short of astonishing. He has never finished lower than second in five Tours, after all, and he has twice beaten Pogačar himself in the biggest race of them all.

“I don’t really see any weaknesses in Vingegaard,” Van Garderen says. “He time trials really fast for such a small guy, he’s obviously a world-class climber, and he always fares well on gravel and hectic stuff in Grand Tours. From what we’ve seen, I don’t think his bike skills are going to hold him back. I think the only weakness he has is that he’s racing in an era with Tadej Pogačar…”

Without Pogačar here, all logic says that Vingegaard should carry the pink jersey to Rome on May 31 and become only the eighth rider in history to win all three Grand Tours. But Giro history is liberally punctuated by editions that veered off in altogether unexpected directions. Vingegaard isn’t quite unbeatable at this Giro, then, but the Giro itself looks like the only opponent that might possibly humble him.

“Vingegaard is the favourite, but the Giro is still open,” Tosatto says. “It’s not the toughest start, but in the last week, if anybody wants to cause a bit of chaos, well there’s ample places to do it. Vingegaard has the long time trial in his favour compared to the other climbers – but anything can happen.”