The candidates feel a lot less promising this year than in previous editions.
I have this bad gut feeling that Evenepoel's career just isn't going the way it's supposed to go for him to become the rider everyone and his mother expected him to become just over a year ago. He was still the only one I voted because I want to believe he still has that big career in front of him, but I'm honestly very unsure.
With Almeida and Vingegaard it's different. They both look insanely promising and are both still really young but these last few years have made me skeptical of whether young riders will actually keep improving after they arrived on the big scene. I guess Almeida was better in this Giro than last years or at least his highs were higher than last years (his Sega di Ala performance was genuinely great) but then he looked extremely inconsistent. Even in the last week where everyone just remembers how great he was he finished the 4 mountain stages as the 6th, 1st, 2nd and 4th best gc rider in a field that was considered as relatively weak by most. I'd argue that only in 2 out of those 4 stages he showed the kind of level he would need consistently over 3 weeks if he wants to win gt's. Now in the past I would have said, no problem, he only just turned 23 he's gonna improve massively, but unfortunately it's 2021 and riders have somehow decided to collectively peak 3 years earlier than in the past so considering his improvement from 2020 to 2021 wasn't that huge I just don't know how much I should expect him to improve going forward.
Vingegaard meanwhile has improved a lot from 2020 to 2021 but then he is 24 already which is ancient for the 2021 peloton. I don't know, it's just that so often in the last few years I watched young gc riders having their first big appearence in a gt and thought "now imagine how good this guy will be in a year" and then he wasn't. Tbf this is the same thought process that last year made me think Pogacar isn't the "real deal" because he might not improve much after his 2019 Vuelta performance. But while I was collosally wrong about Pogacar the same thought applied to pretty much all other young gc contenders from the last few years would have been correct.
Actually looking a bit deeper into this here is a list of all guys standing on a gt podium while being at most 25 years old from 2014 to 2020:
Aru, Quintana, Landa, MAL, Hindley, TGH, Pinot, Bardet, Bernal, Pogacar, Mas (Majka and Carapaz missed the list for being 2 and 5 days too old)
This is a list of some seriously good riders but then I ask you, outside of Pogacar has any other one of these riders improved after getting their first gt podium? You might argue that 2015 Quintana was slightly better than 2013 Quintana or that 2019 Pinot was better than 2014 Pinot and of course Hindley and TGH might have only had an off year before becoming better than their 2020 selves in the future. These predictions are always so hard to make because we are consistently fooled to think that some riders will come back in a year to be even stronger when in reality we have already seen the best of them. Vingegaard looked really really good in the Tour but if I had to make a bet on him either winning or never winning a gt, I would take him never winning one.