Jonas Vingegaard and Wout van Aert’s participation in the Tour de France remains in doubt, according to their coaches at Visma-Lease a Bike.
In separate interviews in recent days, both coaches deemed their prospects of lining up for the Grand Départ in Florence as being around “fifty-fifty,” while a spokesperson from Visma-Lease a Bike told Cyclingnews that no decision has yet been taken regarding the team's Tour selection.
Vingegaard suffered a punctured lung, broken ribs and a broken collarbone in a mass crash at Itzulia Basque Country in April, and he spent twelve days in hospital in Vitoria after the incident. The two-time Tour winner returned to training in Denmark in May and was later spotted training in Mallorca.
Van Aert’s Classics campaign was cut short by the heavy crash at Dwars door Vlaanderen that left him with a fractured sternum, collarbone and ribs. The injuries ruled him out of a planned Giro d’Italia debut, and he returned to competition at last month’s Tour of Norway.
Both Vingegaard and Van Aert have been training in Tignes in the past week in the company of teammate Christophe Laporte. The remaining members of Visma-Lease a Bike’s Tour pre-selection will join them in the coming days, with Matteo Jorgenson touching down in the French ski resort yesterday as shown on his Instagram.
“For me, it's fifty-fifty whether Jonas makes it to the Tour,” Vingegaard’s coach Tim Heemskerk told Danish newspaper BT.
Heemskerk had previously indicated that it would be essential for Vingegaard to train with his teammates in Tignes in order to have any chance of being ready for the Tour. The Dane is currently keeping pace with that schedule, but Heemskerk stressed that the next fortnight would be decisive.
“He needed to be able to follow the programme if he was to have hopes of being ready for the Tour,” Heemskerk said. “The first week at altitude was adaptation and recovery, and now he's just had a tough week. And now there will be another one.
“The important thing will be how he reacts to it. Can he handle it? Will he get tired? The coming week and the one after are essential for the Tour. It's also important that he gets a feeling of ‘Wow, I feel more and more ready.’”
Van Aert
Van Aert was initially scheduled to miss this year’s Tour in order to focus on his preparation for the Paris 2024 Olympics, but his plans were changed by the crash that forced him to miss the Giro.
The Belgian’s condition appeared to improve across the Tour of Norway, and he has been training in Tignes since June 2, with Vingegaard joining him four days later. Van Aert is part of Visma’s long list for the Tour de France, but his participation, like that of Vingegaard, is still uncertain.
“We want to get them to the start of the Tour, but they have to be competitive,” Van Aert’s coach Mathieu Heijboer told Het Nieuwsblad, adding that their response to the training load over the next two weeks will be the deciding factor.
“We will make a decision based on the powers they can achieve over a certain period of time and what their feelings and heart rate are. It is still too early to draw conclusions from their current data. We are still tinkering too much with their basic condition at the moment. The real fine-tuning has still to come.”
Heijboer echoed his colleague Heemskerk’s outlook on Vingegaard and Van Aert’s prospects of making the Tour selection.
“They are still a long way from being as good as they could have been in this moment without those injuries, but I don't want to put it too negatively,” he said. “At the moment I estimate for both of them individually that the chance that they will reach the Tour is just over 50%.”
Speaking to Cyclingnews at last month’s Giro d’Italia, Visma-Lease a Bike manager Richard Plugge confirmed that there was no fixed deadline for a decision on Vingegaard’s Tour participation. The Dane will not race again before the Tour, but Van Aert will line out at the Belgian championships.
“We are going to decide very late. There is no ultimatum,” said Heijboer, who dismissed the idea that a less than fully fit Vingegaard might yet ride the Tour to chase stage wins. “As a two-time Tour winner, it seems difficult to us to start with Jonas with a different mindset. Neither Jonas nor Wout would go to the Tour as an emergency solution, they are too good riders for that.”
Visma-Lease a Bike’s injury crisis extends beyond Vingegaard and Van Aert, with Dylan van Baarle and Steven Kruijswijk both ruled out of the Tour de France after sustaining fractures in a mass crash at the Critérium du Dauphiné. Vuelta a España champion Sepp Kuss abandoned the Dauphiné due to illness, though Matteo Jorgenson impressed to secure second overall.
Heijboer suggested that Jorgenson would lead Visma’s GC challenge at the Tour if Vingegaard is ultimately an absentee.
“If Jonas doesn't make it, Matteo will fight for the top five, but we don't want to stop there,” Heijboer said. “We want to leave our mark on the Tour and so other objectives would be added.”
