Jonas Vingegaard’s second win in the Tour de France has been a triumph of efficiency, teamwork, preparation and consistency, yet it sadly lacked the characteristics that modern cycling needs most: warmth, charm and humanity.
In a measure of how greatly France has warmed to Jumbo-Visma’s Vingegaard, the first significant mention of his second yellow jersey came on page 10 of Sunday’s edition of L’Equipe.
Unfortunately, the Dane, who as a schoolboy footballer was too nervous to even tackle, leaves the host nation cold. At home, he is a superhero, but in France he remains an enigma, one that has already said he will return next year.
“Two years ago was my first Tour, the first year I started to deliver results,” he says. “Not that I wasn’t a good bike rider before, but I just couldn’t handle the pressure.”
“But I learned how to handle it, and I started winning, getting on the podium,” he says. “You gain more and more confidence, within yourself, within the media.”
Watched by huge, partying, younger crowds, there has been much talk of the “Netflix Effect” during this year’s race, but it’s clear, too, that Jumbo-Visma are suffering from “Sky syndrome”, best characterised as spiralling unpopularity, aloof leadership and a team manager who is coming across as a stuffed shirt.
Events at the weekend could not have demonstrated this polarisation more clearly.
After criticising Thibaut Pinot’s Groupama FDJ team for drinking what he described as “large beers” during the Tour’s second rest day and labelling alcohol “poison”, the Jumbo-Visma manager, Richard Plugge, found his team’s vehicles being booed and besieged in the Vosges by Pinot-loving French fans.
Pinot’s breakaway heroics in Saturday’s stage came to nothing, although the French climber did enough to reduce his team management and most local fans to blubbering wrecks. Pinot’s successes in the Tour have been few, but they have always been memorable, even existential in nature. He will leave a gaping void in French cycling.
“Thibaut is a unique rider,” his team boss, Marc Madiot, says. “His results are a few lines on a sheet of paper. But each line has a meaning, a story. Why is there so much emotion today? Well, quite simply because he’s an authentic rider. He lays himself bare, he shows everyone what he’s about.”
The foundation of Vingegaard’s second Tour win was a steadfast resistance to Pogacar’s pyrotechnics, which fizzled out as the peloton arrived in the Alps. The third week of the Tour usually finds out the pretenders from the contenders and this year was no different. Short of training and short of endurance, the Alps were cruel to Pogacar, yet he hung on to finish second overall.
“I was trying to get through the worst moments, and I was always hoping for a better moment,” he says. “In the end, it worked.”
Pogacar won as many fans in defeat as Vingegaard did in victory.
The Slovenian’s directness was the counterpoint to the Dane’s monosyllabic nature. Pogacar’s signoff as a challenger – “I’m gone, I’m dead”– radioed into his team car on the Col de la Loze, was followed by a pithy “I’m fucked,” when asked how he was feeling by a French interviewer afterwards.
That said, his UAE Emirates team, which took third place overall in Paris with Adam Yates, was the only lineup to really threaten Vingegaard’s hegemony.
Ineos Grenadiers, who started the Tour with a lack of clarity over leadership, were none the wiser as the race ended. There were creditable performances from Spanish rider Carlos Rodríguez, who finished fifth, but after a promising first two weeks, Tom Pidcock, once tipped to finish in the top five, slipped to 13th overall.
The 2019 champion, Egan Bernal, riding his first Tour since a career-threatening accident 18 months ago, showed true grit by finishing 36th overall, something of a victory in itself. “Life changes,” Bernal says. “It’s difficult to accept that I’ve gone from being Tour de France champion to just another rider in the peloton.”
Meanwhile, the Ineos team principal, Dave Brailsford, has denied the British team are close to signing Belgian Remco Evenepoel, even though the Vuelta a España champion is one of the few riders capable of going toe to toe with Pogacar and Vingegaard.
But after almost four decades, the Tour desperately needs a French champion to end the years of foreign domination. Pinot, so close to success in the 2019 Tour, has now left the stage, but Madiot still has plenty of fire in his belly.
“You can’t trick the fans,” he says. “The people at the roadside, who wait for hours to watch the riders come past, this is what they come to see. They come to see guys who give everything they’ve got. They come to feel the suffering, but also the character and charm.”
