Grand Tours 2026: 61 stages, and Italy wins only four

Put the three big stage races of 2026 side by side and one number hurts: Italy won four stages in total, and all four came at the Giro d'Italia. At the Tour de France and the Vuelta, not one. We checked every result against at least two sources, the Wikipedia pages of the three races and the year-end review by TuttoBiciWeb published today. The figures hold up. What matters is what they mean.

The big picture: who won what

Jonas Vingegaard, the Dane from Visma-Lease a Bike, won the Giro, his first victory in the pink race. Tadej Pogačar won the Tour for the fifth time. Enric Mas took the Vuelta. Pogačar also has the most stage wins of the year, eight in total: five at the Tour and three at the Vuelta. Vingegaard and Matthew Brennan have five each.

Counting only individual stages, there were 61. The Giro had 21. The Tour had 21, but the first was a team time trial, so 20 had a single winner. The Vuelta was scheduled for 21, but stage 3 was cancelled because of the weather, and the other 20 each had a winner. Twenty-one plus 20 plus 20 makes 61, the same figure TuttoBiciWeb gives, and we worked it out again from the race tables.

Four wins, all at the Giro

Italy's four winners each had a different day. Davide Ballerini won stage 6 in Naples in a two-man sprint after a finish marred by crashes. Filippo Ganna won stage 10, the time trial from Viareggio to Massa, and was dominant against the clock. Alberto Bettiol won stage 13, 133 kilometres from Aosta to a summit finish at Pila. Jonathan Milan closed the race with the sprint on the last day, in Rome.

In the overall classification Italy had two riders in the top ten, both at the Giro: Davide Piganzoli eighth and Damiano Caruso ninth. Outside the Giro, Italy won no stage at all. That is the figure that bothers us most.

TuttoBiciWeb writes that four stage wins is the lowest Italian total in the history of the Grand Tours. We did not find a second source that compares it year by year, so we report it as their claim and not as our own finding.

The four Italian wins came in three ways: a bunch sprint, a time trial and a stage with a climb at the finish. None came from a rider fighting for the overall. The share matters, though. Four wins out of 61 is about 6.6 per cent. Slovenia reached nine, and those nine belong to Pogačar (eight) and Jakob Omrzel (one). Belgium also has nine. One rider can move a whole country's table, and that tells you how often a national team rests on very few names.

Here we have to give an opinion, and we will. We do not think Italy lacks talent. We think it lacks riders built for the mountain stages of the Tour and the Vuelta, the races where a national team's season is often decided on someone else's bike. That is our view. The numbers do not prove it on their own. They only show where the stages went.

What to watch in 2027

The 2027 Giro route is already public, with two crossings of the Mortirolo and the Zoncolan: we wrote about it in our guide to the 2027 Giro route. The 2027 Tour starts in Edinburgh. For dates and spring races, the 2027 calendar is the place to start.

Our question for the season is simple: how many stages will Italian riders win outside the Giro? We do not expect miracles. We would like to see an Italian name win a mountain stage of the Tour, just once. To see what a climb like that asks of a rider, read our guide to Alpe d'Huez.

Now it is your turn. Where do you stand? Is the Giro still the race to bet on, or is it time for Italian cycling to look harder at the Tour and the Vuelta? Tell us in the comments which Italian rider you would like to see win a stage outside the Giro in 2027, and why.

Sources: Wikipedia, 2026 Giro d'Italia; Wikipedia, 2026 Tour de France; Wikipedia, 2026 Vuelta a España; TuttoBiciWeb, 8 November 2026; FloBikes, Giro 2026 stage 13; Giro d'Italia, official news.