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Giro d'Italia

Mikel Landa Withdraws From 2026 Giro d'Italia — Follow-Up Scans Reveal A Pelvic Fracture Missed In The Itzulia Race-Doctor Car Collision Twenty-Three Days Earlier

CYCLING LOOKOUT • 28 APRIL 2026

The Giro d'Italia GC field has lost a second podium-class contender in twenty-four hours. Soudal Quick-Step announced on Tuesday afternoon that 36-year-old Basque climber Mikel Landa will not start the 2026 Giro d'Italia after follow-up scans at the Asepeyo clinic in Vitoria revealed a pelvic fracture sustained in the team-car collision that ended his Itzulia Basque Country race on 5 April. The injury — missed in the immediate post-crash imaging at the Hospital de Galdakao — will require a further four to six weeks of bone-loading-restricted rehabilitation, ruling out any May racing.

The crash itself was already controversial. Landa was struck by a race-organisation medical car on the descent of the Itzulia Basque Country's stage 2 between Salinas de Léniz and Vitoria-Gasteiz, the Spaniard going down at roughly 47 km/h after the vehicle — reportedly attempting to overtake a small group of dropped riders — clipped his rear wheel. Initial X-rays at Galdakao identified soft-tissue trauma to his right hip and a deep haematoma along the iliac crest, but cleared him of bony injury. Landa returned to training nine days later under a "no-impact, low-watt" protocol, and the team had publicly committed to his Giro start as recently as last Wednesday.

The follow-up imaging was ordered after Landa reported persistent left-side groin pain on a 200-watt endurance ride at the team's training camp in Calpe over the weekend. A high-resolution MRI on Monday morning identified a non-displaced sacral ala fracture, partly healed, on the contralateral side of the original impact. Soudal Quick-Step team doctor José Ramos confirmed in a statement that "the fracture has already begun to heal but will require a further period of recovery before bone-loading is medically prudent. Mikel will not race in May. We will reassess for the Vuelta a España in early August."

The withdrawal lands inside twenty-four hours of João Almeida's confirmed pull-out and rebuilds the GC top-ten in real time. Soudal Quick-Step had identified Landa as their primary GC card after Remco Evenepoel's move to Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe over the winter and had built a stage-hunter line-up around him with Mauri Vansevenant in support and Mauro Schmid on stage-win duty. With Landa out, the team confirms Mattia Cattaneo as opportunistic GC option (best result a 2023 fifth at Romandie) and Schmid as primary stage hunter, with the Italian's role oriented toward top-ten rather than podium ambitions.

The Itzulia incident is now the subject of a UCI investigation announced on 12 April, with the governing body confirming that race-organisation vehicle protocols will be reviewed. Landa, who lost a kidney in the 2017 Vuelta a España on a similar in-race crash, is the third UCI WorldTour rider hospitalised by an organisation vehicle in eighteen months, after Sepp Kuss's 2024 incident at Paris-Nice and Aleksandr Vlasov's 2025 collision at the Tour de Suisse. The CPA rider union called for a "wholesale audit of in-race vehicle deployment" in a statement on Tuesday, with vice-president Tao Geoghegan Hart describing the run of incidents as "professionally indefensible".

For the GC market, Landa's departure pulls another 18/1-and-shorter rider off the board within hours of Almeida's withdrawal, leaving Jonas Vingegaard — on Visma-Lease a Bike's first Giro start with the A-team — as the only sub-7/1 favourite for the maglia rosa. Giulio Pellizzari contracts to a hardened 7/1 after his Tour of the Alps performance, and Richard Carapaz firms to 12/1 with Jay Vine entering the second tier at 14/1 on his elevated UAE role. Adam Yates opens at 16/1, the longest a 2023 Giro runner-up has been priced at any pre-race market in the last decade.

Landa, now 36, has the Giro at the centre of his palmarès — second-place finishes in 2015 and 2017, fourth in 2017 and 2018, and the lifetime Giro KOM jersey in 2017. The 2026 race was widely understood inside the peloton to be his career farewell pivot, and he had spoken openly to Marca last month about wanting one more "honest GC fight" before retirement. Whether the Vuelta in August offers an equivalent opportunity is a question Soudal Quick-Step will not answer for another six weeks. For now, the message from the team's communications office in Brussels is straightforward: heal the bone, then assess.

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