In just over a month of cycling competition, Visma-Lease a Bike – get used to the name – has only two wins, less than Israel, a team that does not belong to the World Tour and has started very well 2024, or Polti-Kometa, the young team owned by Contador and Basso. A rarity for the structure formerly known as Jumbo, which dominated the three grand tours last year, something never seen before.
Looking for reasons for such a strange slow start to the season, one very obvious one is that Jonas Vingegaard, winner of the last two Tours and the team’s great star, has not yet made his debut. It finally gets underway this Thursday.
In Galicia, with a 14.8 km time trial through A Coruña, in O Gran Camiño, a race that he dominated from start to finish last season, winning three stages and the overall, he begins his journey that he hopes will lead him to reach yellow Nice on July 21 – for the first time in history the Tour will not end in Paris.
Cycling opens the season in increasingly distant and even bizarre settings, from Australia to Colombia through Saudi Arabia, Oman and these days the Arab Emirates. The 27-year-old conservative Dane has not missed anything in those parts. He prefers less exotic and, of course, less risky environments. He has opted for familiar and closer terrain.
It is no coincidence that all the races in which he will participate this year until the Tour de France are familiar to him because he had already been in them: Tirreno-Adriatico, Itzulia, Dauphiné, in addition to the Galician event. That’s very Vingegaard, with a shy and withdrawn character, who seems to be only comfortable on the bike and surrounded by his most intimate circle. “I don’t have any hobbies outside of cycling. I spend my free time with my wife and my daughter,” he explained to television in his country.
That is, either Vingegaard is training, competing or he is with Triene and Frida. Now it had been five months since he had been seen on the roads, despite the fact that he had a long rally in Teide (Tenerife). “I think I’m starting the season in good shape. “I like cycling, running, and above all improving every time I compete,” he announced yesterday, before debuting in the time trial. It is not the only stage that suits him well because in the fourth and last stage with the finish at Mount Aloia he can also leave his mark.
His great rival for the month of July, Pogacar, does not put on a bib until Saturday, March 2 at the Strade Bianche. But the Slovenian will no longer be the only one to worry about after Roglic’s departure to Bora and Evenepoel’s debut on the Tour.
Just in case, in Galicia the double winner of the Tour will debut new luxury teammates, all very young, like Cian Uijtdebroecks and Ben Tullet, signings this winter, plus Johannes Staune-Mittet, who goes to professionals.
Methodical and ambitious, all the work that the Dane does, this light Hercules, has a yellow undertone, his objective in capital letters. To date, only five champions have linked three consecutive Tours, with the difficulty that this entails for everything to go perfectly: Bobet, Anquetil, Merckx, Indurain and Froome. Vingegaard wants to enter that select club.
