Jonas Vingegaard was already back aboard his bike and conducting his warm-down during his flash interview at Le Lioran, but he couldn’t pretend that this had been just another day among many at the sharp end of the Tour de France. This was a moment apart.
The Dane has won this race twice, but surely nothing he has experienced at the Tour to date – and he has experienced much, from a home Grand Départ to his first yellow jersey atop the Col du Granon – could have inspired a riot of emotions quite like this one.
Dropped by Tadej Pogačar on the climb of Puy Mary with 31km to go, Vingegaard somehow made up a 35-second deficit on the following Col de Pertus before outsprinting the maillot jaune at Le Lioran, but the drama of the day’s action was only a detail in the bigger picture. Barely three months ago, Vingegaard lay in a hospital bed in Vitoria, fearing for his career and, he said, even his life.
Tour speaker Sebastien Piquet has a penchant for making stage winners cry, like ASO’s very own Barbara Walters, but he didn’t have to probe very hard here. Vingegaard only made it about halfway through his first answer before tears started to trickle down his gaunt face.
“It’s, of course, very, very emotional for me. Coming back from the crash… Sorry,” Vingegaard said before pausing to catch himself. “It means a lot. All the things I went through in the last three months… Yeah, it makes you think of that. I would never have been able to do this without my family.”
On April 4, Vingegaard suffered a punctured lung and a broken collarbone in the mass crash on the Alto de Olaeta on stage 4 of Itzulia Basque Country. Fellow Tour contenders Remco Evenepoel and Primoz Roglič were also among the fallers, but Vingegaard was the worst affected.
He spent twelve days in hospital in Vitoria, with Visma-Lease a Bike providing notably few concrete details about his condition. The concern heightened when Vingegaard’s father told Danish media that he, too, was utterly in the dark about the situation amid Visma’s information vacuum.
Yet by early May, Vingegaard was already back in training, first in Denmark and later in Mallorca. By the time he joined his Visma teammates for a training camp in Tignes in June, it seemed clear he would ride the Tour, but nobody, perhaps not even Vingegaard himself, could have known precisely in what state. Those doubts, already fading after an assured first week, have surely disappeared now.
“I mean, with the crash I had, I really believed I was going to die three months ago,” Vingegaard said when he took a seat in the press conference truck. “Now, sitting here with a stage victory in the biggest race of the world is really unbelievable. I would never have believed it would be possible for me to get this far.”
He wasn’t the only one, though he was later asked about a different form of incredulity. It was put to Vingegaard that his rivals at UAE Team Emirates felt he had been over-egging his doubts about his condition in the lead-up to this Tour. Pogačar, for instance, had always insisted his rival would reach the Tour in peak condition, and on Wednesday, he suggested Vingegaard was in the form of his life.
“I don’t think you can be in the best shape of your career with one and a half weeks of training,” said Vingegaard, who lies 1:14 off Pogačar in third overall and eight seconds behind Evenepoel.
“If I’m playing a bit the ‘victim card’ it’s because I am. Seeing where I came from, I don’t think a lot of guys would have made it to the Tour. Making the Tour was a big, big victory. I said back then that I’d take it day by day. I don’t know how the second and third week will be, but we’ll keep going.
“I think that’s a question for Tadej, if he can believe how good I am. It is what it is. To be honest, I just cannot believe how I made it to this level. I only had a month and a half of proper training before this race. My injuries were so bad I had to take a lot of rest before I could start real training. But I’m here now and I’m just super happy with this stage win and how it’s going. It’s more than I would ever have expected.”
Puy Mary
In the Massif Central on Wednesday, as on the Galibier on stage 4, Pogačar and UAE Team Emirates set out to probe the true state of Vingegaard’s form. In past generations, the long run to Le Lioran would have lent itself to a break, but in the Pogačar-Vingegaard era, every day is a potential GC day.
UAE Team Emirates spelled out their intentions by setting a blistering pace on the Puy Mary that whittled the front group down to its bare bones, and when Pogačar attacked near the summit, it briefly looked as though the Slovenian was in the process of wrapping up the Tour as it reached its midpoint.
After surging clear in the final 800m of the climb, Pogačar opened a gap of 35 seconds over the other side, and though Vingegaard, Evenepoel and Roglič found common cause in their pursuit, theirs seemed to be an exercise in damage limitation. Once Vingegaard pulled clear of his fellow chasers on the following Col de Pertus, however, the complexion of the day changed. His earpiece crackled with encouraging information from directeur sportif Grischa Niermann. The gap was shrinking, and rapidly.
“I was actually really surprised I could close the gap,” Vingegaard said. “From the moment he dropped me, I just thought I’d do a TT, do my own pace, and limit my losses. Then, all of as sudden, on the next climb, he was before me. I heard the time was going down, then suddenly he was 10 seconds in front of me and I believed I could catch him back.”
Although Pogačar won the sprint for the time bonus at the summit with 14km remaining, he was betraying clear signs of flagging, and on the following Col de Font de Cère, Vingegaard looked significantly smoother of pedal stroke. In the uphill sprint at Le Lioran, Vingegaard somehow pipped his usually more explosive rival, striking a weighty psychological blow to accompany his stage win.
“I hope that it’s the turning point, not only for this race but for our whole season,” Vingegaard said. “Hopefully, it’s the turning point, and we can do what we normally do – but it’s pretty hard to do what we normally do with all the bad luck we’ve had.”
He made it look strikingly easy at Le Lioran.
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