Is there any good reason why the third command in the listing below is so slow?

And, more importantly, is there any way to make it run at comparable speed with the first two?

a@DESKTOP-OCHDMBI MINGW64 ~
$ time head -c 1G </dev/zero >/dev/null

real    0m0.141s
user    0m0.109s
sys     0m0.000s

a@DESKTOP-OCHDMBI MINGW64 ~
$ time head -c 1G </dev/zero | cat >/dev/null

real    0m0.221s
user    0m0.171s
sys     0m0.263s

a@DESKTOP-OCHDMBI MINGW64 ~
$ time cat </dev/zero | head -c 1G | cat >/dev/null

real    0m2.065s
user    0m0.608s
sys     0m3.185s

The practical interest behind this question is running pigz in MINGW that is strangely slow, presumably because MINGW is not feeding the input data to it fast enough.