The new Grand Tour hat-trick
Do they realise what they've done?!
The first rider ever to win stages in all three Grand Tours was the great Italian rider Fiorenzo Magni in 1955. He probably didn’t realise what he’d done at the time, because back then Grand Tours didn’t really exist.
There were big races and small races and some races in between, but the concept of a Grand Tour with a big ‘G’ and a big ‘T’ didn’t exist until the 1990s.
Nevertheless, it doesn’t stop nerds like me retroactively applying modern-day feats throughout the entirety of cycling history.
When Ben O’Connor won Stage 6 of last year’s Vuelta (and took the leader’s jersey and very nearly held on to it until the end), he became the 111th and most recent male rider to achieve this feat. O’Connor has won exactly one of each, which is actually quite rare. It’s rare because the riders who tend to manage this particular hat-trick are, by definition, repeat stage winners so they tend to win stages repeatedly. The only other two riders with exactly one stage win in each of the Giro, Tour and Vuelta are Lennard Kamna and Juan Manuel Garate.
Magni didn’t know what he’d achieved in 1955, that’s for sure. But by the 90s and 2000s, all of us were becoming more and more aware that winning a stage in all three was quite a good thing. But still, I believe it is only in the last few years (10 maybe?) that completing this hat-trick has become an explicit goal and not something which just happens as a result of trying very hard to win races in general.
Riders are starting to declare it out loud. Wout Poels has done so about the upcoming Giro. He wants to join the elite club…
It’s a big goal of mine
And arguably, Poels would be joining the even eliter club containing just O’Connor, Kamna and Garate. Arguably, because it depends on your view of whether he won the Angliru stage of the Vuelta in 2011 which was ‘won’ originally by Juan Jose Cobo.
Poels is one of six riders who can complete the hat-trick at the upcoming Giro, along with Wout van Aert, Romain Bardet, Simon Clarke, Rafal Majka and Adam Yates.
But there are more than three Grand Tours now. There are six. So there’s a new hat-trick up for grabs.
Given the history of the women’s editions of the Tour de France and the Vuelta, it’s tricky to know where to draw the line in the sand of where the origins of this hat-trick winning feat should begin. Well, nobody knew the rules of this whole thing when Magni was doing what he did in the 1950s. Similarly, there are no rules now, so I’m going to make them up.
The Vuelta began in 2020. The Tour de France began in 2022. And the Giro began in 1988. And that’s the way it is.
So… in the short window of time where it has been possible to achieve this feat how many have done it?
Four. Four women have already won a stage in all three Grand Tours: Marianne Vos, Lorena Wiebes, Lotte Kopecky and Annemiek van Vleuten.
Not bad considering how recently it’s only become possible.
There are three riders who only need a stage of the Vuelta to complete the hat-trick. One isn’t riding it currently - Blanka Vas.
I will be keeping a keen eye on the other two over the next few days to see if they can do it - Emma Norsgaard and Lianne Lippert.
We discuss all this and a lot more on the latest episode of the Did Not Finish podcast. I also give my co-hosts Harry and Stu a Giro d’Italia quiz which they were shite at. See if you can do any better. Give it a listen and let us know what you think!