Jonas Vingegaard takes another stride towards the inevitable at Giro

The area beyond the finish line of a Giro d’Italia summit finish is always a maelstrom. Exhausted riders fight their way through the crowd to find their soigneurs. Pushy television crews bustle about chasing the stories of the day. Vexed carabinieri blow whistles to direct traffic. Music blares from the podium. Multi-lingual swearing peppers the air. Everybody’s cortisol levels rise a few notches. 

But Felix Gall always carries himself with a wry calm, so maybe it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that the Austrian somehow managed to find himself a little oasis of serenity even here at the summit of Pila after the toughest day of the Giro to date. 

On crossing the line in second place, 49 seconds down on new pink jersey Jonas Vingegaard, Gall rolled towards the barriers and seated himself on a little deckchair while a Decathlon-CMA CGM soigneur supplied him an energy drink and a jacket for his descent back down the mountain.

When a group of reporters crouched around him, Gall politely talked us through his day and gently disabused us of the notion that the Giro was still a contest after the first day in the Alps. Gall had already told us as much at the Blockhaus more than a week ago and once more on the rest day after he had pushed Vingegaard close at Corno alle Scale.

Now, high in the mountains of Valle d’Aosta, the underlying truth of this Giro had restated itself more forcefully than before. Vingegaard is in pink, 2:26 up on the fading Afonso Eulálio (Bahrain Victorious), 2:50 ahead of the on-form Gall, and more than three minutes clear of everybody else.

“There is no point in thinking of beating Jonas,” Gall said, not with rancour or regret, but as a statement of fact. “It’s more of a race for the podium for me.”

The truth of the Giro is always revealed in the high mountains. Vingegaard had admitted to suffering from a cold towards the end of the second week, but he also insisted he was over the worst, and Saturday’s run through the mountains of Valle d’Aosta confirmed that it was no bluff.

There were no alarms and no surprises for Vingegaard on a short but fearsome stage 14 that took in more than 4,000 metres of total climbing, including the tough final haul to Pila.

The stage was just 133km in length, the day was hot and the road climbed from the moment the race left Saint-Barthélémy. In cycling’s frenetic 2020s, stages like this have often translated into an afternoon of fireworks and ambushes, but Vingegaard and his Visma Lease a Bike guard looked utterly in control throughout.

Red Bull dispatched Aleksandr Vlasov in the early break of 23 as a satellite rider for Giulio Pellizzari and Jai Hindley, but there was never a moment where it looked as though the race might become too unwieldy for Visma to manage.

By the time the race hit the foot of the climb to Pila, the break was already doomed and Vingegaard still had three Visma teammates for company. Victor Campenaerts made more headlines than were really necessary this week for his, er, creative use of bidons, but there is a serious bike rider amid those plain-speaking but playful social media posts. As sports director Marc Reef told us this week, Campenaerts isn’t in Italy just for the vibes on the bus or at the dinner table.

“He brings atmosphere, but he’s a really good rider and he’s not scared to take the lead at certain moments, to keep everybody together,” Reef said. “In that way, he’s a very, very important member for the team.”

Campenaerts has certainly developed strikingly as a climber since re-joining Visma last year, and that quality was on show again here, as he led the pink jersey group through the first 7km of the final climb before swinging off.

Some notable climbers were already beginning to suffer by that point, and their ordeal didn’t improve when Sepp Kuss came through to ratchet the intensity upwards a little further. It was dialled up still more when Davide Piganzoli took up the reins with 7km to go ahead of Vingegaard’s inevitable attack.

When it came with 4.6km to go, nobody, not even Gall, deigned to follow. Vingegaard had looked strikingly comfortable in the wheels on the lower portion of the climb, and he looked just as smooth here, gliding clear of the competition and finally inheriting the pink jersey that has been set aside for him more than a week ago on the Blockhaus.

The rest of the Giro let him get on with it, focusing instead on the contest for the two steps of the podium beneath him. Gall, impressive again, is the best placed. The Red Bull duo of Jai Hindley and Giulio Pellizzari might fight it out for third with Thymen Arensman (Ineos), while Ben O’Connor (Jayco AlUla) will hope for better days than this. 

Those skirmishes will provide the competitive interest in the final phase of this Giro, but a week from Rome, the destination of the Trofeo Senza Fine no longer appears to be in any doubt. 

Speaking to La Gazzetta dello Sport during the week, two-time champion Vincenzo Nibali backed Vingegaard to win this year’s race at a canter, but he called on him to garland his ineluctable victory with a little more panache than he had shown thus far.

The win at Pila was Vingegaard’s third from three mountaintop finishes thus far, but it’s still not clear if there has been a liberal enough sprinkling of spettacolo over his Giro to satisfy Nibali’s refined tastes. 

Vingegaard was more dominant here than at Blockhaus or Corno alle Scale, putting almost a minute into Gall and scattering the rest of the Giro across the mountainside, but this was also a carefully calibrated victory rather than an instinctual one, as he explained in the mixed zone.

“We saw on the parcours that there was a good moment from 6 or 5.5km to go, where it got steeper, so we said we’d go harder from there,” Vingegaard said. “Piganzoli made already almost a gap to the guys behind me and then I just had to continue.”

Vingegaard and Visma’s strategy at this Giro hasn’t been entirely unlike that of Mikel Arteta’s Arsenal, with a focus on set-piece opportunities like this and an aversion to needless risks in the name of adventure or entertainment.

It should also be noted that expectations for how a rider should win a Grand Tour have been completely and unrealistically skewed in the Tadej Pogacar era. Nothing the Slovenian has done in in his career is remotely normal, but Vingegaard’s dominance at this Giro has clearly been under-estimated in some quarters as a result.

When Simon Yates scored three uphill stage wins in the opening two weeks of the 2018 Giro, it felt like a dazzling achievement, but the bar has been set so much higher for Vingegaard. In some quarters, three stage wins and a commanding overall lead at this point is viewed almost as the bare minimum, just because Pogacar had four stage wins and a 6:41 buffer by the second rest day two years ago.

Vingegaard, however, has never been one to be unduly affected by outside noise. This race is the final chapter in his bid to complete a full set of Grand Tours, but it’s also the first leg of his tilt at the Giro-Tour double, and that thought underpins his every decision in Italy.

The name of the game for Vingegaard is to win the Giro without delving too deep into his reserves ahead of the Tour. He has played it perfectly to this point, and there is no reason to change tack before Rome.