Analysis

Vingegaard's Giro d'Italia debut is right call amid Pogacar's Tour dominance

Jonas Vingegaard's announcement that he will ride the 2026 Giro d'Italia is a tacit admission of the current lie of the land, namely that Tadej Pogacar is operating on another plane at the Tour de France. We break down the Dane's big decision.

January 13 2026 - 4:15 PM

Jonas Vingegaard - 2025 - Vuelta a Espana stage 3

Harry Talbot

The whispers had begun to harden into fact since the turn of the year, but formal confirmation finally arrived in La Nucia on Tuesday. Jonas Vingegaard will make his Giro d’Italia debut in 2026 as he seeks to become the eighth man in history to win all three Grand Tours.

The news will come as an immense relief to RCS Sport, who had designed the Giro route expressly so that at least one of Vingegaard or Remco Evenepoel would take on the corsa rosa as well as the Tour de France in 2026.

Evenepoel had already passed up on the chance to return to the Giro, despite the lure of a made-to-measure 40km time trial on the route. That left Vingegaard, who had been signalling his desire to sample the Giro throughout the off-season.

Even so, Vingegaard’s personal preference was still no guarantee. Last winter, after all, he had teased a possible Giro debut only to opt against the idea in January. Vingegaard and his Visma | Lease a Bike squad have long held a Tour-centric vision of the cycling calendar, and not even the most amenable of Giro routes was certain to break that pattern.

In truth, the route was only one piece of the puzzle. It’s hard to shake off the sense that Tadej Pogačar’s otherworldly dominance has been the biggest factor in Visma’s decision to allow Vingegaard to ride the Giro.

When Vingegaard beat Pogačar to win the Tour in 2022 and then repeated the dose in 2023, it looked as though the Dane had his rival’s number at the biggest race of them all. Visma certainly believed that Vingegaard’s powers of endurance and his ability to withstand extreme heat and high altitude meant that he held an inherent advantage over Pogačar at the Tour.

That credo remained intact even after Pogačar’s crushing win on the 2024 Tour, given that Vingegaard’s preparation had been so hampered by his career-threatening crash at Itzulia Basque Country.

The sobering defeat at the 2025 Tour, however, clearly prompted a rethink. Vingegaard insisted that he produced some of his best-ever numbers in the mountains last July, but he still never laid a glove on Pogačar, who keeps on reaching hitherto unseen heights since coming under coach Javier Sola’s tutelage in the winter of 2023-24.

A defiant stage victory at Le Lioran on the 2024 Tour apart, Vingegaard has never put the rebooted Pogačar under any significant pressure over the past two years. Vingegaard was the best of the rest at last year’s Tour, of course, but it was increasingly difficult to claim that he was a true rival for this iteration of Pogačar, currently without peer.

In that light, Vingegaard’s decision to race the Giro in 2026 is eminently logical. It would have been a denial of the current reality for him to build his entire season around the Tour. As things stand, Pogačar is in a league entirely of his own.

Barring accident or overreach, it’s difficult to see anybody denying him a record-equalling fifth Tour win in July. Vingegaard can only win the Tour if Pogačar contrives to find a way to lose it.

Vingegaard’s interests are better served by pursuing a more achievable target, the Giro, before turning his attention to the Tour. And even with the exertions of the Giro in his legs, Vingegaard would still fancy his chances of being the best of the rest behind Pogačar in July.

The decision to ride the Giro is the correct one, because Vingegaard has nothing to lose by riding it.

The Almeida challenge

That said, Vingegaard still has to go out and win the Giro, and he will know that it’s a race that hasn’t always been kind to first-time participants with lofty goals. There may be increasing homogenisation in the WorldTour of the 2020s, but the Giro remains a race apart, an event with rhythms entirely of its own.

All sorts of hazards can cascade into a man’s path across three weeks in May, though RCS Sport have endeavoured to create a relatively bland (or ‘modern,’ to use their preferred euphemism) route that looks to have softened some of the Giro’s traditionally sharp edges.

The overall reduction in climbing metres and the distribution of mountain stages have both been devised expressly for riders tackling the Giro-Tour double. The set-piece summit finishes that punctuate the course – starting with the Blockhaus on stage 7 – give Vingegaard a chance to stamp his authority on the race early and often.

Then again, João Almeida (UAE Team Emirates-XRG) will have the same idea. The Portuguese rider pushed Vingegaard closer than he might have expected at last year’s Vuelta a España, and the margins might have been tighter again had the Valladolid time trial in the final week not been shortened.

Almeida will be heartened by the 40km time trial to Massa on stage 10, and, unlike Vingegaard, he will be racing the Giro without having to worry about recovering for the Tour afterwards. He will also be flanked by Jay Vine and Adam Yates in a strong UAE squad.

By contrast, it seems that Visma are diverting their resources towards the Tour. Domestique understands that Visma had planned for Simon Yates to forgo his Giro title defence in order to be fresh for a key role in support of Vingegaard at the Tour. Yates' retirement leaves a big hole in Visma’s preferred Tour line-up and that will surely have a knock-on effect for Vingegaard’s supporting cast at the Giro.

UAE’s strength in numbers could make this Giro a real battle for Vingegaard, but the Dane will still be confident that he can emerge victorious from any head-to-head confrontation with Almeida.

For all Almeida’s undoubted qualities, he is a known quantity by this point for Vingegaard and Visma. One senses they might have had greater misgivings about the Giro had Isaac del Toro been charged with leading the UAE challenge. The Mexican might yet give Visma headaches in July. But they have every reason to believe that Vingegaard can carry pink to Rome on May 31.

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