How Italy’s newest sporting superstar can shake up battle for Giro d’Italia glory

Now 22, the youngster was riding for the second-tier VF Group-Bardiani CSF-Faizane team when he first made a name for himself, at the 2024 Giro. He looked certain to take victory on a mountain stage to Monte Pana, but none other than Tadej Pogacar had different ideas. Rather than dropping away, demoralised, Pellizzari continued to follow him up the climb, and afterwards impulsively asked for the Slovenian’s maglia rosa.

It is not too hard to picture him wearing the leader’s jersey for real. A move to Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe has transformed him from a rangy young hopeful to a genuine contender, surrounded by elite teammates and aided by the coffers of an energy drinks giant.

He has another two Grand Tours in his legs since that breakout race and two sixth-place finishes on his palmares, at last year’s Giro and Vuelta; at the former he arrived as a super-domestique but his class made a switch from stage-hunting to GC inevitable. He has also wised up; he took nasty comments online to heart at the Vuelta, when he dropped a place overall three days after winning a stage, but will avoid social media this time around. The sad reality is that that criticism comes with the territory, and comes with the talent.

Last year’s Vuelta champion Jonas Vingegaard is the hot favourite at the Giro (AFP/Getty)

The man from Le Marche arrives at the start line in Bulgaria in a position he has never been in before: as a team leader for a Grand Tour. But he has performed well under pressure before, winning the Tour of the Alps last month – his first overall victory at a professional stage race – and ably handling the mantle of pre-race favourite. He has completed three stage races this year and been on the podium at all three.

He said after winning in the Alps: “Last year, I was just a helper, and I started the race always thinking ‘I hope I will perform’. This morning, I had no choice, I had to perform. Now I’m understanding what it means to be the leader. [The team] give everything for me, so I give everything for them. You cannot just say, ‘I don’t have the legs.’ You have to give a lot, and I’m learning this.”

Like at the Vuelta, Pellizzari will co-lead at this Giro with Jai Hindley, a former winner of the maglia rosa. The pair made a strong double act in Spain – the Australian finished fourth overall – and while co-leadership doesn’t always pay off, they have the advantage of being able to alternate attacks on Jonas Vingegaard, a strategy which his Visma-Lease a Bike squad used to devastating effect when the Dane won the Tour de France in 2022.

Primoz Roglic, who was Vingegaard’s second-in-command then, is now an elder statesman at Red Bull; while he will not be racing in Italy, Pellizzari can lean on the experienced Hindley, the 2022 champion, and Aleksandr Vlasov, the mercurial Russian with three top-10 Grand Tour finishes to his name.

Egan Bernal, who won the Giro in 2021, is another of the challengers (Getty)

A comparatively thin Giro field means there will be more pressure than perhaps initially expected on Pellizzari’s slender shoulders. Joao Almeida is out with illness, Richard Carapaz missing through injury, and Egan Bernal – who Pellizzari dispatched easily at the Tour of the Alps – has Grand Tour pedigree but has never replicated his exploits from before a horrific crash which nearly killed him in early 2022.

Is it unrealistic to expect a youngster with only one pro stage race victory to his name to challenge the might of three-time Grand Tour champion Vingegaard? Possibly, but Decathlon CMA CGM are throwing 19-year-old Paul Seixas into the Tour de France meat grinder with exactly the same flimsy palmares.

Their potential is undeniable – and both riders can look to precedent, with Pogacar finishing third at the Vuelta on his first Grand Tour start. And Pellizzari has significantly more experience over three weeks than Seixas and Pogacar did then, with his two top-six finishes at three-week races. “These two Grand Tours made a difference when I started,” he told Cyclingnews, of the start of his 2026 campaign. “Maybe I just grew up.”

Intriguingly, Antonelli’s three Grand Prix victories came on the same day Sinner won Masters 1000 events. The Canadian Grand Prix takes place on the same day Sinner will start the French Open as the hot favourite. Two days later, the Giro enters its final week, with a quartet of mountain stages, perfectly suited to Pellizzari, which will decide the winner of the corsa rosa. This glorious season of Italian sport could soon have a new king.