"If The Team Works For Me I Have To Live Up To It" — Giulio Pellizzari Goes Into The 2026 Giro D'Italia As The Most Credible Italian GC Hope Since Nibali Last Stood On The Podium In Milan
Italy has not had a podium finisher at its own Grand Tour since Vincenzo Nibali's second place behind Tom Dumoulin in 2017, and a winner since the same Nibali in 2016. As the 109th edition of the Giro d'Italia rolls out from Nessebar on May 8, the country is leaning hard on a 22-year-old from Camerino who has spent the last twelve months quietly turning into the only home rider on Jonas Vingegaard's odds board.
Giulio Pellizzari's spring has been the most consistent of any GC contender on the startlist. Third overall at the Ronde van Valencia in February. Third overall at Tirreno-Adriatico in March. Outright winner of the Tour of the Alps last week, his first overall stage-race victory of his professional career. The Alps win came on the back of a queen-stage performance in Val Martello that was the single best high-mountain ride by an Italian rider since Damiano Caruso's second place at the 2021 Giro.
Underpinning the form is a structural change at Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe. The German team, in a calculated bet on Italian hardware, brought Pellizzari into the leadership room over the winter and built the entire 2026 calendar around him alongside Jai Hindley. He will share co-leadership with the 2022 Giro winner at the Corsa Rosa, in an arrangement structurally identical to the one that gave Hindley his Vuelta podium ride in 2024 — Pellizzari leads in the high mountains, Hindley shadows in the medium and protects on the cobbled and gravel days.
The opening field has cracked wide open in Pellizzari's direction. João Almeida's withdrawal with a viral infection. Mikel Landa's late-diagnosed pelvis fracture. Richard Carapaz's cyst-surgery setback. Three of the seven pre-season GC favourites are out before the opening time trial. The bookmakers have shortened Pellizzari from 25/1 to 7/1 in the past eight days. He is the second-shortest favourite behind Vingegaard at 4/9, and the only contender below 10/1 who has not yet had a Grand Tour podium.
The Italian press, which spent the winter in mourning for Filippo Ganna's decision to skip the Giro for a Roubaix-and-Tour double, has switched cleanly onto Pellizzari. La Gazzetta dello Sport ran a four-page profile last week. Tuttobici's editor wrote a column on Wednesday calling Pellizzari "the only mathematically Italian way to a Maglia Rosa in Rome on May 31". The fan-painted graffiti on the Stelvio, repainted every year for whoever the Italian hope happens to be, this year reads "P_E_L_L_I_Z_Z_A_R_I" instead of "GANNA" or "NIBALI" or "ARU".
Pellizzari himself has, by his own admission, struggled to settle into the favourite-tag conversation. "If the team works for me I have to live up to it," he said at his Tour of the Alps press conference. "It is the first time in my life I have been at the front of a press room rather than in the back. The numbers are good. The legs are good. The pressure is something I am still learning." He has been notably reluctant to commit to a podium goal, even after a third place at Tirreno and an Alps overall in the past 60 days.
The route — a 21-stage parcours starting in Bulgaria, dipping into Albania, returning to Italy on stage 4, with a 51-kilometre time trial on stage 11 and three high-Alps stages including a return to the Mortirolo on stage 19 — is widely regarded as one of the toughest of the past decade. It also disadvantages Pellizzari at exactly the point his rivals are strongest: he is not, on current form, a top-five time trialist, and a 51km TT against Vingegaard could cost him 90 seconds before the Alps even begin.
The Italian podium drought is now nine years deep. The country's only realistic way to break it sits in a Red Bull team car on a Ryanair flight to Burgas this weekend, with a full Grand Tour ahead of him and a question — whether the Maglia Rosa is a plausible target or merely a top-five — that he will spend the next 24 days answering on Italian roads.