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Giro d'Italia

"A Chance At Winning Every Stage" — Jayco-AlUla Unveil 2026 Giro d'Italia Squad Around Ben O'Connor's Podium Tilt, Ackermann Hunts A Fourth Career Stage Win, Vendrame Returns For A Ninth Corsa Rosa

CYCLING LOOKOUT • 1 MAY 2026

Friday afternoon Melbourne. Eight days from the 9 May Nessebar Grande Partenza, Jayco-AlUla have closed out the 2026 Giro d'Italia rider lottery with the team's most explicit dual-objective roster of the post-merger era — Ben O'Connor for the general classification, Pascal Ackermann for the sprint stages, and a six-rider supporting cast that head sport director Mat Hayman has briefed to "race for a result every single day". Eight names confirmed: O'Connor, Ackermann, Andrea Vendrame, Koen Bouwman, Alan Hatherly, Felix Engelhardt, Robert Donaldson, and Christopher Juul-Jensen.

O'Connor is the headline. Two fourth-place finishes at the Giro d'Italia — 2020 in his Sunweb-NTT debut, 2024 with Decathlon-AG2R — and a Vuelta a España runner-up in 2024 still leave the 30-year-old Australian without a Grand Tour podium, the line item the Jayco-AlUla recruitment cell flagged as the missing peak when they signed him for 2026 on a three-year deal that runs through to the end of his career. Hayman to the team's morning press release: "Ben has finished fourth at this race twice. He has spent the winter focused on closing the gap to the riders ahead of him. The route suits him, the team is built around him, and the only way we go to Bulgaria is for the podium."

The mountain support stack is the strongest Jayco-AlUla have ever taken to a Grand Tour. Bouwman, the 2022 Giro mountains classification winner before his switch from Visma Lease-a-Bike, anchors the high-altitude work and gives O'Connor a final-3km wheel that has now been wheel-tested across two seasons together. Hatherly, the 2024 Olympic mountain bike silver medallist who has settled into road racing faster than any cross-discipline transfer of the last decade, is the climbing variable the bookmakers are still working out how to price. Engelhardt rounds out the high-mountain trident, with the 25-year-old German promoted to a Giro start after his Tour of Catalunya stage 5 podium ride.

Ackermann is the second pillar. The 32-year-old German has won three Giro stages across his career — Foggia 2019, San Vito al Tagliamento 2019, Tortoreto 2024 — and arrives in Bulgaria off a strong spring at the Tour of Turkey and the Scheldeprijs. Donaldson, the 24-year-old Scot in only his second professional season, slots into the final lead-out role and will hit a Grand Tour for the first time in his career. The book opens Ackermann at 5/1 for the Stage 1 TT bonification sprint behind Vingegaard, 6/1 for any of the four flat stages in the second week.

Vendrame returns for a ninth Giro d'Italia start — only one rider in the active peloton, Diego Ulissi at XDS Astana, has more starts among the 184 confirmed riders — and gets the explicit breakaway-card brief that delivered his two stage wins in 2021 and 2024. Juul-Jensen returns as road captain for what the 36-year-old Dane has confirmed will be his final Grand Tour before retirement at season's end. The eight-rider squad averages 27.4 years, the most-experienced Giro lineup Jayco-AlUla have taken to a corsa rosa since the 2018 Esteban Chaves edition.

The route reads to O'Connor's strengths in a way the 2024 edition did not. The Stage 1 TT is short enough that the gap to Vingegaard caps at 60 seconds, the second week stacks four medium-mountain stages where O'Connor's climbing-time-trial template has historically delivered, and the final-week summit finish at Sega di Ala is the kind of long-tempo grind he won at on the Tour de France in 2021. Hayman's working number for podium probability sits at 38 per cent, the highest pre-Giro probability the team has carried since the 2017 Adam Yates edition.

The team will fly out of Melbourne on Sunday morning local time and land in Sofia on Monday afternoon, with a Tuesday recon of the Stage 1 TT in Burgas, a Wednesday recon of the Stage 3 closing 50 kilometres into Sofia, and a Thursday rest-day press conference at the Burgas Hilton. O'Connor at the Friday afternoon presentation: "I've been fourth twice. The next number on the page has to be smaller than four."

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