And what of Vingegaard? Where, you say, has he come from?
Put yourself on the Jumbo-Visma team bus before the 2019 Ruta del Sol, a five-day stage race in February. Such early-season races are not considered important but Jumbo team director Frans Maassen has a problem. The team’s new rider, Jonas Vingegaard, has just thrown up and seems feverish.
There isn’t a doctor available and Vingegaard says he’s OK to ride the race. This has been a problem in the past, especially during his teenage years. Before important races, he would get physically sick. The Ruta del Sol was his first race as a full-time professional and the thought of it was just too much.
Maassen talked to him, reassuring the debutant there was no pressure. Just relax and enjoy the experience. Except that Vingegaard could not. He was one of the weakest riders in the race, finishing 109th of 114. Maassen wondered if the team had made a mistake. They had wanted to hire Julius Johansen from third-tier Danish team ColoQuick but backed out of that when discovering Johansen was still in his teens.
ColoQuick’s sports director Christian Andersen suggested they look at Vingegaard. He said the 21-year-old began work at 5am in a fish factory so that he could ride his bike in the afternoon. Andersen also said he had talent. Jumbo sports director Grischa Niermann decided to take a chance.
Two months later, Vingegaard is part of the Jumbo team at the six-stage Tour of the Basque Country. Maassen, remembering Vingegaard’s troubles in the south of Spain, tells the rider to just do his best to get through it. Then Maassen sees what he’s doing on a climb and says to the mechanic in the team car: “F***, it’s incredible, that kid is flying up the mountain.”
Maassen knew then that Vingegaard had huge potential. This is also the moment Vingegaard himself feels that maybe he belongs at the highest level.
Later that season he goes to the Tour of Poland and wins for the first time at the elite level, out-sprinting Pavel Sivakov and Jai Hindley at the end of the hilly stage. For a young man who had been working in a fish factory a year before, this was a hugely encouraging result. Vingegaard got the leader’s jersey and all he had to do was hold onto it on a similarly hilly final stage.
But the responsibility of seeing out the race weighed so heavily he could not sleep. At breakfast that morning, he could not eat and so began his first defence of a leader’s jersey in a professional race without sleep or food. He finished 14min 30sec down, dropping from first to 26th. He beats himself up when this happens, like he has always done.
The team know they have a hugely talented rider and also a complex young man who can get too nervous and fearful of letting people down. They recommend that he goes to an academy in the Netherlands that has a good sports psychology department. If he could believe in himself, they know he has the talent to be at the top level.
During the lockdown in 2020, the team asked the riders to do a ten-minute effort at maximum effort at their homes. They were staggered by the results. Vingegaard recorded better numbers than every other rider, Wout van Aert and Primoz Roglic included. Vingegaard was not entirely happy with this.
In a piece for the Danish newspaper Politiken, Vingegaard explained to Soren Lissner how he reacted to his rise at Jumbo-Visma. “Earlier in my career, I liked that it wasn’t me who was responsible for delivering the result,” he said. “Of course I wanted to win the bike race. But I had a hard time being on one of the world’s best cycling teams and being the one who has to perform when seven insanely talented riders have crashed into the fence for me.
“I feared falling through, finishing 50th and disappointing them. That was what I couldn’t let go of that night in Poland. The result of the test during the corona[virus] shutdown f***ed me up mentally. I suddenly put a lot of pressure on myself again and couldn’t handle it. If I was the one who delivered the best test, I also had to win the bike race, otherwise it might not matter. I got too nervous again when I had to ride the races.”
“Trine [Vingegaard’s wife] has been the best help and really made me realise that there is a tomorrow if I don’t win today. That thought has done so much for me. As a rider I have got a little more hair on my chest. I became a father and discovered that a bad result on the bike didn’t make me a worse person.”
Maassen says Trine Hansen has been the key to Vingegaard overcoming his nervousness. “We tried to get help for him in the Netherlands, but the best help came from Trine. She has been crucial on the mental level. She convinced him he could win the Tour.”
Early in the 2021 season, at the Coppi e Bartali race in Italy, Vingegaard was the designated leader of a team of young, inexperienced riders. The hope was that he would feel more comfortable leading riders who were younger and less talented. It worked. He won the race and it was clear he was learning to cope with expectation.
At the 2021 Tour de France, he was there to support Roglic and only took on the leadership after the Slovenian had abandoned. He finished second and was the only rider to challenge Pogacar on his march to a second title.
By then Vingegaard knew he could win the Tour. He beat Pogacar decisively in 2022 and he returned to this Tour with greater self-belief. He said the race would not be decided by seconds.
It was inevitable that after such dominant performances over the past two days, he would again be asked about doping and what the team could do to allay fears of those not quite sure what they’re watching. “For me it’s hard to tell what more you can say,” he said. “I understand that it’s hard to trust in cycling with the past there has been. But I think nowadays everyone is different than they were 20 years ago. And I can tell from my heart that I don’t take anything. I don’t take anything I would not give to my daughter, and I would definitely not give her any drugs.”
In cycling there is a beauty that some worship, others question. It is the nature of things. So far there has been nothing to suggest Jonas Vingegaard is not who he says he is.
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