Vingegaard indulges inner cannibal as thoughts turn to Pogacar and the Tour

No gifts? Not entirely. As the pink jersey group approached the summit of Piancavallo for the first time on Saturday, Giulio Ciccone made a point of sidling up alongside Jonas Vingegaard just to make sure.

The point was virtually moot, given that the remnants of the early break was about to sweep up the relevant king of the mountains points, but Ciccone wanted to double check that Vingegaard wasn’t hellbent on adding the maglia azzurra to the bounty from his Italian campaign. 

Although Visma Lease a Bike had set a brisk tempo from the foot of Piancavallo, slashing the break’s lead in the process, Vingegaard had the air of a man who hadn’t given the king of the mountains title a second thought. He confirmed to Ciccone – rather more sheepish here than in his discussions with Einer Rubio on Friday – that this prize was his alone. Vingegaard’s target was another.

Although Vingegaard had long since sealed the overall crown at the Giro d’Italia, he wasn’t quite finished winning the race. Although he had already racked up four mountaintop stage victories across the race, he confirmed at the start in Gemona del Friuli on Saturday that he wanted another one here.

That divested the final mountain stage of the Giro of any real suspense. The stage 10 time trial to Massa aside, Vingegaard has done more or less as he has pleased on this Giro. If he wanted another stage here, then no rider or circumstance was going to stop him. 

As was the case for Tadej Pogačar two years ago, the Giro had long since descended into a very public pre-Tour de France training camp for Vingegaard. He has even been making progressively longer efforts on summit finishes and winning by increasingly bigger margins as the third week has dragged on, as if to underscore how his condition has been growing as July draws nearer.

Visma’s coaching staff will have access to the more relevant data from Vingegaard’s power-meter, of course, but it seems clear to us on the outside that his condition has been in crescendo in the third week. 

Jai Hindley, third at Piancavallo and third overall at this Giro, said afterwards that there had been “a lot of tired boys out there” on stage 20, but it’s not clear if he included Vingegaard in their number. Once more, the Dane looked strikingly fresh as he sallied clear at Piancavallo.

The Giro is the second most prestigious race on the calendar, and yet Vingegaard has breezed through the mountain stages as though he were making guest appearances at a series of Grand Fondos.

At Pila last Saturday, Vingegaard attacked just inside the final 5km, beating Felix Gall (Decathlon CMA CGM) by 49 seconds. At Carì on Tuesday, he struck out alone with 6.5km remaining, beating Gall by 1:09. On the final time up Piancavallo, he opted to cruise clear with 10.6km, beating Gall by 1:15 after slowing to devote himself to his various celebration rituals in the closing metres.

At first glance, the assumption was that Vingegaard had attacked from distance to prove a point, to others if not to himself. Since the race left Bulgaria, there has been a steady chorus of voices grumbling that Vingegaard had been too clinical in his management of this Giro, parsimoniously saving energy for July rather than generously offering up spettacolo in May.

The charge was ludicrous, of course. Grand Tour racing is (normally) an exacting business, and dosing out efforts judiciously across the three weeks is an essential part of the game. 

Besides, beyond some performative grumbling about being forced to “share the cake” with other teams in the second week, Pogačar wasn’t a whole amount more aggressive than Vingegaard two years ago when it came down to it. When a race is already one, there’s so much spettacolo a man can conjure up.

After the finish, in any case, Vingegaard immediately disabused us of the notion that his long-range attack here had been a sop to those who had called for him to breathe a little more drama into his inevitable Giro victory. 

He had attacked with 10.6km to go simply because he had run out of teammates, as Sepp Kuss was still bearing the effects of his effort to win stage 19 and Davide Piganzoli had been given a day off domestique duty in order to try to divest Afonso Eulálio (Bahrain Victorious) of the pink jersey. 

“We gave him the chance and said that he shouldn’t do a lead-out for me today,” Vingegaard said. 

In other words, his superiority has been so total that he was free to send his teammates off on side quests in the dying days of this Giro.

Vingegaard’s main quest, of course, is the Tour de France and that never-ending contest with Pogačar. Just as Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo are facing into the sixth World Cup of their careers, Vingegaard and Pogačar are building towards a scarcely credible sixth consecutive duel at the summit of the Tour – even if this year’s race promises additional intrigue with the introduction of 19-year-old Paul Seixas to the mix.

The past two Tours have been sobering for Vingegaard, with Pogačar claiming the yellow jersey by a hefty margin on each occasion. The decision to ride the Giro was a direct consequence of those setbacks, just as Pogačar’s corsa rosa appearance two years ago followed his own back-to-back defeats to Vingegaard in the Tours of 2022 and 2023.

The Giro offered Vingegaard something of an insurance policy before the Tour, and he will line up in July secure in the knowledge that he already has something very tangible to show for his 2026 season.

But Visma have insisted that the Giro also offered Vingegaard the ideal build-up to the Tour. RCS Sport already did their bit last winter by devising a route expressly to attract riders with designs on the Giro-Tour double. The unseasonably warm weather this month has helped to ensure that the race would not prove unduly taxing for Vingegaard.

There are no guarantees that the change in build-up will bring Vingegaard any closer to Pogačar in July, but even at this early remove, it’s clear that he will not be able to claim that he expended too much energy at the Giro either. His effervescence on the final mountain of the Giro, where he beat Marco Pantani’s 1998 record up Piancavallo, proved as much.

This Giro has marked a subtle change in gear from Vingegaard, who has shown a bigger appetite for victory than in any of his previous Grand Tours. He had two stage wins on the 2022 Tour, and he ‘only’ won a time trial en route to overall victory the following year. At last year’s Vuelta, he claimed three stage wins. 

Vingegaard’s iteration looks a little more ruthless. He showed that when he hammered home the message at Paris-Nice and the Volta a Catalunya in March, and he left the same impression on the Giro. The pink jersey has never looked in doubt, not even when Felix Gall limited his losses on the first two summit finishes, but Vingegaard’s Visma squad have repeatedly raced to tee up stage wins along the way.

Maybe it’s all part of Richard Plugge’s bid to secure a new title sponsor, or maybe it’s Vingegaard’s way of sending a message to his old rival Pogačar. In any case, and in his own understated way, Vingegaard has indulged his inner cannibal on this Giro.