"Two Captains, One Race, And A Twenty-Two-Year-Old Who Has Been Waiting Three Years For This" — Red Bull-BORA-hansgrohe Names Pellizzari-Hindley Dual-Leadership Giro 2026 Squad, Vlasov The Third GC Card, Aleotti And Moscon The Mountain Hub
Red Bull-BORA-hansgrohe have confirmed an eight-rider Giro d'Italia 2026 squad built around the dual leadership of Giulio Pellizzari and Jai Hindley, with Aleksandr Vlasov confirmed as a third GC card on a stage-by-stage rotation. The team release, dated Sunday morning from the squad's Sestriere recon camp, frames the dual-leader brief as a hedged play that gives the team three viable podium scenarios into the third-week mountain block.
Pellizzari is the headline. The 22-year-old Italian, who finished sixth at last year's Giro and won the Stage 16 mountain stage to Bormio, is racing his home Grand Tour with the team's GC weight on him for the first time. He won the Tour of the Alps two weeks ago by 31 seconds and was top-five at Itzulia in the build, and the team has matched the long-term contract he signed in February with a Giro brief that has the third-week mountain stages — Tre Cime, Sestriere, and the Trentino circuit — as the verdict block.
Hindley is the insurance. The 2022 Giro champion has been re-built into a co-leader role after a 2025 season that ended in the Vuelta breakaway-rider second tier rather than the GC fight, and the team has been clear that Hindley's brief is to ride for himself if Pellizzari has a bad day, and to ride for Pellizzari if not. The 29-year-old Australian was 12th at the Tour de Romandie, finished eight seconds off the Stage 4 Anzère podium, and the team has him back at the top of his form curve.
Vlasov is the third card. The Russian, in his second year at Red Bull-BORA-hansgrohe and racing under the team's ProTeam-Russian-quota framework, has been brought back to the Giro for the first time since 2022, when he was riding under the Astana banner. Vlasov's brief is closest to the medium-mountain stages, the Stage 9 Lago Maggiore time-trial-loaded weekend, and the third-week breakaway slot. The team has framed his role as "the GC card we don't need to think about until week three."
The five-rider support cast is the strongest the team has fielded at a Grand Tour since the 2024 Tour de France. Giovanni Aleotti is the mountain road captain, racing his fourth Giro and his second on the Pellizzari support brief. Gianni Moscon, the Italian veteran, has been brought in as the engine-room rider for the medium-mountain transitions and the bunch-positioning brief in the closing kilometres of the climbing days. Mick van Dijke, signed in November from Visma-Lease a Bike, is the closing-kilometre lead-out and the breakaway-pursuit rider.
The final two slots go to Luke Tuckwell and Ben Zwiehoff, the two riders who would normally have shared the same brief but who the team has split — Tuckwell, the 24-year-old British neo-pro, gets the breakaway brief, and Zwiehoff, the 31-year-old German, gets the mountain-domestique brief. Notable absences include Danny van Poppel, who had been on the long-list but is being saved for a post-Giro Tour de Suisse and Belgian Classics block in late June, and Anton Palzer, who has been ruled out with a hamstring strain that was confirmed at the team's Sestriere camp on Monday.
The numbers behind the squad: combined eight-rider GC palmarès of three Grand Tour overalls (Hindley 2022 Giro, Hindley 2023 Tour podium, Vlasov 2022 Giro top-ten), four Giro stages between Pellizzari and Hindley, and seven Italian Grand Tour podiums in the support cast across Aleotti and Moscon. The team's bookmaker GC win pricing for the eight-rider squad sits at 7/2 outright (Pellizzari 5/1, Hindley 8/1, Vlasov 14/1), the second-best Giro win price after Primož Roglič at UAE at 6/4, and a touch shorter than Antonio Tiberi at Bahrain Victorious at 4/1.
For Pellizzari, this is the Grand Tour the team has been building him toward since November 2024, when his contract was extended to 2030. For Hindley, it is the comeback Grand Tour to confirm that the post-2024 dip was a function of programme rather than ceiling. And for Vlasov, it is the rehabilitation Grand Tour after a quiet 18 months. The Stage 1 Nessebar time trial rolls out on Friday 8 May.