One step away from writing his name into road cycling history, Team Visma-Lease a Bike’s Jonas Vingegaard delivered a dominant mountain performance to claim victory in the Giro d’Italia’s penultimate stage on Saturday, putting his first overall title at the three-week Grand Tour all but out of reach.
The 29-year-old Dane, a pre-race favorite and two-time Tour de France champion, has been a class of the field at this year’s Giro, overcoming an early-race illness to win five stages and build an insurmountable lead heading into Sunday’s ceremonial final lap around Rome. Barring an unprecedented catastrophe on the flat, largely ceremonial route through the Italian capital, Vingegaard will become just the eighth rider in cycling history to secure the sport’s triple crown: overall victories at all three of road cycling’s Grand Tours (the Giro d’Italia, Tour de France, and Vuelta a España). He will join legendary figures including Eddy Merckx, Bernard Hinault, and Italian great Vincenzo Nibali in the exclusive group.
Saturday’s decisive stage was centered on two grueling 14.5-kilometer climbs to the summit finish at Piancavallo, where Vingegaard turned a comfortable general classification lead into an unassailable advantage. When the main peloton reached the first ascent, a breakaway group had already built a four-minute advantage at the front of the race. By the start of the second climb, that gap had shrunk to just over two minutes, and Vingegaard launched his decisive attack a little more than 10 kilometers from the finish line.
He first pulled clear of the main chasing pack, then easily distanced his closest overall rival, Austria’s Felix Gall, who could not match the Dane’s power on the upper slopes of the climb. Vingegaard then surged past the remaining remnants of the early breakaway to cross the line first, extending his lead over Gall to more than five minutes in the general classification. Gall will head to Rome as the clear second-place finisher, with no realistic path to overturning that gap on the flat final stage.
In the race’s secondary classifications, Italy’s Giulio Ciccone secured the blue Mountains classification jersey with his performance on Saturday, capping a standout performance in the hills. This marks the third Grand Tour mountains classification title of Ciccone’s career, adding to his 2019 Giro mountains win and his 2021 Tour de France polka-dot jersey victory.
Beyond his imminent first Giro title, Vingegaard’s performance this week has set the stage for what is already shaping up to be one of the most anticipated battles in modern cycling at July’s Tour de France. Vingegaard is targeting a rare Giro-Tour de France double this season, a feat only a handful of riders have pulled off in modern cycling history. His top rival, Slovenian superstar Tadej Pogačar, skipped this year’s Giro to focus on the Tour, and the head-to-head between the two Grand Tour greats is expected to be one of the most fiercely contested battles in the 111-year history of the race. Vingegaard’s dominant performance at the Giro, even while recovering from early-race sickness, has cemented his status as the man to beat when the Tour gets underway in July.