Jonas Vingegaard will, like Tadej Pogacar two years ago, race the Tour of Italy and the Tour de France in 2026 with the objective of becoming the eighth rider in history to have won the three major Tours. The Dane, who unveiled his program on Tuesday January 13 during the media day of his Visma-Lease a bike team in Nucia, on the Spanish Costa Blanca, will compete for the first time in the Giro (May 8-31) of which he will be the big favorite in the absence of Pogacar. He will then continue with the Tour de France (July 4-26) which he won in 2022 and 2023 but where he will this time start as an outsider against Pogacar, the outgoing double winner. At 29, Vingegaard will try to achieve the same feat as Pogacar in 2024 when the Slovenian won the Giro and the Tour hands down. The ogre of world cycling then became the eighth rider in history to achieve such a double in the same year after Marco Pantani, Miguel Indurain, Stephen Roche, Bernard Hinault, Eddy Merckx, Jacques Anquetil and Fausto Coppi. Vingegaard will have another objective: to become the eighth rider to have won the three major Tours in his career, he who already has two Tours de France and a Vuelta to his name. If he succeeds, he will be ahead of his great rival Pogacar who has won the Tour de France four times, the Giro once but never the Tour of Spain where he took third place in 2019 during his only participation. Bernard Hinault, Eddy Merckx, Jacques Anquetil, Felice Gimondi, Alberto Contador, Vincenzo Nibali and Chris Froome are the seven riders to have won all three Grand Tours.
