The pure sprinter who once guaranteed four or five stage wins at every Grand Tour is becoming a relic. Stage 12 of the 2026 Giro d’Italia offered the latest evidence: Paul Magnier, Jonathan Milan and Dylan Groenewegen were all dropped on the climbs, and the day's biggest win went to a late attacker.
Alec Segaert had already planned his late assault on stage 12, regardless of whether the pure sprinters survived:
"[I planned to attack 3km out] yesterday evening. I always had it in mind. As it was a good moment on the parcours," the Belgian of Bahrain-Victorious told TV reporters after his late attack carried him to the biggest win of his career.
"I was really happy with how the race was going, [it was a] hard pace on the climb. And then teammates from the sprinters who were left had to ride hard, and this was my chance to go in the final when they were all on the limit."
Segaert's powerful move was an opportunistic one, benefitting from the work of Movistar and NSN for their respective nominated leaders and versatile fastmen, Orluis Aular and Ethan Vernon. Those teams rode hard for the last hour and a half of racing to drop Magnier (Soudal Quick-Step), Milan (Lidl-Trek) and Groenewegen (Unibet Rose Rockets).
It's now a full sprint drought in Italy at this Giro. The last head-to-head between the fastmen came in the Bulgarian capital, Sofia, on stage three, when Magnier edged out Milan and Groenewegen. At that point it looked like Magnier was going to rack up a handful of wins – his team had every appearance of the vintage Quick-Step setup that collected sprint wins for fun in the past.
Previously, Grand Tour flat finishes were dominated by sprinters. The careers of Mark Cavendish, André Greipel and Marcel Kittel were built on flat finishes in Italy, France and Spain. If you had one of them in your team, you could count on four stages every Grand Tour – Cav's best was six at the 2009 Tour de France. His personal record at the Giro was five stages, which isn't even close to Alessandro Petacchi's all-time record of nine from the 2004 Corsa Rosa.
Alec Segaert launched a late attack to deny the peloton on stage 12 (Image: Zac Williams)
In 2026, the rider with the most wins at this Giro is Jhonathan Narváez (UAE Team Emirates-XRG) with a hat-trick – two from a breakaway, one from a reduced bunch sprint.
So what has happened to the pure sprinter? Three things: the parcours, the riders and the competitiveness.
Course design has had a Darwinian effect on who can win. Grand Tour directors have increasingly opted for stages that deliver suspense and chaos, squeezing out the flat finishes that once guaranteed sprinters their pay day. We now have more punchy stages which have become increasingly difficult for the sprint teams to control.
On the slippery Neapolitan stage six, in our view, the organisers got it wrong – an unnecessary tight cobbled corner in the final 300 metres had no place in a sprint finish, and we'd have preferred a simple, safe chance for the fastmen to do their thing.
No such complaints on stage 12. The course design was excellent: enough uncertainty to intrigue and excite, a legitimate test of who could survive the climbs, and a finale that rewarded the most aggressive rider in the bunch. The pure sprinters were left frustrated, but the viewers certainly were not.
The change in course design has been met by a change in the riders themselves. When Tadej Pogačar won his maglia rosa in 2024, he took six stages back to Slovenia with him. A month later, he did the same in France. Pogačar's ability is obviously an anomaly, but his UAE squad has become the archetype of success in the modern peloton — built entirely without a top-level pure sprinter.
The shift is visible beyond UAE. Wout van Aert has won bunch sprints at the Tour, but also time trials and mountain stages – he is something else entirely, an all-rounder who can beat sprinters when the conditions suit him. The most prolific rider at the 2025 Giro, with four wins, was Mads Pedersen – fast at a flat finish, but not, by any stretch, a pure sprinter.
The template for Grand Tour success has moved away from the specialist and toward the complete rider.
Parcours and rider profiles have changed, but so has something more fundamental: cycling has simply become more competitive. Advantages in training optimisation, aerodynamics, equipment and race intelligence have been spread across the peloton. The best sprinters can all push upwards of 1,900 watts at the end of a Grand Tour sprint – a figure that would have been stand-out a decade ago, and is now merely the baseline. When everyone has access to the same marginal gains, the specialist loses the edge that made them indispensable.
It doesn't mean sprinting talent is no longer worth investing in. But in the 2020s, it no longer guarantees Grand Tour wins the way it did in the 2010s and earlier. The sprint is one weapon among many.
It's bad luck again for the fastmen on Friday's stage 13 to Verbania, with two categorised climbs in the last 30km. They'll have to wait for stage 15: 157 kilometres of flat from Voghera to Milan. No climbs, no excuses.
