Who had gotten closest to the Giro-Tour-Vuelta sweep?

Now that GC Kuss has delivered, Jumbo-Visma has achieved what hasn’t been done in the 73 years it has been possible (remember the Vuelta is considerably younger than the other Grand Tours, and had more breaks than the other races) and won the Giro d’Italia, Tour de France and Vuelta a Espana in the same season.

The general reckoning seems to be that, whilst very nice for Sepp Kuss, the feat is exemplative of a type of dominance that is not welcome in cycling, which is odd, because historically, fans have usually been enthused about teams that have had an opportunity to complete the “Trilogy”, as Jumbo-Visma have decided to call it.

Perhaps that has been down to the manner in which the Dutch team achieved the feat – with such utter dominance that they could essentially choose who won the race from their podium lockout, leading to perhaps the first and only time a Grand Tour will be decided by social media outrage. It seems that the 1.36% prevalence of a team winning all three Grand Tours will be the tolerated peak, unless achieved by an individual rider of course.

Was anyone else ever close?

Jumbo are far from the first team to be able to, or indeed consider winning all three Grand Tours in one year. However, only eight teams have actually won two Grand Tours and then had a finisher in the third:

Why only eight teams? Well, since the Vuelta’s inception in1955, there have been 28 occasions when a team has won two Grand Tours in a year (and then Kas’s triumph in ’66) However, only eight of those actually rode all three Grand Tours, as the majority of these were in the pre-World/ProTour era and so were when teams were not obligated to ride all three. As a result, team such as Helyett (1962), St Raphael (1963 and 1964), Salvarani (1965), Faema (1970), Molteni (1972, 1973 and 1974), Flandria (1977), Renault-Gitane (1978), Inoxpran (1981), Renault-Elf (1982 and 1983), La Vie Claire-Radar (1985), Carrera Jeans-Vagabond (1987), Mercatone Uno (1998), US Postal (2003) and Astana (2008) all won two Grand Tours, but did not take part in the third one.

Pedro Delgado in 1992

It means that Banesto in 1992 were the only team other than Kas-Kaskol to have gotten riders on the podiums of all three Grand Tours, having had Pedro Delgado on the podium of the 1992 Vuelta, which means the Spanish team were the closest to winning all three Grand Tours since Kas. They were only just ahead of France’s 1955 effort, with Raphael Geminiani coming 4th in the Giro that year.

Romain Kreuziger in the 2010 Tour

Interestingly, teams in recent years have been nowhere near as close. Sky, probably the team we’d have expected to threaten to complete the task, had a good opportunity in 2018, but sent a relatively weak (by their own standards) team to the Vuelta, so that David de La Cruz “only” came 15th. The year before had probably been more likely, had Geraint Thomas’s Giro challenge not literally come crashing down into a motorbike. Mikel Landa salvaged pride with the the mountains jersey, but was 17th overall. Romain Kreuziger’s 7th place at the 2010 Tour (and remember he was originally 9th before the DQs rolled in) is thus the closest a team has come to winning all three in the post 2005 WorldTour era, with his Liquigas teammates Ivan Basso and Vincenzo Nibali winning the Giro and Vuelta respectively.

Not given the chance?

You’ll note that, for obvious reasons, teams have gotten closer to winning all three Grand Tours in a year since the top teams actually had to ride them all, post the 2005 ProTour reforms. The exception to the rule is of course Astana, who won the Giro and Vuelta in 2008, but had their automatic invitation to the Tour rescinded, officially because of the team’s doping scandals the year before, and unofficially because ASO and the UCI were, frankly, trying to piss one another off.

Contador wins the 2008 Giro, rather hilariously putting 1’53 into Ricco after the self styled Cobra had closed withing 4 seconds of the win.

2008 Astana certainly had the resources to win all three, having Contador, previous years Tour podiumer Levi Leipheimer, and perennial contender Andreas Kloden on their books. However, the suggestion they might have won all three had they not been thrown out of the Tour is disingenuous to the truth. For starters, it is unlikely the team would have even targeted the Giro if they had received their Tour invite – and as it happened, they weren’t even invited to the Giro when RCS made its announcement of the participants (which due to various political machinations, wasn’t subject to the rule requiring all ProTour teams to be invited.)

After some political lobbying from the Kazakhstan government and a promise to bring their three stars, Astana finally got the call up six days before the race, with Contador famously leaving the beach, and th NGC Medical-OTC Industria Porte team suddenly being told their invite was no longer valid.

With adequate prep, Astana won four stages and flanked the Tour de France winner Carlos Sastre on the podium.

In essence, the circumstances of the season forced the team to target the Giro and Vuelta, and had it been a regular season, resources would likely have been directed to the Tour and then the Vuelta. The triple was never really on for Astana.