Jonas Vingegaard Rides Free

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.