Don't Blame Jonas Vingegaard if the 2026 Giro d'Italia (https://velo.outsideonline.com/tag/giro-ditalia/) and the efficient domination of Jonas Vingegaard (https://velo.outsideonline.com/tag/jonas-vingegaard/) has hardly been a three-week fireworks display.
The 2026 Giro d’Italia is missing its stars, yet it’s still a grand tour, with three weeks being a long time for any race. The 'Big Start' in Bulgaria was a bust, and the field is thinner than a plate of tagliolini pasta. Yet somewhere in the background, the murmur started that it’s Vingegaard who is making this race boring.
Vingegaard is closing in on becoming the eighth rider in cycling history to win all three grand tours. How can that be boring? No. This Giro was 'mezzo cotto' — undercooked — long before the two-time Tour de France champion arrived. Look no further than Sunday’s pancake flat sprint stage into Milan. When the world’s eyes were on the Giro on its primetime weekend spot, RCS Sport served up a boring sprint stage that’s a guaranteed snooze fest. Vingegaard and Visma-Lease a Bike have done almost everything right: they came in as pre-race favorites, raced like pre-race favorites, and the Killer Bees have controlled the race the way GC super teams are expected to.
Vingegaard has attacked when he needed to and already won three stages. He has the pink jersey and a commanding lead. That’s the job.
The problem isn’t Vingegaard. It’s just about everything else about the 2026 Giro d’Italia. First off is the starting lineup: the 2026 Giro is missing at least one more 'fuoriclasse,' that elite, game-changing type of rider who would have elevated the race. Most striking is the absence of Tadej Pogačar, who shapes races even when he doesn’t race. That’s the Pogi paradox: when he races, people complain it’s getting predictable. When he doesn’t, you realize how much sheer excitement he packs just by being there. Even when the outcome feels inevitable, the racing almost never is. Pogačar is good value.
João Almeida would have at least made things more interesting at the top. He took Vingegaard deep in last year’s Vuelta a España, but illness knocked him out before the start. UAE’s Plan B, Adam Yates, was KO’d in the stage 1 chaos. So that meant the long-running UAE vs. Visma grand tour super team rivalry that went 1-2 in every grand tour last year was neutered before the Giro even started. Then there’s Paul Seixas, the most hyped racer in cycling right now. The French phenom would have blown this race up and perhaps made it the grand tour of the year. And yes, sending him to the Tour makes sense, but Seixas could have challenged Visma almost single-handedly, and he might have won.
Even the sprinter field is off. Jonathan Milan, the big star of this pack, hasn’t won a stage yet. There’s no Wout van Aert or Mathieu van der Poel to add star power on the flat days. And many of the riders who are here have been hit by illness, crashes, or early time losses. There is no true rival in the fight for pink.
That’s not Vingegaard’s fault. How the 2026 Giro d’Italia’s ‘Big Start’ backfired is another story. The three-day start in Bulgaria might have sounded good on paper, but it had none of the trademark Giro passione that a grande partenza is supposed to feel like. These overseas adventures are great for Giro owner RCS Sport’s bottom line (https://velo.outsideonline.com/road/road-racing/giro-ditalia-bulgaria-start-10-million-riders-hate-foreign-start/) and they look wonderful on television. But in terms of sporting spectacle, they deflate a grand tour right from the start. Organizers deliberately keep the opening overseas stages easy to justify the long travel distance, and the first stages back in Italy tend to be short parades as well. That’s roughly a quarter of the race traded away for PR and profits.
So when the big hits came — Blockhaus, Corno alle Scale, and last weekend’s Alpine finale at Pila — Visma arrived fresh enough to put everyone in their place. We got lucky that the longest time trial in a Giro in a decade didn’t completely settle the race last week. Vingegaard had an off day, not a full-blown crisis. But he struggled, so at least some intrigue survived into the weekend.
The Giro’s infamous final week still looms. Tuesday, Friday, and Saturday are all monster stages. Giro magic can still happen, but Vingegaard has run a near-perfect race on a course that barely tested him. And if everyone else is out the back, is that his fault? No. Missing the point of a grand tour is a different thing entirely: it’s not about surviving every day, but about surviving on the final day.
