Two GC defeats in two days in the Tour de France normally do not do wonders for a rider's morale. But after Friday's time trial, when he talked to reporters, Jonas Vingegaard both looked and sounded like a man with a completely renewed spirit to fight for the GC between here and Paris, despite coming second to Tadej Pogačar for a second time in 24 hours.
Vingegaard's mood switch was due to a much better feeling on the bike, he explained. So even though he lost 36 seconds to the Slovenian on the 10.9-kilometre uphill slog to Peyragudes altiport on Friday, and there was certainly no repeat of his stunning Alpine TT ride in Combloux two years ago, his second runner-up spot was more than enough to constitute a bounceback.
Furthermore, during the time trial, the Dane had an unexpected psychological boost of overtaking his two-minute man - none other than World Time Trial Champion Remco Evenepoel (Soudal-QuickStep) - some 50 metres from the line. This has more than symbolic consequences, too: Vingegaard has now dropped to 4:07 down on Pogačar, but his second place on the podium, at over three minutes on both Evenepoel and Florian Lipowitz (Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe), looks much safer than it did after Thursday's near-debacle on the Hautacam.
The mere fact that Vingegaard would talk to reporters, after yesterday's point-blank refusal to do more than head for the team bus, also spoke volumes about his vastly improved morale.
"We bounced back today, yesterday [Thursday] was a terrible day for us," Vingegaard told reporters.
"Up until the final climb, I actually felt good. But all of a sudden, the lights just went out, and to be able to come back like today is very nice. We're super-happy with it."
Asked how he managed to put such a difficult situation as Thursday behind him so quickly, Vingegaard recognised that he had been "very disappointed" after stage 12, where he lost over two minutes to Pogačar. That the Hautacam had been the same climb where he had delivered a knock-out blow in the 2023 Tour to the Slovenian surely made that defeat even harder to swallow.
But 24 hours later, the Dane said he felt like he was back in the game for real. His principal reasoning was that even if he did not yet have an explanation for such a bad day on Thursday, his performance was in no way par for the course with his usual previous mountain rides, either.
"I knew it was not my normal level [on Thursday]," he said. "It's not like I lost belief in myself, I still believe in myself. I think today I came back to normal. So I have to keep on trying.
"I don't think it was the heat that caused it. At the moment, I don't have an answer for it. I don't know what it is. To be honest, this was my second bad day in this year's Tour, and normally, I don't have bad days. So I hope not to have any more."
The million-dollar question, with his return to 'normal', is where Vingegaard goes from here, and his answer was that for all the setbacks of the first 13 days, as he put it, "The Tour is far from over."
"We just have to keep trying, and we have to keep believing we can do something in the race," he insisted. "The whole team is incredibly strong, and we just have to show it in the coming days."
If Saturday's final Pyrenean stage may yet provide more fuel for his bounceback, Vingegaard can also take heart, too, that his third weeks tend to be his strongest. Furthermore, in the 2021 Tour, he both managed to briefly drop Pogačar on the Ventoux, fast looming on the horizon next Tuesday. And then on the Col de la Loze in the 2023 race, due to be tackled next Friday, it was Pogačar, not him, who collapsed completely.
A current Tour isn't won on history, of course, and there's a strong case for saying Pogačar from 2024 onwards has been operating on a very different level on the climbs compared to any previous editions. But for now, at least, Vingegaard has fresh wind in his sails again - and there's no knowing where that might take him.
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