By racing the Giro d’Italia, Jonas Vingegaard chose to court the most pressure possible. Not only would he face the unrelenting scrutiny of being the sole favorite for the race, whatever he did would be judged against his archrival Tadej Pogacar’s authoritative 2024 Giro. If any of the other challengers for the Giro ever got a wheel past him at any point, he’d face serious questions about whether trying the Giro–Tour de France double represented a brush with hubris. Even if he bested them, if he did not also banish the ghost of Pogacar in the process, he’d have offered further evidence to skeptics that beating Pogacar this summer in France and beyond was outside of his abilities.
It’s worth remembering this pressure, because it seems like such a distant worry after the nearly perfect Giro that Vingegaard put together. The Danish champion was in total control the entire race. He never faced a moment of jeopardy, never put a wheel wrong, and never made a bad decision en route to the overall title and five stage wins. He and his Visma team controlled every single mountain stage despite losing the steadying presence of Wilco Kelderman at the very start of the race, and they rode the veteran Sepp Kuss to a stage win and the young Davide Piganzoli into the top ten. Their dominance cleaved the race into two distinct spheres: the typical Giro-as-comedy stuff, where Michael Valgren was pulling a Poké Ball out of his pocket and Giulio Ciccone was throwing temper tantrums on the bike; and the stages where Visma was trying, which meant they were necessarily succeeding.
As tempting as it is to frame the perfection of Vingegaard’s Giro—a race that made him only the eighth cyclist to win all three of the sports Grand Tours—against Pogacar’s Giro two years earlier, what we saw in Italy was not a tribute act but rather its own thing. Vingegaard and Pogacar are very different racers, and they raced two distinct, equally dominant Giri. The word with Vingegaard is control. On all five of his stage wins, his team would set a hard tempo until most everyone was sheared off by the brutal pace, Vingegaard would accelerate one time, and everyone would hang their heads and race their own race, with Gall the final rider to drop off Vingegaard’s wheel. When Gall gave it a go on Stage 16 and lasted 10 or so seconds, it counted as an impressive performance.
Vingegaard won the Vuelta last year and finished runner-up in France twice in a row, but the version who dominated the Giro was the strongest since he won the 2023 Tour. At his best, Vingegaard is one of the purest three-week racers in the professional peloton. This is a distinct skill, and one that I think is more difficult to glimpse in the Pogacar era—not just for the greed and omnipresence of Pogacar in one-day races, week-long stage races, and really every competitive format on the bike, but also because being great at three-week races is most easily glimpsed in the negative. It’s a matter of not having bad days. The Pogacar theory of Grand Tour racing is that every day you get out there on the bike and you go kill people, but that only works for him. Really, three-week racing is about being a boulder in a river, resisting the brutal erosive forces around you. It’s about not giving in, and Vingegaard doesn’t give in with the best of them.
Even though he battled an illness through the Giro’s first week—”Yes, we have had a bit of coughing and tickling in the throat among some of the boys,” Visma sports director Jesper Mørkøv said—Vingegaard did not have a single truly bad day. In the first half of the race, he put together a middling time trial, finishing 13th and shipping a little bit of time to Thymen Arensman and Ben O’Connor, which could qualify as a wobble, though he preceded the time trial by winning two mountain stages and followed it up by winning the big mountain stage into the Val d’Aosta days later. Vingegaard’s steadiness and cool on the bike are impressive; day by day, the viewing experience was of something not happening to him.
That he added five stage wins should tell you how strong Vingegaard’s feeling heading into July. Remember, while Pogacar was inventing new modes of dominance over the past two Tours, Vingegaard hasn’t been at his best. A horror crash in the Basque Country hobbled him in 2024, as did his concussion at Paris-Nice last season. This year, he’s flying.
As much as the traditional worry about the Giro–Tour double is that it will drain the batteries of anyone trying to win in July, Vingegaard has maybe the best batteries in the peloton. He’s always doing the Vuelta after the Tour and kicking ass, so the logic follows that he should have plenty of juice next month.
“It is now a matter of recovering well and then picking up the right training again,” Visma coach Arthur Van Dongen said. “We are now heading to the podium with the whole group, to then devour the necessary pizzas and beers together.” Vinegaard earned those beers, crying in celebration after reaching Rome for the formal crowning of a victory he sealed weeks earlier.
I found his burst of emotion moving. Vingegaard is not a footnote of the Pogacar era. He’s an all-time great in full flight, capable of the most impressive feats of bike racing we’ve seen in decades. He loves racing, and is amazing at it, steeled by a focus, a force of will so smooth and total that it’s not always easy to see. Underneath the family man, one layer deeper than the stoic, implacable face he shows the world, there is a killer in Jonas Vingegaard. It’s a joy to watch him win, and he’s not nearly done.
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