Usually, on a brutal 244km mountain stage when your team decimates the peloton, you win the stage, and you smash a climbing record by more than a minute, it means you have taken total control of the race, which for 1.5km seemed like exactly what Jonas Vingegaard had done at the Giro d'Italia.
He'd put his team to work on the lower slopes of the 13.6-kilometre Blockhaus climb, and with 5.5km of the ascent left to take on, he had attacked with only one man able to follow: Gilulio Pellizzari. A worthy challenger, yes, but Vingegaard looked ominous as he controlled his breathing and kept looking back at the Italian, knowing that he could accelerate at will until he broke the Italian.
Just seven stages have been raced, but the expected result was already materialising, with pink jersey Afonso Eulálio getting dropped under the pressure of Vingegaard's impressive Visma lieutenants, Davide Piganzoli and Sepp Kuss. It was business as usual for the men in yellow and black.
That was until Felix Gall started to mount a comeback that is rarely seen against Vingegaard when he's in top Grand Tour form, as an elite rider who definitely sits in the same dominant club as Tadej Pogačar and Mathieu van der Poel on his best days; when they have gone solo, you don't tend to see them again.
Everyone else, however, does seem to be reduced to the fight for the podium now, with Vingegaard ending the day having extended his lead out to more than a minute over all except for the Austrian and pink jersey Afonso Eulálio, who fought hard to keep hold of what was a 6:22 race lead at the start of the stage. It was the superiority everyone had been expecting, yes, but with Gall throwing a spanner in the works.
Where Gall is lacking in the fight against Vingegaard
As he spoke at the finish, Gall admitted he was "not thinking about how to beat [Vingegaard] for now," despite only finishing 13 seconds in arrears. He even highlighted the area where he knows, and certainly Vingegaard knows, that there remains a gulf in quality between the pair.
That would be time trialling, with Gall's awkward, un-aerodynamic position on his road bike signalling where he really lacks as a GC rider. Once Gall is on his TT machine on stage 10 from Lucca to Pisa, you can almost add the minutes of time losses to his overall standing before he makes it off the start ramp.
Only once in his career has he ever beaten Vingegaard against the clock, and that was in May 2018 at the Grand Prix Priessnitz spa, when Gall finished 58th, 11 spots higher than the Dane in 69th. Perhaps most importantly, it was only during that summer of 2018 that Vingegaard stopped working in the fish factory, a well-known part of his rise to the top – he was not the GC phenom he is today.
In every race against the clock, they have competed against each other since then, Vingegaard has come out on top and only finished outside the top 10 once, on the fifth stage of last year's Tour. In that same time frame, contrastingly, Gall has only finished inside the top 10 once, on the mountain ITT of the Tour 12 months ago, and has barely finished inside the top 50 of those 10 time trials since 2018.
The gaps at the Giro will surely be massive once they reach Massa and the 42-kilometre, flat 10th stage is done, possibly two minutes or more. What is just 17 seconds now on GC will become a gulf, with Vingegaard also likely being a stronger operator against the clock than all of the other GC riders at the Giro. And this is without mentioning whether Gall will survive the punchy Muri stage on Saturday to Fermo with his narrow deficit still intact.
Sunday's race to Corne alle Scale is a big plus for the Austrian, though, offering a great chance to eke out his lead over the other contenders, and mount another challenge to the Dane on the 10.8km ascent, which averages 6.1% in gradient, but 10.1% for its final 3km.
Gall may not be the contender for the pink, which today's stage made him seem, mostly due to his time trialling – he said that himself – but also his real lack of descending skills, which will hurt him in the third week when the mountain stages have repeated climbs; however, that brings with it repeated downhills. But, and it is a big but, his excellence uphill makes him the big favourite to finish second best behind Vingegaard now, which would be quite the performance.
Understanding Vingegaard
Though he completely overhauled that climbing record held by Nairo Quintana from 2017, Gall finishing so close has already led to questions being asked of Vingegaard's shape. Should he not be winning by more, as Pogačar might have? Is he not at top form yet? Was he holding back, knowing how brutal the third week is?
The latter two will probably be answered in the second and third weeks of the Giro, with stage 14, 19 and 20 being the big days for him to impose his climbing superiority on the opposition once again, and with even more emphasis – if he's able to anyway.
Perhaps he isn't at the peak climbing form, which he showed at the Tour in 2022, 2023 and 2024, or up the Bola del Mundo at the Vuelta last September, but there is important context with Vingegaard and his performances.
While, yes, he will absolutely want to be at his best to win this Giro, he and Visma especially know that the key to doing so will be him hitting his peak on the eye-wateringly difficult climbing days to Alleghe on stage 19, and Piancavallo on stage 20 – which are exactly two weeks away.
And even still, Vingegaard will actually be aiming to be at his absolute best in July, as he is targeting the Giro-Tour de France double in 2026, and in that duo, it's the Tour that takes precedence. There, of course, his main rival will be Pogačar: the best rider seen for 50 years who has defeated him for two years running, so for that appointment, Vingegaard can leave no bit of performance behind if he wants any hope of a third yellow jersey.
Pogačar, too, did the Giro-Tour double in 2024, winning both in emphatic style with six wins at each race. Vingegaard may not be able to dominate in that kind of all-conquering style, but considering he could have heaps of performance still to unlock before the Tour's hardest days, a win on Blockhaus more than two months prior that only Felix Gall could almost match, is nothing to sound the alarm over.
Gall might just have done his career-best performance on Blockhaus today, after all. He's not racing the Tour this year – that will be the job of teenager Paul Seixas for Decathlon – with the Giro and Vuelta as his big goals, and the field of La Corsa Rosa offering him a big shot at the podium; he should be firing on all cylinders by now.
Vingegaard has oozed with calm throughout the first seven stages of his debut Giro, escaping all of the chaos and crashes so far, and now passing his first mountain test with no issues. It wasn't as emphatic as some might have been expecting, but he seems in total control of the race. 17 seconds to Gall doesn't paint the full picture, and by the end of Tuesday's time trial, with Eulálio also already teetering in the lead and being another poor TT rider, Vingegaard could well be in pink with a massive lead, and with 11 stages to only make it wider.
Jai Hindley in 2022 is, amazingly, the only Blockhaus stage winner to also win the Giro d'Italia in the same year, something even a young Eddy Merckx couldn't do in 1967 when he burst onto the Grand Tour scene, but Vingegaard looks well on the path to being the second after today. Those seven men in history to have won all three Grand Tours could soon be welcoming a new member to the club, as his biggest potential barrier to the pink jersey in Rome still seems to be a crash, illness or himself, not the likes of Gall.
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