Vingegaard vs Pogacar? Analysts impressed with his Giro win, but there are doubts about Tour chances

Jonas Vingegaard took his fifth stage win and secured overall victory in the Giro d’Italia with his success on Piancavallo. That puts him in an illustrious group, but the big goal comes only in just over a month. The Dane of Visma | Lease a Bike wants to win the Tour de France for a third time, but has the Giro given him the preparation he wanted?

Vingegaard crossed the line with a healthy lead over his “rivals” in stage 20. “I’m sure Jonas did not go full gas,” Johan Bruyneel says on his THEMOVE podcast. “Whether he is at the top of his game is hard to say, but I think physically he is close. But today he did not need to give everything.”

What does his performance mean ahead of the Tour? “The challenge now will be how he gets through the five weeks before the Tour de France. He will take some rest, go to altitude and will not race again. That is a challenge, how he is going to structure that time. In theory you can plan it out, but that is not how it works. Sometimes things go differently. But he is in a good place. His homework for the Tour is done.”

Thijs Zonneveld also saw a brilliant Vingegaard in Italy. But was he already at his very best? “You never know,” he says on his In de Waaier podcast. “But we do know that he has at least been in really good shape over the past week, and that he comes out of the Giro better than he went in. I think Visma can only be happy. Mission accomplished, never ridden at the limit, never had to destroy himself.”

“I think it is really special for Vingegaard and for the team, also the way they did it. They gain confidence from that.” That confidence will be crucial in the Tour, but Zonneveld still sees it as difficult against the once so dominant Tadej Pogačar. “I still do not think it will just be a duel in the Tour. We will have to see whether he is that good.”

Roxane Knetemann saw that Vingegaard kept riding away from his rivals. “Either his rivals have simply become worse more quickly, or he has genuinely improved over these three weeks. He is really riding strongly in the final week,” she says on the In het Wiel podcast.

For comparison: on Blockhaus the gap between Vingegaard and Felix Gall was 13 seconds. On Piancavallo it was 1 minute 15 seconds. That meant the two-time Tour winner could, as expected, ride a little more on reserve in the Giro. “He is not being pushed to his maximum anywhere. You never want to waste energy unnecessarily. Vingegaard has shown that he can put his energy exactly where he wants to. He could ride this Grand Tour very economically.”

The Giro d’Italia was placed on Jonas Vingegaard’s programme for two reasons. First, he wanted to win it and have all three Grand Tours on his palmarès, but he also saw it as ideal preparation for the Tour: he would be better in his second Grand Tour of the year. “If I see him riding around this Giro like that, I am starting to believe that too, that Vingegaard is a man who can combine those two objectives,” co-host Marijn Abbenhuijs says.