If at first you don't succeed, try and try again – or at least go to the Giro d'Italia instead.
That appears to be the tactic that Jonas Vingegaard intends to adopt for 2026, having hinted strongly that he would prefer to win the Italian Grand Tour over the Tour de France next year.
To be fair to the Danish Visma-Lease a Bike rider, as a two-time winner he has very much succeeded already at the Tour. He added victory in the Vuelta a España to those titles in September this year, too.
But it would seem as though the dominance of Tadej Pogačar – who has won the Tour de France on both the two most recent occasions – has encouraged Vingegaard to look elsewhere for glory.
Vingegaard was talking to La Dernière Heure at ASO's recent annual Saitama Criterium in Japan, an exhibition race which he won ahead of Lidl-Trek's Jonathan Milan.
He said: "Win three Grand Tours or the Tour de France in 2026? I think I'd prefer to win the three Grand Tours. And after the Tour de France and the Vuelta, I only have the Giro left."
However, he insisted that the French race would remain on his calendar and would still be the priority.
"We haven't decided where I'll race next season," he said. "The Tour de France obviously remains the big objective."
It's all rather cryptic, but it sounds like Vingegaard is keeping his options open at the very least.
Vingegaard and his team have talked previously about a Giro debut for the Dane, but have yet to pull the trigger. Earlier this year team sports director Grischa Niermann said: "We were thinking about taking the Giro as a kind of preparation [for the Tour], but there are so many factors when you go to the Giro. How is the Giro [route]? How is the weather? How hard do you have to go every day? There are a lot of things you can’t control yourself.
“Then we realised that if you go on a training camp you can control every training session you do and that’s probably better.”
More recently Niermann said they were considering next year's Giro but would be in a better position to make a decision on it once the route had been announced in detail.
