Jonas Vingegaard is generally a man who dispenses words in press conferences about as willingly as he concedes seconds to Tadej Pogačar. Since taking the yellow jersey at this Tour de France in the opening week, the Dane kept things just as buttoned down in the press conference truck as he has out on the road.
On Sunday evening in Saint Gervais, for instance, Vingegaard was patently reluctant to shed anything but the faintest of light on his thoughts during his latest mano-a-mano with Pogačar on the final haul up Le Bettex on stage 15.
“We’re looking a lot to each other,” the Jumbo-Visma rider said. “I’m just thinking about staying with Tadej.”
Later, Vingegaard saw little point in dredging up the energy to indulge in niceties when a reporter asked a question – “Do you still believe this Tour will be decided by minutes?” – that he felt he had fielded enough times already. “I had that question the last two days, so you can look at the answer of the last two days,” he said pithily.
Vingegaard’s demeanour and word count were rather different, however, when he was asked if he could understand the scepticism that has greeted the extreme levels of performance at this Tour. Then again, this has always been the kind of question that makes a yellow jersey sit up and take notice.
For context, on stage 5, Vingegaard and Pogačar climbed the Col du Tourmalet faster than anyone in history, breaking the 30-year-old record of Tony Rominger and Zenon Jaskula. On the Col de Joux Plane on Saturday, they were on course to beat Marco Pantani’s seemingly unreachable 1997 time up the ascent until they stalled to mark one another in the final 2km.
Vingegaard knows enough about cycling history to understand that displays surpassing those achieved in an era when the peloton was awash with EPO are always going to face scrutiny.
He also knows enough about press relations to understand that reacting to doping questions with irritation – as his teammate Wout van Aert did on last year’s Tour – doesn’t make them go away. He adopted a conciliatory tone here, as he did in response to a similar question in Rocamadour on the final weekend of the 2022 Tour.
“To be honest, I fully understand the scepticism and I think we have to be sceptical because of what happened in the past because otherwise it will just happen again, I would say,” Vingegaard said on Sunday's response to a similar question in Rocamadour on the final weekend of the 2022 Tour.
“In that way, I fully understand all the questions we get about it. The only thing I can say is I’m not taking anything. But yeah, to be honest, I’m happy there’s a bit of scepticism about it because we are going faster, we are going quicker than back then, maybe. I think it’s a good thing. And also, the food, the material, the training, everything is different. But again, it’s always good to be sceptical about it, or to think about it, at least.”
Quite what Vingegaard and Jumbo-Visma would be willing to do to allay some of that scepticism and answer some of the questions remains to be seen. As other Tour-winning teams demonstrated yesteryear, transparency is easily talked about in principle but rarely if ever delivered upon in practice. Over to them.
Pogačar
Vingegaard reaches the second rest day of the Tour still in the yellow jersey and still clutching a lead of 10 seconds over Pogačar after the pair broke even on stage 15 to Saint Gervais-Mont Blanc, which brought the race to a finish in the shadow of the still, snowy, and serene mountain itself.
The pair were so utterly absorbed in their private duel that they could afford to let Pogačar’s UAE teammate Adam Yates briefly forge clear on the climb to the finish before they surged back up to him in the final kilometre. Like on the Grand Colombier, Pogačar accelerated after the flamme rouge in a bid to prise some seconds from Vingegaard, but the yellow jersey didn’t yield an inch, and they crossed the line together, 6:04 behind winner Wout Poels (Bahrain Victorious).
“I felt good today, but I don’t know if I was thinking about attacking,” Vingegaard said. “We were, how you say, not playing a bit, but he was letting Adam Yates go, and in that moment you don’t kind of gain anything by trying, I think. It didn’t really make sense to go there.”
Vingegaard and Pogačar exchanged hefty blows on successive days during the Tour’s early foray through the Pyrenees, but the second week of the race has seen plenty of attacking yet curiously little movement in the general classification. Across the past six stages of this most evenly-matched contest, Pogačar has clawed back just seven seconds of Vingegaard’s lead.
With the mountains seemingly unable to separate them, Tuesday’s hilly 22.4km time trial to Combloux may yet prove a weightier arbiter.
“I think the time trial, but also the day after and stage 20, will be very decisive,” Vingegaard said. “It could be that any one of these three is the really decisive stage, we’ll just have to see.”
Something has to give eventually. Asked if he had yet reached the limits of his athletic abilities, Vingegaard hesitated before answering. “There’s something you can optimise,” he said. “I guess you never really find the limit, no? Of course, we have to always try to get as close to the limit as possible. That’s what we always try.”
