On the mountain stages in the Pyrenees, the man who once earned his living in a fish factory has an advantage anyway: his team is still complete, Pogacar has already lost two of his Emirates colleagues through positive corona tests, and the Pole is Rafal Majka is infected, but his stats are in the green. But nobody knows how this will develop.
In any case, how Jonas Vingegaard has developed since 2018 is remarkable. At that time he put fish in the ice from morning until noon, trained in the afternoon and drove for the Danish team ColoQuick-Cult. The fact that he slipped into the World Tour was only due to a coincidence: the Jumbo-Visma scouts wanted to watch a teammate, but then they noticed this 1.75 meter tall and 60 kilo light guy from north-west Denmark. Of course, the expectations weren’t huge: “I don’t think we’ll be hearing much from him in the next few years,” said team boss Merijn Zeeman.
A mistake. An explainable one for Jonas Vingegaard: “I wouldn’t say I was lazy, but I wasn’t always the guy who trained the most,” he said of Süddeutsche Zeitung. “Then I had a job. I think all in all I had a lot of aspects that I could improve and that made a big difference.”