Why Vingegaard's Giro dominance isn't all that different to Pogacar's

Tour de France talk was more or less verboten within the Visma Lease a Bike camp when the Giro d’Italia began, but even Jonas Vingegaard finds himself acknowledging the elephant in the room as the third week draws on.

“Of course I think about it somewhat,” Vingegaard confessed in the mixed zone in Andalo after stage 17. “I don’t want to completely kill myself here if it’s possible not to.”

With four stages remaining, Vingegaard holds a commanding advantage of 4:03 over Felix Gall (Decathlon CMA CGM) after winning the four mountaintop finishes to date. The Giro hasn’t been formally inscribed on his palmarès just yet, but it’s impossible to imagine anyone else brandishing the Trofeo Senza Fine beneath the Colosseum on Sunday evening. 

But Rome is not Vingegaard’s final destination this summer. There is still the minor matter of another Tour de France, where Vingegaard lines up for the sixth episode of his seemingly never-ending rivalry with Tadej Pogačar. The double looms large in Vingegaard’s thinking as the days tick by.

When Pogačar lined up here two years ago, nobody had achieved the Giro-Tour since the late Marco Pantani in 1998. Even when the Slovenian cruised to a comfortable overall victory in Italy, there was still a school of thought that wondered if he would pay for those efforts in July, just as Alberto Contador had in 2015 and Chris Froome in 2018.

Two years on, the question has hardly arisen on this Giro. That’s partly because Pogačar proved the double was indeed possible in 21st century cycling, but also because Vingegaard has had such a tranquil time of it in Italy.

A mild cold and a subdued stage 10 time trial was about as stressful as it’s been so far for Vingegaard, who has largely been able to pick and choose his moments to strike on this race. As an additional bonus, the weather has been kind, with unseasonably high temperatures the order of the day rather than cold and rain.

In a tighter contest, Wednesday’s mountainous run to Andalo might have tempted the GC riders onto the offensive. Instead, Vingegaard enjoyed another relatively peaceful day in the peloton as the break fought it out for the win. Tuttobici likened the pink jersey’s quiet afternoon to a hair salon’s midweek day off.

Everything Vingegaard has done in Italy over the past two weeks or so has been viewed through the prism of his July appointment with Pogačar. Then again, everything he ever does is compared with his eternal rival.

When he won the Vuelta a España last September, the victory was damned with faint praise in some quarters due to Pogačar’s absence. And even though Vingegaard is dominating the Giro just as Pogačar did two years ago, there have been grumbles that he hasn’t provided quite as much entertainment as his old sparring partner.

That’s all in the eye of the beholder, of course. It’s true that Vingegaard hasn’t attacked on a sprint stage for the sheer hell of it as Pogačar did on the road to Fossano two years ago, but when it really came down to it, the Slovenian also largely limited his aggression to setpiece moments at his Giro.  

Like Vingegaard, his biggest efforts came on the big summit finishes, and by the third week, Pogačar was also starting to talk openly about sparing himself for the Tour. 

UAE Team Emirates-XRG sports manager Joxean Matxin Fernandez was on hand to guide Pogačar to that victory, and he has been observing Vingegaard carefully this time around. Nothing he has seen so far has come as a surprise.

“I honestly think it’s been what we thought, because he’s been the undisputed favourite from the start,” Matxin told Domestique. “I think he’s been more conservative early on, but at Pila we saw a Vingegaard who wanted to win the stage and who wanted to control the stage from the very start, with him maintaining control from beginning to end. I think this is the Vingegaard we expected. I don’t think he has surprised anyone. He’s been dominant in the mountain stages, even if he didn’t really take control with his team until Pila.”

All of Vingegaard’s climbing performances on this Giro have been parsed and analysed to the nth degree, but there might be limits to what power estimates can tell us about his readiness for July. In the absence of Pogačar – or even of men like Remco Evenepoel and Juan Ayuso – Vingegaard has never really been pushed to extremes in the mountains. He has done enough to win stages and win the Giro, but he will hope to have more left in his locker for July.

“You can interpret it partly that he has been dominating the Giro but also doing it in a slightly more conservative way,” Matxin said. “In other words, he’s looking to minimise his effort while maximising his performance. And he’s doing that openly, so he can get to the Tour without having done too much work or made too many sacrifices.”

That thinking informed UAE management’s approach to the 2024 Giro, though there were occasions when Pogačar didn’t quite seem to get the memo. And while Pogačar made a fast start to his Giro by trying to lead the race from start to finish – he was denied on stage 1 in Turin by Jhonatan Narváez – Vingegaard and Visma were more than happy to have Afonso Eulálio in pink and Bahrain Victorious as an ally until the third weekend.

“Well, Tadej is a rider with a real winner’s mentality, isn’t he?” Matxin smiled. “I’d maybe see Jonas as being a little more conservative. You don’t see him attacking at 100km to go or 80km to go, so he’s more conservative in that regard, right? But in the end, his performance shows that he wins and that he’s one of the best cyclists in the world.”

In 2022 and 2023, Vingegaard had Pogačar’s number at the Tour, but he was soundly beaten in the last two editions. Vingegaard will maintain that he was still hampered by the impact of his horrific crash at the 2024 Itzulia Basque Country on each occasion, and he spoke optimistically this week about being finally back at his best level. He knows, of course, that July’s rendezvous with Pogačar will be the real arbiter of that claim.

In the here and now, Vingegaard has been facing criticism that he has produced less of a spectacle at the Giro than Pogačar two years ago, with two-time champion Vincenzo Nibali among those calling for him to seal his inevitable win with a long-range attack. In the UAE camp, however, they see it differently.

“You don’t have to race to please Nibali or anybody else,” Matxin said. “I’m respectful of people’s opinions and everybody is entitled to them, but they’re still only opinions. In the end, everybody makes their own decisions. We’d all love to be tall and handsome, but not all of us are… I think Vingegaard gets a lot of results while minimising effort, and he does it very well.”

Rendezvous in July.