The Giro-Tour double has long been one of cycling’s most coveted achievements. Winning two Grand Tours in one year is a sign of a rider’s dominance, and unsurprisingly the list of those who have achieved it is a list of the greatest cyclists of all time. Eight male riders have managed to win both the Giro d’Italia and Tour de France in one season, and one female rider, although that is a list that could grow longer thanks to the date change for the women’s Giro.
The first rider to achieve the feat was the great Fausto Coppi. The Italian was an icon, famed for his movie star good looks, and the first rider to dominate the sport and win races across Europe. The last rider to win both was Tadej Pogačar, and now his rival Jonas Vingegaard will attempt it in 2026. Starting the Giro for the first time, the Dane is the stand out favourite of all the GC contenders and will go on to ride the Tour de France in July.
|
Rider |
Year |
|---|---|
|
Fausto Coppi (Ita) |
1949, 1952 |
|
Jacques Anquetil (Fra) |
1964 |
|
Eddy Merckx (Bel) |
1970, 1972, 1974* |
|
Bernard Hinault (fra) |
1982, 1985 |
|
Stephen Roche (Ire) |
1987* |
|
Miguel Indurain (Esp) |
1992, 1993 |
|
Marco Pantani (Ita) |
1998 |
|
Tadej Pogačar (Slo) |
2024* |
*Completed the Triple Crown by also winning the UCI road race World Championships
Annemiek van Vleuten became the first woman to win the Giro/Tour double in 2022, although this list of one is not through a lack of female riders good enough to do it, but through a lack of opportunity. The Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift returned to the women’s calendar in 2022 after a decade long campaign, and even then, the dates weren’t helpful.
That year the ten-day Giro d’Italia Donne finished on July 10 and the Tour de France Femmes began just 14 days later on July 24. Van Vleuten was however more than capable in a year where she barely finished outside of the top five in every race she started. To make her achievement even more impressive, she won the Madrid Challenge by La Vuelta in mid September. Although at the time, the women’s third Grand Tour was only five stages long.
This year the Giro d’Italia Women has moved and will start on May 30th, and finish on June 7th, giving riders eight weeks between the two races. This should mean the top GC riders in the women’s peloton will ride both, giving more riders the chance to add their name to the list. Demi Vollering has already stated her 2026 aim is to complete the double.
|
Rider |
Year |
|---|---|
|
Annemiek van Vleuten (Ned) |
2022 |
Male riders who have achieved the Giro / Tour double
Fausto Coppi
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‘Il Campionissimo’ needs no introduction. Fausto Coppi is one of the most iconic and legendary cyclists of all time and, long after his untimely death, his name still carries a mythical status in the sport given his extensive list of achievements during his career.
Coppi was the first rider to ever win the Giro-Tour double, and ended up winning both races in the same year on two different occasions.
The first occasion was in 1949 while riding for the Italian national team. Coppi initially sustained a huge time deficit in the Tour after crashing heavily in the earlier stages, but he would go on to claw the time back in the high mountains as the race progressed.
He went on to win the race’s penultimate day time trial in Nancy which ensured that he would triumph at the Tour, on debut, and become the first rider to achieve the Giro-Tour double in the same season in the process, a feat he would go on to match three years later.
Jacques Anquetil
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Five Tour victories and two Giro triumphs make up just part of the great Jacques Anquetil’s list of achievements, but 1964 was arguably the Normandy-born rider’s crowning moment of his career.
Anquetil had already won the Giro previously in 1960, but going into the Italian Grand Tour that year he was among a select group of foreign hopefuls for the maglia rosa who all had the potential to upset the home support looking to witness an Italian triumph in their own backyard.
Riding for the Saint-Raphaël team that eventually inspired the well known kit brand Rapha, Anquetil took a stage win early on which saw him pull on pink before holding it all the way through to the finish.
A few weeks later at the Tour, Anquetil was very nearly denied his fifth Tour victory by Raymond Poulidor, who pushed him all the way to the end, cutting Anquetil’s lead to almost nothing. But Anquetil would eventually prevail, beating Poulidor in the race’s final time trial to ensure that he would win his fifth and final Tour de France by 55 seconds and achieve the double.
Eddy Merckx
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Eddy Merckx holds the record for the most Giro-Tour doubles achieved during his career, an achievement truly befitting of a man nicknamed the Cannibal.
The Belgian great first pulled off the double in 1970, before going on to add a second and third in 1972 and 1974. His first Giro d’Italia was arguably unexpected after he had suffered with a knee injury for much of the race and illness beforehand.
However, after winning stage two, Merckx then went on to win three more stages as his fitness developed during the race. He then won a second successive Tour de France later that summer. Merckx then held off several challenges in 1972 at the Tour from France’s Raymond Poulidor and Felice Gimondi of Italy in order to ensure that he landed yet another double. Merckx’s eventual winning margin stood at more than ten minutes.
Merckx’s 1974 Giro win was a closely run affair. The Belgian won the Corsa Rosa by just 12 seconds that year and was made to wait until stage 12 for his first victory of the race, a 25 mile individual time trial on stage 12. He then won the Tour by 8:04 ahead of Poulidor.
Bernard Hinault
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‘The Badger’ is the next man to have completed the double on more than one occasion, winning both the Giro and Tour in 1982 and 1985. Remarkably, the French legend won nearly all of the Grand Tours he ever participated in.
During his career, he competed in three editions of the Giro and two editions of the Vuelta a España, winning all five races. Hinault also won on five out of eight appearances at the Tour de France, making him part of a select club of riders to have won the Tour on five occasions.
The 1982 Tour saw Hinault take four stages on his way to victory in Paris. Three of those were individual time trials, one being the race’s prologue in Basel, before he then went on to win the race’s final stage in Paris on the Champs-Élysées.
Three years later, the Tour was a much more closely run affair. Hinault only managed two stage wins – both coming in time trials once again, before going on to win the race overall by 1:42 ahead of his La Vie Claire teammate, Greg LeMond.
Stephen Roche
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Stephen Roche is one of only two former pro cyclists to achieve the unthinkable, winning cycling’s triple crown – the Giro d’Italia, Tour de France and road World Championships – all in the same season.
The Irishman only won the Tour on one occasion, but coming in the middle of his triple crown, it shouldn’t be underestimated. Interestingly Roche has previously said that it was never the plan to win all three events in the same year, everything just seemed to fall into place at the right time to enable him to do so.
Roche took the pink jersey during part b of the race’s first stage, a short individual time trial from the Poggio near San Remo into the middle of the town. The second part of the stage was a mere five kilometres in length, but that didn’t prevent Roche from laying down the law and claiming pink. Roche then won the final day longer time trial into Turin to wrap up the overall victory by more than three minutes.
Later that year, Roche was pushed all the way to the penultimate day time trial by Pedro Delgado during the Tour. Roche won an 87km time trial on stage ten before he then lost the yellow jersey with the end in sight. The Irishman clawed back enough time during the penultimate stage to pull on yellow once more ahead of the race wrapping up in Paris.
Miguel Induráin
Indurain (middle) on the final Tour de France podium in 1993
(Image credit: Getty Images)
Induráin is the only man to have ever completed the double in two consecutive seasons, winning both the Tour and Giro in 1992 and 1993. The Spaniard also won the Tour five years in a row with his time trialling prowess setting him well on the way to victory in each.
During his first Giro triumph, it was two time trial wins that got him over the line, including a 41 mile effort into Milan on the race’s final day.
Induráin then won all three of the Tour’s time trials later that year before eventually claiming yellow in Paris. He then replicated that accomplishment the following year, winning all four of the time trials on offer across both Grand Tours on his way to overall victory in each.
On retirement, Induráin’s stage win total stood at 16 in both the Giro and Tour with most of those being on aero bars. As well as his wins in both Italy and France, his time trial mastery also saw him claim the world title in 1995, before going on to land an Olympic gold medal in the discipline a year later.
Marco Pantani
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Marco Pantani is possibly one of the most written about cyclists of all time, mainly due to his troubled private life which culminated in his tragic and untimely death in 2004 aged just 34.
In his prime, Pantani was regarded as being one of the sport’s very best climbers, with the sight of him dancing up the slopes of some of cycling’s most iconic peaks on his celeste blue Bianchi being a joy to behold. He was also well known for his pirate bandana and earring which he sported throughout his career, earning him the nickname ‘Il Pirata’.
Two months later the Tour began in Ireland with Chris Boardman winning the prologue and pulling on yellow. Pantani had to wait until stage 11 to Plateau de Beille to make his mark. The Italian obliterated his rivals to win the stage and set a record time for the ascent in the process. He was made to wait before he could pull on the yellow jersey, but victory on stage 15 at Les Deux Alpes, when leader Jan Ullrich suffered in the cold and rain through the mountains, was enough to see Pantani take the leader’s jersey and eventually win the Tour.
Controversy dogged the race that year, with the Festina doping scandal threatening to discredit the entire sport. Use of EPO was rife – Pantani was kicked off the 1999 Giro for having a high haematocrit (a measure used before a test for EPO was developed) – and the UCI was scrambling to keep up with the cheats. Rider protests threatened the Tour’s very existence and many teams and riders were kicked out, or pulled themselves out. All of which left a cloud over Pantani’s win.
Tadej Pogačar
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It says everything about the Slovenian that he made the impossible look decidedly straight forward in 2024. Having already won Strade Bianche, the Tour of Catalunya, and Liège-Bastogne-Liège he breezed through the Giro d’Italia winning by nine minutes and 56 seconds (the biggest winning margin since 1965) from Daniel Martínez (Bora Hansgrohe), having worn the leaders pink jersey from stage two, taking six stage victories on the way and seemingly taking his foot off the gas in the final stages with his Tour challenge already in mind.
His Tour win was almost as dominant. He beat Jonas Vingegaard, who had won the previous two editions, by six minutes 17 seconds, took the yellow jersey on stage two, relinquished it on stage three only to win it back on stage four and wear it until the finish in Nice, and take six stages along the way.
Even though Vingegaard had a disrupted build up thanks to being caught up in a horror crash at the Tour of the Basque country that spring, Pogačar was clearly unstoppable. He then went on to become the third male rider in history to achieve the triple crown – winning the Giro, Tour and UCI road race world title in the same year. The latter with a jaw-dropping 101km break away.
He did however sit out the Paris Olympics that started just one week after the Tour, citing exhaustion.He also won the GP Cycliste de Montréal, Giro dell’Emilia and Il Lombardia.
Female riders who have achieved the Giro / Tour double
Annemiek van Vleuten
(Image credit: Getty Images)
When looking at the Giro-Tour double winners club, it would only feel right to include Annemiek van Vleuten, winner of both the Giro d’Italia Women and the Tour de France Femmes in the same year in the list.
Van Vleuten has won the Giro Donne on four occasions, but it was in 2022 that she won both the Giro and women’s Tour de France in the same year. She may not have won two three-week Grand Tours with just a month off in between, but she beat some formidable opposition on the way to her two victories. It is as good as you can get in women’s cycling.
Looking at her Tour win in particular, she put the likes of Demi Vollering and Elisa Longo Borghini to the sword on the way to victory in the race’s inaugural edition, a landmark achievement for women’s cycling.
It was on stage three of the Giro that the Dutchwoman took her the first step towards her third overall victory. Van Vleuten won a hilly stage on a circuit around Cesena before going on to win in the mountains around Aldeno on stage seven which was enough to get the job done and secure the overall title.
During the Tour she had to leave it late to snatch the yellow jersey. Marianne Vos held the overall lead going into the final two mountain stages, but Van Vleuten wrestled it from her shoulders by taking wins at Le Markstein and Planche des Belles Filles.
Van Vleuten’s palmarès also matches any male rider on this list, particularly due to her four world titles and Olympic gold medal. She was simply a force to be reckoned with during her career and as a result, she thoroughly deserves her place alongside Pogačar, Merckx and company as a true winner of the Giro-Tour double.