"Three Riders, Three Briefs — Pedersen Owns Bulgaria, Milan Owns The Bunch, Skjelmose Owns The Mountains" — Lidl-Trek Names An Eight-Rider Giro d'Italia 2026 Squad That Splits The Race Into Three Discrete Campaigns Before Stage 1 Has Even Rolled
Saturday afternoon Pieve di Soligo. Six days from the 8 May Grande Partenza in Nessebar, Lidl-Trek have confirmed the eight riders that go to the 2026 Giro d'Italia: Mattias Skjelmose as GC leader, Mads Pedersen for the Bulgaria opening block and the puncheur stages, Jonathan Milan as the lead-out closer for every flat day, and a five-rider support cast of Giulio Ciccone, Toms Skujins, Mathias Vacek, Carlos Verona and Jacopo Mosca. The team launch in Pieve di Soligo this morning broke the squad into the three campaigns the management have decided will run in parallel through the three weeks: a Bulgarian sprint-and-puncheur week, a continuous bunch-sprint thread, and a defensive GC programme aimed at a podium ride into Rome.
Pedersen's brief is the most front-loaded of the three. The Dane goes to Bulgaria as the rider Lidl-Trek expect to wear the maglia rosa out of the Grande Partenza after Stage 1's Nessebar coastal start, with the Stage 2 Plovdiv run profiling identically to the punchy finishes that have given him five career Giro stage wins. Pedersen's race ends after Stage 9 if the maglia rosa has stayed on his shoulders, or after Stage 12 if it hasn't. The same brief that took him out at Stage 12 in 2024 gets re-run, with the same 2026 endgame: out of the Giro, into a four-week block before the Tour.
Milan's role is unchanged from his 2024 Giro: every flat day, every reduced-bunch finale, every lead-out into the line. The Friuli sprinter has eight career Giro stage wins from his three previous starts, and the 2026 route — six pure-sprint days, three reduced-bunch options, and a closing Stage 21 Rome circuit that the team have priced as a fourth pure-sprint card — is built more sympathetically than any Giro Milan has ridden. The internal target the team confirmed in the Pieve di Soligo room is four stage wins. The market is priced at 11/4 he hits the number.
Skjelmose's GC brief is more cautious. The 24-year-old Dane's last full grand tour was the 2024 Vuelta, where he finished sixth on his debut, and the team have set the 2026 Giro target at "podium if the form is there, top five if it isn't". The decisive blocks for Skjelmose's GC are Stage 14's Asiago double summit, Stage 16's Mottolino-Bormio queen stage, and Stage 20's San Pellegrino in Alpe time trial. The Dane has trained for two of the three at altitude on the Sierra Nevada in the second half of April with Ciccone and Verona, and the team's internal data has him within five percent of the climbing power he produced at his Liege win in 2024.
The squad shift relative to the 2024 Giro is a function of Juan Ayuso's Tour de France reroute, confirmed in mid-April after the Itzulia comeback. Ayuso was the original GC leader for the team's 2026 Giro project before the management agreed in April to send him directly to the Tour with seven weeks of altitude work in Andorra. Skjelmose moves up to a leadership role he had never previously held in a grand tour, and the support cast around him — Ciccone in the mountains, Skujins as the road captain, Verona as the high-altitude domestique — is the closest the team have come to building a dedicated GC platform in the Giro since the 2017 Mollema project.
"This is the cleanest split-leadership Giro squad we've sent in a decade," sport director Steven de Jongh told the launch room. "Mads has Bulgaria. Jonathan has the sprints. Mattias has Asiago, Mottolino, San Pellegrino. The supporting riders know on day one of the race who is on whose card. We are not going to lose a Giro through internal competition." The line was the rebuttal of the implicit comparison with the team's 2024 Tour, where the simultaneous Pedersen-Skjelmose ambitions ran into each other on the Plateau de Beille and cost the team two days of net GC.
The Bulgaria reconnaissance that Pedersen completed this week with Vacek and Skujins has been the team's headline preparation block. The three rode the full Stage 2 Plovdiv finishing circuit on Tuesday, the Stage 3 Veliko Tarnovo punch on Wednesday, and the Stage 4 transfer day route on Thursday. Pedersen's Strava splits on the Plovdiv punch matched his 2024 Stage 11 Cesenatico-Fano power numbers to the watt. The Stage 1 Nessebar coastal sprint is priced 5/2 Pedersen-or-Milan as a team-line stake, with the team's preference being for Pedersen to take the line and the maglia rosa from a Stage 1 reduced-bunch break.
Skjelmose's first GC marker arrives on Stage 6, the Stage 7 medium-mountain to Tagliacozzo, and Stage 9's Tuscan summit finish. The team have confirmed the Skjelmose Stage 9 brief is "no losses on Pellizzari", with the 19-year-old Italian's home-roads attack the only marked GC threat for the first nine stages. The internal data has Skjelmose winning the Stage 9 effort if Pellizzari attacks before 4km to go and losing it inside two kilometres. The team's race-radio script for Stage 9 is built around holding the Italian's wheel to within 1.8km of the line and not before. The 2026 Lidl-Trek Giro is now structured. Pedersen leaves for Sofia tomorrow morning. Milan and Skjelmose follow with the rest of the squad on Tuesday.