Jonas Vingegaard wins Tour de France, completing his sudden ascent to top of cycling
PARIS — Head down and legs churning, Jonas Vingegaard crossed the finish line of the penultimate stage of the Tour de France on Saturday and cupped his hand over his mouth, as if to stifle a gasp. He had done what he had come to do, and his astonishing accomplishment was sinking in.
In only his second Tour de France, and only three years after becoming a professional cyclist, Vingegaard, a 25-year-old Danish rider, had sealed his victory in cycling’s most prestigious race.
His victory became official Sunday, when the race concluded with its traditional celebratory ride into Paris. But the Tour had been effectively over for days, and when Vingegaard finished second in Saturday’s time trial to his Jumbo-Visma teammate Wout van Aert of Belgium, his effort on the 25-mile course was enough to leave him with such a large lead in the overall standings — 3 minutes 34 seconds ahead of his closest pursuer — that the final stage brought almost no drama at all.
Vingegaard steered clear of danger on the final laps in Paris, crossing — safely — alongside his teammates well behind the peloton. His winning time was 79 hours 33 minutes 20 seconds.
“Since last year I always believed I could do it,” Vingegaard had said Saturday. “It’s a relief that I did.”
After about three full weeks of the Tour, Vingegaard, as he had Saturday, immediately sought out his partner and toddler daughter in the area past the finish line and gave them a long, sweaty hug.
While Vingegaard had pedaled up and down all the endless hills and unforgiving mountains, and across all the flat roads past fields of flowers and farms, he had wanted to win for them. During every day of searing heat that at times rose above 100 degrees, melting pavement and sidelining some riders with heat exhaustion, he said, he had steeled himself for them.
And, in the end, Vingegaard, who grew up in a small fishing town in northern Denmark, won what was arguably one of the most grueling Tours in history.
Tadej Pogacar, the Slovene rider looking for his third straight Tour win, finished second overall, 2:43 behind Vingegaard, after fighting Vingegaard for the lead until the race’s final days. Geraint Thomas of Britain, the 2018 Tour winner, was third, 7:22 off the pace. Every other rider was at least 13 minutes behind Vingegaard.
“I think the battle between me and Jonas was really something special,” Pogacar, 23, said Saturday, acknowledging the eventual outcome. He offered Sunday’s only hint of a surprise: a late sprint into the lead on Sunday’s final lap, although he was immediately reeled back into the lead group.
“It’s going to be an interesting couple of years ahead for us,” Pogacar said of his nascent rivalry with Vingegaard. “He’s stepped up from last year, he’s taken control of things from the beginning, and he’s proved he’s a strong rider.”
Vingegaard’s entire career has been nothing short of a fairy tale played out on two wheels and on fast forward.
Six months before joining Jumbo-Visma in 2019, he was working part time in a Danish factory where he gutted, cleaned and packed fish into ice-filled boxes. Before that, he worked at a fish auction. He credits those days of waking at 4 a.m. and all that hard manual labor in the shivering cold with helping him get to where he is now, at the top of the cycling world.
His Jumbo-Visma team, especially van Aert, was at his side all the way.
Van Aert ran his own remarkable race, spending every day of the Tour except the first in the green jersey, which is awarded to the rider who accumulates the most points for stage finishes and in midrace sprint sections. But his biggest achievement over the past three weeks might have been his support of Vingegaard.
Van Aert was there for Vingegaard when his teammate needed him the most on the grueling Hautacam climb that turned out to be the deciding stage in the overall competition. He took off on a breakaway and mercilessly dictated a fast pace, challenging the notion, at 6 feet 3 inches tall, that light, smaller riders like Vingegaard and Pogacar are naturally the best climbers.
Pogacar, who was battling Vingegaard for the overall lead, couldn’t keep up. As Vingegaard and van Aert kept climbing, Pogacar faded, looking like a car with a sputtering engine as the Jumbo-Visma teammates powered ahead.
The Jumbo-Visma team had won six of the Tour’s 20 stages entering Sunday’s finale. After Saturday’s stage, though, Vingegaard faced questions about his fairy-tale career. One reporter asked him about his rapid rise in the sport, and about how he could have finished 22nd in the 2019 Danish national time trial and then go on to nearly win Saturday’s time trial after three weeks of the Tour.
If Vingegaard was familiar at all with Tour history, or Danish racing history, it was possible that he expected the question. The only other Dane to win the Tour was Bjarne Riis in 1996, and a decade later Riis admitted that he had doped to win the race. Many past winners, though none recently, have either been caught doping or have admitted to doing so.
No, Vingegaard said, he did not go fast because he had doped. It happened because he and his team improved his aerodynamics by toiling in the wind tunnel and adjusting his body position and bike.
“We’re totally clean,” he said in his news conference, broadening his denial to include his entire team. “Every one of us. I can say that to every one of you. No one of us is taking anything illegal.”
High-altitude training camps and attention to detail — in food, in equipment, in preparation — were behind Jumbo-Visma’s rise, he said. “That’s why you have to trust,” he said.