You Ought to Know that You're My Giro
If Tadej Pogačar doesn't win the maglia rosa, something's gone badly wrong
It’s not entirely Tadej Pogačar’s fault, but it’s a little bit Tadej Pogačar’s fault.
I didn’t appreciate, until I sat down to seriously consider how the Giro d’Italia might unfold, how entirely the peloton had bailed on the second-biggest stage race in the world.
ProCycling Stats has a metric for the quality of a race’s startlist. It’s a bit of a blunt tool, which uses PCS ranking1 and marks Pogačar as having the same value as Marc Hirschi. But this is a blunt point. This year’s Giro has the lowest startlist quality score of any Giro in the past 10 years, by more than 10 percent. According to PCS, this is a weaker field than the Tour of the Basque Country, Tirreno-Adriatico, or Paris-Nice, and only barely stronger than Volta a Catalunya or the Tour de Romandie.
So in name and format, this is a grand tour, but in terms of the actual competition, it looks like a middling one-week stage race.
And the names on the startlist bear that out. There are extenuating circumstances, of course. Among riders who could credibly be called grand tour GC contenders, Pogačar is no. 1 in the PCS standings. The next three GC threats (Remco Evenepoel, Jonas Vingegaard, and Primož Roglič) all went into a ditch on the same corner at Tour of the Basque Country. And there are no fewer than four climber/GC riders in the top 20 (Marc Hirschi, Juan Ayuso, Adam Yates, and Brandon McNulty) who are on Pogačar’s team. Even if one or more of them were taking the start in Torino on Saturday, they’d only be strengthening the favorite.
Roglič never meant to race the Giro anyway, because he’s concentrating on the Tour de France. Everyone is, in fact. There are 13 active grand tour winners in the men’s peloton. Pogačar is one of three racing the Giro. The other two—Geraint Thomas, 37, and Nairo Quinana, 34—are arguably no longer their teams’ most dangerous GC threats.
Right now, the written-in-pencil startlist for the Tour de France includes 12 of the active grand tour winners, plus Enric Mas, Pello Bilbao, Aleksandr Vlasov, Adam Yates, Juan Ayuso, and a number of other riders who are far more dangerous in a grand tour GC context than some of the older former champions.2
Almost as noticeable is the lack of elite sprinters and stage hunters. Again, injury is playing a role, since this was supposed to be Wout van Aert’s big stage race for 2024 before he got hurt. But Alpecin-Deceuninck is taking Kaden Groves, but not Mathieu van der Poel or Jasper Philipsen. Visma-Lease a Bike is bringing Christophe Laporte and Olav Kooij, but not Matteo Jorgenson. EF Education-Easy Post is going to look sick as hell in the traditional black alternate kit, but Ben Healy won’t be wearing it.
It seems like pretty powerful evidence of the separation in prestige between the Tour and the Giro. It’s not a 1 and 1A situation anymore—the Tour is where the eyeballs and the money are, and that matters most to the sponsors who keep these teams afloat.
And if everyone is concentrating on the Tour, the fact is that there are only about four riders—Roglič, Pogačar, Evenepoel, and Vingegaard—who have a reasonable shot at winning it without the help of some bizarre tactical fluke.3 Those four4 all want a shot at each other and will target the Tour. Bora-Hansgrohe signed Roglič specifically to give him undisputed primacy at the Tour, and is doubling down by sending its strongest riders to the Tour, rather than the Giro.
And apart from Bora, who has the GC depth to mount serious challenges for both the Tour and the Giro? Visma-Lease a Bike, but Vingegaard is hurt and Sepp Kuss—to the extent he wants GC leadership again at all—has been run ragged after racing the sharp end of five grand tours in a row and 11 in five years. He needs a rest. The only other team I could think of is Ineos, which is sending the only squad with even a remote prayer of taking Pogačar down in a fair fight.
There’s an argument to be made that concentrating on the Giro would be a great way for a team to steal an easy shot at a grand tour win, only Pogačar’s presence here negates that argument, as well as any reason UAE might send someone like Ayuso or McNulty. And if sponsorship and visibility are the goal, a top-10 finish at the Tour might outweigh a top-3 at the Giro. Certainly the fact that perpetual Giro contender Jai Hindley is far from a household name would support that theory.
Without Pogačar, perhaps this would be an opportunity for Thomas or Quintana to turn back the clock, or it would’ve attracted a bevy of contenders for a first grand tour GC win. But Pogačar can ride this race because he’s the only rider who transcends the Tour, whose greatness can only be demonstrated by contending for multiple championships at once. He’s not after the Giro as such; he wants the Giro-Tour double, or the Giro-Tour-Olympics-Worlds quadruple, or the Giro-Tour-Vuelta triple in his career.
My assumption is that Pogačar will win this race easily. If he cares about margin of victory and Thomas isn’t absolutely on it, he could win by 10 minutes. Thomas and Ben O’Connor of Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale are my picks to round out the podium, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Daniel Martínez rediscovered his early-season form and insinuated his way onto the podium.
Unless some tragedy befalls Pogačar, the most interesting component of this race will be the day-to-day fight for stage wins. The one place this field is strong is in sprinters who can get over a hill: Jonathan Milan, Biniam Girmay, Laurence Pithie, Laporte, Matteo Trentin if he’s got anything left in the tank.
On slightly hillier terrain, Simon Carr and Andrea Piccolo are both chasing a first grand tour stage win, while 37-year-old Canadian puncheur Michael Woods is out to complete his full set of grand tour stage wins, having already taken victory at the Tour and the Vuelta. Astana might not have its strongest GC or sprint squad here, but it does have master stage hunters Aleksey Lutsenko and Lorenzo Fortunato.5
The GC battle is a foregone conclusion. The hope, however, is that the otherwise wide-open field will lead to exciting breakaways, and an exciting classics season-in-miniature.