26 years after the controversial triumph of Bjarne Riis, who years later would admit to having doped, like almost all cyclists of his generation, another Dane has managed to enter Paris dressed in yellow. At the age of 25, the Jumbo-Visma cyclist has succeeded in dethroning the Slovenian Tadej Pogacar (UAE), who was the favorite to chain three triumphs in the Tour. “Last year I finished second and I realized that I could win. It was always clear to me that I could have options,” admits this shy Scandinavian who, at the end of each stage, the first thing he did was call his wife to hear his voice, and also that of his little daughter. In the last stages, it was no longer necessary, since all his friends have made the trip to France to cheer him on. Among them, Rosa Kildahl, his wife’s mother, who curiously until now was the most famous of the family, because a few years ago she won a television competition in which the contestants were tested by baking sweets and cakes. “The first few times they came to see me, everyone greeted her. She’s very famous in Denmark,” admits a Vingegaard who doesn’t quite take it well that everyone looks at him. He is a village boy who fondly remembers his early years on a bicycle. “My club had about fifteen members. We rode on the very beautiful, windy roads in northern Denmark. They took good care of me,” he recalls. One of those clubmates, by the way, was Michael Vaegren, five years his senior, who has also become a professional cyclist.
The road from Thisted to Paris, however, has not been easy for Vingegaard, who four years ago was still working in a fish factory. “I finished my studies in 2016 and it was time to work. I was already riding a bicycle, but in an amateur way. Micahel Vaegren, who is from the same region, worked in the fish factory and gave me the phone number of his superior. That’s how I to find a job in the fish factory, where I worked for a year,” explained Vingegaard these days, who is shy and admits that he does not like to talk about himself. For a year his job was to attach tags to boxes full of fish and then check if the code worked, in order to facilitate the tracking of the product. He had to work standing up, not suitable for a cyclist, but the hours were good, from 7 in the morning to noon. “Then I got injured and couldn’t work either,” he recalls. When he got back to work, he ended up cleaning the fish before it was frozen. Vingegaard would work at the fish factory in his region until the summer of 2018.
In 2016, Vingegaard had entered the ColoQuick-Cult team, which bet on young talents. Here came the first good results of a young man who combined trips abroad to cycle with work at home until 2018. In 2017, in fact, he excelled at the Tour de China, and in 2018, the prologue stage of the Aosta Valley. But just when everything seemed to be going well, he suffered a serious fall that left him with a concussion. Tireless, five weeks later he was racing again, and then caught the eye of the Dutch team Jumbo-Visma, with whom he would win the first stage of a 2019 UCI World Tour event in Poland. Initially, his role was to be gregarious to the Slovenian Primoz Roglic, who in 2020 would win the Vuelta a España with the Dane working tirelessly for him. “When you’ve worked as hard as I have, being able to go out and train every day is a pleasure,” explains Vingegaard, who always had the support of his parents, Claus and Karina, who encouraged him when he had crises that brought him to think that he wanted to leave the sport.
The big jump, now a year ago
And then came the 2021 season, when he stopped being a supporting actor to catch everyone’s attention shining in the Tour of the Emirates and the Settimana Coppi e Bartali and finally reaching second place overall in the Tour de France. In three years, from the factory to the podium of the most prestigious event, partly taking advantage of the fact that Roglic had dropped out due to a crash, which had left him as the team leader of a Jumbo-Visma that he had finally understood that he had a treasure to your team. It wasn’t always like that. In fact, he was not supposed to run that 2021 Tour, but entered at the last minute after Tom Dumoulin’s withdrawal. “In that Tour, especially in the Mont Ventoux stage, I saw that I could stand up to Pogacar. I realized that he was not unbeatable”, he explains. I was right This Tour 2022, Vingegaard has become the second Dane to win it, after Bjarne Riis in 1996, a tainted triumph, this one, as Riis would admit years later to having doped.
In this Tour, accompanied by a Jumbo-Visma full of luxury gregariants such as the Belgian Wout van Aert, Vingegaard has been wearing down a Pogacar that started the race strong but, as it lost teammates, was giving up to the evidence At the age of 25, Vingegaard has won a Tour that curiously experienced the first three stages on Danish soil. Denmark, a country where everyone rides a bike, has a golden generation of cyclists, with three different stage winners in this Tour. The heirs of Mogens Frey, who in 1970 was the first Dane to win a stage of the Tour in a strange way, as he was instructed to let his team leader, the Portuguese Joaquim Agostinho, win. The latter, however, grabbed the Dane’s handlebars in the final stretch to ensure first entry, and ended up disqualified. And Frey won almost unintentionally. Vingegaard, on the other hand, was clear throughout the Tour that it was his year and ended up greeting thousands of Danes who traveled to Paris from a podium where he was joined by Welshman Geraint Thomas, third, and a Pogacar that is surely already thinking about trying to recover the lost crown in 2023.
With a half-shy laugh, Vingegaard rolled around the Champs Elysées dressed in yellow, excited after winning a beautiful Tour, with athletes with brands and modern technology, but with the spirit of yesteryear. With exciting qualifying, crazy riders like the brilliant Wout van Aert, breakaways, attacks and a promising rivalry between Pogacar and Vingegaard. A year after having Paris at his feet, Pogacar has ceded his crown to this Dane who has gone from working in a modest factory to entering the City of Lights as a hero. And a lot of excited Danes celebrated in the streets of Paris, where the Belgian Jasper Philipsen won the sprint in the last and anecdotal stage.
