Jonas Vingegaard was already back on his bike and warming up for his lightning interview at Le Lioran, but he couldn’t pretend that this was just another day at the top of the Tour de France. This was a special moment.
The Dane has won this race twice, but nothing he has experienced so far on the Tour – and he has experienced plenty, from a home Grand Départ to his first yellow jersey atop the Col du Granon – could have inspired such an explosion of emotion.
Distanced by Tadej Pogačar on the climb of Puy Mary with 31 km to go, Vingegaard made up a 35-second gap on the following Col de Pertus before beating the Frenchman in the sprint. yellow jersey At Lioran, the day’s drama was just a detail in a larger picture. Just three months ago, Vingegaard was lying in a hospital bed in Vitoria, fearing for his career and, he said, his life.
Tour announcer Sébastien Piquet has a penchant for making stage winners, such as ASO’s Barbara Walters, cry, but he didn’t have to push it too hard here. Vingegaard only got halfway through his first answer before tears began streaming down his gaunt face.
“It’s obviously very, very emotional for me. Coming back after the accident… Sorry,” Vingegaard said before pausing to compose himself. “It means a lot. All the things I’ve been through in the last three months… Yeah, it makes you think about that. I could never have done this without my family.”
On 4 April, Vingegaard suffered a punctured lung and a broken collarbone in a massive crash on the Alto di Olaeta during the fourth stage of the Giro d’Italia. His compatriots Remco Evenepoel and Primoz Roglič also suffered the same crash, but Vingegaard was the worst affected.
He spent twelve days in hospital in Vitoria, with Visma-Lease a Bike providing few concrete details about his condition. Concerns were heightened when Vingegaard’s father told Danish media that he too was completely in the dark about the situation, due to the information vacuum at Visma’s disposal.
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Yet by early May, Vingegaard was already back in training, first in Denmark and then in Mallorca. When he joined his Visma teammates for a training camp in Tignes in June, it seemed clear that he would be competing in the Tour, but no one, perhaps not even Vingegaard himself, could have known precisely what condition he would be in. Those doubts, already dispelled after a confident first week, have surely disappeared now.
“With the accident I had, I really thought I was going to die three months ago,” Vingegaard said as he took his place in the press conference truck. “Today, sitting here with a stage win in the biggest race in the world is really incredible. I never thought it would be possible for me to go this far.”
He was not alone in thinking so, although he was later asked if he was incredulous. It was pointed out to him that his rivals at UAE Team Emirates felt he had exaggerated his doubts about his fitness ahead of the Tour. Pogačar, for example, had always maintained that his rival would arrive at the Tour in top form, and on Wednesday he suggested that Vingegaard was in the form of his life.
“I don’t think you can be in the best shape of your career with a week and a half of training,” said Vingegaard, who sits 1:14 behind Pogačar in third overall and eight seconds behind Evenepoel.
“If I play the victim card a little bit, it’s because I do. Given where I come from, I don’t think many riders could have done the Tour. Going to the Tour was a big, big victory. I said at the time that I was going to take things day by day. I don’t know how the second and third week will go, but we’ll keep going.”
“I think that’s a question Tadej has to ask himself. Can he believe how good I am? That’s just the way it is. To be honest, I can’t believe I’ve been able to reach this level. I only had a month and a half of training before this race. My injuries were so bad that I had to rest a lot before I could start real training. But I’m here now and I’m super happy with this stage win and how it’s going. It’s more than I expected.”
Puy Mary
On Wednesday, in the Massif Central, as on the Galibier during the 4th stage, Pogacar and UAE Team Emirates wanted to test Vingegaard’s form. In past generations, the long climb up to the Lioran could have been conducive to a break, but in the Pogacar-Vingegaard era, every day is a potential general classification day.
UAE Team Emirates showed their intentions by setting a blistering pace on the Puy Mary, whittling the lead group down to the bare essentials, and when Pogačar attacked near the summit it briefly looked as if the Slovenian was wrapping up the Tour as it reached its midway point.
After pulling away in the final 800 metres of the climb, Pogačar opened up a 35-second gap on the other side, and although Vingegaard, Evenepoel and Roglič found common ground in their pursuit, their focus seemed to be on damage limitation. However, once Vingegaard broke away from his chase companions on the next Col de Pertus, the tone of the day changed. His earpiece crackled with encouraging news from sports director Grischa Niermann. The gap was closing, and fast.
“I was really surprised that I could close the gap,” Vingegaard said. “As soon as he dropped me, I thought I was going to do a time trial, set my own pace and limit my losses. Then all of a sudden, on the next climb, he was in front of me. I heard the time was dropping, and then suddenly he was 10 seconds ahead of me and I thought I could catch him.”
Although Pogacar won the sprint for the bonus at the top with 14km to go, he was clearly showing signs of weakness and, on the Col de Font de Cère that followed, Vingegaard looked noticeably more fluid. In the sprint up the Lioran, Vingegaard distanced his usually more explosive rival, dealing a significant psychological blow to his stage victory.
“I hope this will be a turning point, not only for this race but for our whole season,” Vingegaard said. “I hope this will be a turning point and we can do what we usually do, but it’s quite difficult to do what we normally do with all the bad luck we’ve had.”
He made it seem surprisingly easy to Lioran.
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