“Last year we were well on the way to cracking Tadej Pogacar” – Visma DS insists Jonas Vingegaard’s 2026 gamble will strengthen Tour de France bid

Jonas Vingegaard riding the Giro d’Italia in 2026 is not being sold inside Team Visma | Lease a Bike as a deviation from their Tour de France obsession. It is being presented as the most credible way they can change the outcome of a rivalry that has stalled over the last two summers.

The Tour has remained the team’s fixed point throughout every conversation around Vingegaard’s programme. What has shifted is Visma’s willingness to accept that their previous formula, while consistently competitive, has not been enough to beat Tadej Pogacar at his best. Rather than defend a method that delivered podiums but not yellow, the team are deliberately introducing a variable.

That is the context behind sports director Grischa Niermann’s blunt assessment of where the rivalry stood last July, in quotes collected by IDL Pro Cycling.

“Last year his interviews afterwards showed we were well on the way to cracking Tadej,” he said, referring to Pogacar’s visible fatigue during the Tour. The message is not that Visma believe they already had the upper hand, but that they saw enough to justify changing the route rather than lowering expectations.

Externally, the Giro Tour double is being framed as a risk that could compromise Visma’s July ambitions. Internally, the hierarchy remains unchanged. “We keep aiming to win the Tour, the biggest race in the world,” Niermann said. “Beating Tadej in the Tour is the highest thing we can achieve.”

The Giro is being used as a tool, not an alternative objective. Niermann was clear that Visma believe Vingegaard can still peak later in the season. “We also definitely believe he can be better in the Tour than in the Giro,” he said, emphasising that the Italian race is not intended to be the final target.

That confidence is grounded in Vingegaard’s own history rather than theory. Visma points repeatedly to his Tour Vuelta combinations, where sustained Grand Tour racing sharpened rather than dulled his level. “We don’t have a guarantee,” Niermann acknowledged, “but we do have the data from his Tour Vuelta combination,s and that makes us believe.”

The reference to data matters. This is not an emotional response to losing to Pogacar twice, nor an attempt to simply match what Pogacar himself has done. It is Visma applying the same evidence-led thinking that underpinned Vingegaard’s rise in the first place.

What Visma are openly admitting is that repeating the same preparation would likely produce the same outcome. Niermann was explicit about that reality. “We were doing well, but ultimately not good enough,” he said. “Now there’s a different route again, and we have to approach it differently.”

That willingness to accept risk is itself revealing. Visma are not framing 2026 as a year of consolidation or damage limitation. The Giro Tour double exists precisely because they still believe the Tour can be won, not because they have accepted Pogacar’s dominance as inevitable.

Niermann stopped short of outlining how Visma intend to turn that belief into a decisive edge. “We already have an idea, but we still have to fine-tune it,” he said, offering no further detail. That restraint is telling. The team are not selling certainty. They are selling intent.

The gamble is real. So is the logic behind it. And for Visma, the greater risk would have been pretending that the last two Tours did not demand a fundamentally different answer.