The underrated alien? Jonas Vingegaard carves out his own piece of history at Giro

Are you not entertained? At times like this, Jonas Vingegaard seems doomed always to be damned with faint praise, at least in comparison with you know who. The editorial in Sunday morning’s La Gazzetta dello Sport dutifully hailed Vingegaard as a champion for dominating this Giro d’Italia, but there was still a notable degree of restraint in the newspaper’s final assessment: “He put on a show without overdoing it.”

There were no such reservations from La Gazzetta when Tadej Pogačar annexed the Giro in 2024, with the newspaper’s final day editorial on that occasion launching into raptures about the various qualities of the Slovenian. “He attacks to win, he races to convince. He doesn’t play it safe. He rides with a smile and receives smiles in return,” cooed La Gazzetta this day two years ago. “Today, Rome can open its ancient arms to gratefully welcome the new Gentle Cannibal.”

Pogačar has repeatedly proven himself to be the best rider of his generation, of course, and he is building a most compelling case to be considered the greatest of all-time, but it’s striking just how much his dominance has skewed the yardstick for just about everybody else and for Vingegaard in particular.

Before this Giro began, some voices of experience like Gilberto Simoni and Matteo Tosatto warned that Vingegaard mightn’t have it all his own way in May, and you could understand their reasoning. Riders like Chris Froome and Alberto Contador endured all sorts of Herculean labours en route to their Giro victories, after all. 

Instead, Vingegaard floated over every bar with precisely the same, Mondo Duplantis-esque ease as Pogačar two years ago. The only mild ruffle in an otherwise smooth Giro came with Vingegaard’s subdued showing in the Massa time trial on stage 10. It later emerged that he had been suffering with a cold, and any creases in his conditioning were ironed out by the time the race hit the Alps. 

This Giro was never much of a contest to begin with, and it became a procession once Vingegaard lifted himself into pink with his third stage victory at Pila. He would matter-of-factly add two more in the final week, at Carì and Piancavallo, all while giving the distinct impression that he was only beginning to move through the gears on his road to the Tour de France.

None of this is remotely normal. When Contador won the Giro in 2015, he was pushed so hard by Astana’s incessant attacking in Italy that he was a shadow of himself in July. Three years later, Froome’s reservoirs were so depleted by his Giro victory that he could only manage third at the Tour. 

Vingegaard, by contrast, has cruised through this Giro, winning the overall title by 5:22 and notching up five mountaintop stage wins along the way. In the last couple of stages, he could even give his best mountain domestiques some time off the day job, with Sepp Kuss released to win at Piani di Pezzè and Davide Piganzoli given the freedom to try to win the white jersey at Piancavallo.

This is a level of dominance produced by only one other man in contemporary cycling and by precious few in the entire history of the sport – but there always seems to be a ‘but,’ as though Pogačar’s multi-watt luminescence blinds us to the astonishing nature of Vingegaard’s own career.

In the social media age, sports fandom has tended towards a binary view of the world. In football, for instance, any praise for Lionel Messi carries with it tacit (or not so tacit) criticism of Cristiano Ronaldo, and vice-versa. When Ronaldo won the Ballon d’Or, Messi was washed. When Messi won the World Cup, Ronaldo was a fraud. And so on unto infinity.

The discourse is a little more nuanced in cycling, but not always by much. Mathieu van der Poel’s achievements on the cobbles were repeatedly held up as an accusation against Wout van Aert, at least until the Belgian won Paris-Roubaix. And no matter what Vingegaard does, there will always be a vocal cohort quick to point out that he doesn’t ride the Classics that Pogačar does, that he doesn’t produce the watts/kg that Pogačar does, or that he doesn’t have the same aura that Pogačar does.

Perhaps time will soften those critiques. The men whose hopes were repeatedly dashed on the rocks of Eddy Merckx’s dominance in the 1970s were eventually sainted for their resilience rather than derided for not being as good as the GOAT.

Marc Madiot’s admiration for Luis Ocaña was such that his fan club invited the Spaniard as the guest of honour to celebrations for his second Paris-Roubaix win in 1991. A starstruck Madiot has kept the very sofa on which Ocaña sat in his home as a precious relic ever since.

The late Ocaña is rightly remembered as one of the greatest and most compelling riders in history, but it’s also worth recalling that his defining work was an unfinished symphony. At the 1971 Tour de France, he humbled Merckx at Orcières Merlette, but he crashed out in yellow on the descent of the Col de Menté a few days later. When Ocaña finally won his Tour in 1973, Merckx was absent, but that detail, justly, hasn’t diminished his place in history. 

Ocaña’s impact could never be confined to results alone. His defiance of Merckx, his doomed tilting at the windmill, is what enraptured fans then and has kept the flame of his memory alive ever since. 

Vingegaard will never be as glamorous a figure as Ocaña, but he has been the steadfast leader of the resistance against Pogačar’s iron rule. 2020s cycling has been characterised by the dominance of a select cadre of ‘alien’ talents. That predictability certainly isn’t to everyone’s tastes, but the Tours de France of the Pogačar era would have been a whole lot duller without Vingegaard on the scene.

And Vingegaard, lest we forget, has already beaten Pogačar at the Tour – twice, in fact, just in case anyone thought the first time around was a fluke. But those defeats played a part in Pogačar’s dramatic metamorphosis into his current, all-conquering form in the winter of 2023-24, of course, and the Slovenian has travelled to places Vingegaard simply could not reach over the past two seasons. 

It’s also worth wondering what Vingegaard might have achieved without the career-threatening crash he suffered at Itzulia Basque Country in 2024. Remarkably, he recovered in time to place second to Pogačar at that year’s Tour and a tearful Vingegaard touched upon the emotional toll of those months when he met the press after pipping his rival to a stage win at Le Lioran.

It was a rare glimpse behind the mask, as Vingegaard and Visma have tended to keep things buttoned down in his media dealings over the years. We saw that play out again at the beginning of this year when both rider and team opted for guarded silence rather than open explanations when illness delayed the start of his season. 

That led to criticism from Bjarne Riis, of all people, and the polemic resurfaced during the Giro, when Vingegaard and Visma opted against a press conference on the second rest day. All told, Vingegaard could probably give a little more to the media and, by extension, the wider cycling public, but he certainly doesn’t give any less than Pogačar. 

There’s always an implied distance between Vingegaard and his audience – he follows Björn Borg and Lasse Viren in the grand lineage of vaguely hermetic Nordic sports stars – but he is always courteous in his media dealings. Pogačar is more playful when the television cameras are rolling, but he became visibly bored, if not irritated, with press conferences for written media as the 2024 Giro drew on. 

Vingegaard, by contrast, seemed to accept it as a part of his duties, refusing to betray even a flicker of annoyance when the Tour and Pogačar began to surface repeatedly as points of discussion in the third week. 

And that comparison with Pogačar was a companion throughout the Giro. When Gall limited his losses to Vingegaard at the Blockhaus and Corno alle Scale, there were doubts as to whether the Dane’s performances would be up to snuff against Pogačar. When Vingegaard delivered more convincing showings at Pila and Carì, there were faint grumbles that he still hadn’t cut loose in quite the same manner as Pogačar.

Unlike Ronaldo, who has occasionally been wound up by crowds the world over taunting him with chants of ‘Messi,’ Vingegaard seems to bear his affliction lightly. He doesn’t appear to view racing in the era of Pogačar either as a blessing or a curse, but as a simple fact of life.

Before the Giro, we suggested to Visma sports director Marc Reef that Vingegaard was, if anything, underrated because of Pogačar’s almost absurd dominance. Reef didn’t entirely disagree with the thesis, but he also wasn’t griping about it either. 

“Pogačar is the standard in cycling nowadays, and he’s just doing what he wants, attacking from distance,” Reef told us. “Jonas is a different type of rider, a different person. If you compare everybody to the standard of Pogačar, then everybody is, of course, a little less. But that doesn’t mean that the things Jonas has already achieved aren’t really big if you compare them to the history in cycling.”

At the past two Tours, even though Pogačar was now several rungs better than Vingegaard, the Dane and his team still raced as though he wasn’t. At times on last year’s Tour, Visma were questioned – and almost ridiculed – for deigning to try to take the race to Pogačar, but what else could they do?

By Tour’s end, Vingegaard was far closer to Pogačar’s yellow jersey than Florian Lipowitz was to his second place, but his race was still couched squarely as a defeat. Vingegaard has placed in the top two in all five of his Tour appearances and he rarely suffers off days. Perhaps his importance in the story of the Pogačar era will only be fully appreciated the day he finally cracks and ships half an hour. 

That day is unlikely to come in 2026. Vingegaard will travel to the Tour with renewed hope after his Italian expedition, where he wrote himself into the history books without expending any more ink than was necessary. He will now believe he can, like Pogačar in 2024, reach a higher level still in July.

There’s every chance that Vingegaard will do just that, but there’s also every chance that it won’t be enough. Pogačar has changed the terms of the game completely since the 2023 Tour. Vingegaard knows that, but it hasn’t stopped him from trying. As this Giro showed, Vingegaard is relentless. He keeps on going.