Like an old Franciscan, so stoic, Jonas Vingegaard, wearing strappy sandals on the cool morning of Orleans by the Loire on a rest day, but he keeps his feet warm with thick socks printed with the funny head of a man in a hat. It is the double personality of the winner of the last two Tours, the seriousness with which he faces serious issues; the lightness, the ironic smile, with which he thinks about the inconsequential, the rest of life, which for him now is everything, or almost everything, after the accident he suffered on April 4 in the Itzulia. Including the Tour.
Sitting in an armchair in front of two dozen journalists, Vingegaard does not raise his voice, nor does he give it dramatic intensity, nor does he even blink, when he recounts the serious issues to answer in Danish to those who ask him if it was true what they had told him, that when he was in the hospital in Vitoria he had thought about giving up cycling. “It is clear that when you are having a bad time, and I had a really bad time, you start to think about things, to ask yourself if it is really worth taking the risks that you take with the bike. I felt so bad, so bad that I thought I was going to die… And when I was like that, and truly believing that I would not get out of it, I told myself that if I survived, I would give up cycling,” explains the calm Danish cyclist, 27 years old, who spent 12 days in April in the hospital in Txagorritxu, with a broken collarbone and ribs, a severe lung contusion and a pneumothorax. To heal his lungs and get the air out of them, he had to spend several days in the ICU. “I talked about it a lot in the hospital with my wife, Trine, who later confessed to me that when she saw me on TV, lying on the ground, not moving for a long time after the fall, she also thought I was dying. She was fundamental in the process. And here I am sitting now. So neither one thing nor the other.”
The reflection of an athlete clearly inclined to introspection, the other side of the coin of his great rival, Tadej Pogacar, which gives it more grandeur and interest, two very defined fields for fans, continues when he talks about the inevitable change of mentality, the leap of maturity, that followed the accident, starting with the fact that now, perhaps for the first time, he is aware of the danger. “Until then, I didn’t even think about it, it was something foreign to me. I had always been good at avoiding falls and braking in time, so I thought it would never happen to me, but it did. So now I have started to be more careful, knowing that I can be more cautious and still stay in the race for victory,” says Vingegaard, perhaps remembering that in the Galibier descent that Pogacar executed acrobatically and quickly, he lost 30s of the 75s with which the Slovenian has an advantage in the general classification. “It has made me think more about when to take risks.”
Sunday’s stage on the white roads of Troyes, Pogacar’s nervousness that the Slovenian calls fun, the ease with which he, on Tratnik’s bike, and his team, Van Aert, Laporte and Jorgenson, above all, controlled the attacks of Pogacar and Evenepoel, has raised the mood of Vingegaard, the only one who knows how to beat Pogacar in the Tour, and he has done it twice. And so he begins to talk more lightly about the inconsequential, about the Tour, of course. “Everything I’ve been through allows me, first of all, to feel happy just to be alive, and to enjoy being able to go out on my bike every day, and to be able to race, and in some way, to enjoy it even more than before,” says Vingegaard. “It’s not that I didn’t have fun before, but now I ride more relaxed. I give less importance to the result. It’s clear that I’ve changed in that regard. I’m already happy just to be here, to be on the Tour.”
Pogacar hears these things and is suspicious, and he also hears that Vingegaard has said that he is worse than last year and Pogacar is better. “He is pretending so that I trust him,” says the Slovenian, who, at the start of the race, mental gamessays that the one he really fears is Remco Evenepoel, “who flies”, and that Vingegaard only thinks about riding on his wheel.
Vingegaard has a plan, as everyone knows. The first and second weeks are about surviving, not falling into the ambushes that the Slovenian sets for him – “if I had gone with him at the end, he would surely have attacked me and left me behind,” he says – and waiting for the third week, or even the Pyrenees weekend, to strike his blow. “I didn’t come with perfect preparation, but I think that what I did, I did at a very high level. The first week exceeded all my expectations,” he says. And he warns: “And I’m starting to believe that I can definitely fight for victory in this Tour.”
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