Jonas Vingegaard will not participate at the World Championships in Glasgow regardless of how he fares at the Tour de France. Danish national team Anders Lund has revealed that the defending Tour champion has not made himself available for selection for the Worlds, which this year takes place in an earlier August date.
“Vingegaard has said that the Worlds weren’t possible for him due to his race programme after the Tour,” Lund told TV2. “I can understand that Jonas is focusing clearly on the Tour de France at this moment and that that’s what counts for him.”
Lund announced that Mads Pedersen, Mattias Skjelmose (Lidl-Trek), Kasper Asgreen (Soudal-QuickStep) and Søren Kragh Andersen (Alpecin-Deceuninck) will ride the Worlds road race, which takes place on August 6.
The remaining four riders on the Danish team will be named on July 17, with the two participants in the time trial to be confirmed the following day.
Vingegaard has been one of the outstanding performers of the 2023 season to date, winning eleven races including Itzulia Basque Country and the Critérium du Dauphiné. The Jumbo-Visma rider and Tadej Pogacar (UAE Team Emirates) are the overwhelming favourite for the Tour de France, which gets underway in Bilbao on Saturday.
Now in his fifth season as a professional, Vingegaard has never raced the elite World Championships. In 2022, he opted against participating in the Wollongong Worlds, taking a two-month break from competitive action before returning at season’s end to win the CRO Tour and place 16th at Il Lombardia.
Rolf Sørensen, a silver medallist for Denmark at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, expressed disappointment at Vingegaard’s absence from the Glasgow Worlds even though he understood his reasoning.
“His absence tells me that he is completely focused on the Tour de France,” Sørensen told TV2. “Of course, I always think it's a shame when riders miss the Worlds, but that probably has more to do with the fact that the Worlds was always a big goal for me, because it is the only place where you compete under your own flag.
"But Jonas Vingegaard is – fully deservedly – the darling of the Danes anyway, and now he might win the Tour again. So it's just about respecting that when he's as good as he is. And I’m sure that when there is a perfect route with lots of altitude metres, he will be at the start and ready.”
