Jumbo-Visma’s dominance in this Tour de France was so extreme that Jonas Vingegaard was afforded the luxury of slowing down in the final kilometers of Saturday’s time trial in Rocamadour to hand team-mate Wout van Aert the stage win. In a Tour with more than a touch of déjà vu, this was something very new.
Van Aert’s victory brought Jumbo-Visma’s tally to six for this race, a number that could still rise to seven on the Champs Elysees. On Sunday evening in Paris, Vingegaard will be celebrated as Tour champion, and he will also be crowned king of the mountains. Van Aert will wear the green jersey and also receive the red bib as the most combative driver in the race.
Given the history of this sport, this race, and indeed a team that rose from the ashes of the infamous Rabobank project, it’s only logical to look at this supremacy and ask the blindingly obvious question: can we believe in what are we watching
Vingegaard grew up during a time when Danish cycling was asking tough questions about the doping of its golden generation of the 1990s. He probably could have guessed that such a query would come up at some point during his Tour winner’s press conference on Saturday evening, and his answer was delivered with his usual calm.
“We’re totally clean, all of us, and I can tell everyone that,” Vingegaard said. “None of us are taking anything illegal. I think why we’re so good is because of the preparation we do. We take the altitude camps to the next level, and everything: materials, food and training. I think the team is truly the best at it. That’s why you have to trust us.”
A few minutes later, Vingegaard’s stablemate Van Aert sat in the same chair and had a rather less level-headed answer to a similar question. It seems his penchant for super combativeness isn’t limited to when he’s on his bike.
“I don’t want to answer that question. It’s a crap question. It comes back every time someone wins the Tour,” Van Aert complained.
For the second consecutive round, Van Aert has won three stages in three different ways. He also wore the yellow jersey for four days and repeatedly broke the peloton with early attacks. The zenith of his Tour action came on stage 18, when Van Aert attacked from kilometer zero to form the opening break and then made the decisive turn to drop Tadej Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates) in the last climb to Hautacam.
“Now, since we are acting at this level, do we have to defend ourselves? I don’t understand,” Van Aert said. “We’ve worked really hard for this, and cycling has changed. I don’t like that we have to keep responding to these things. We have to pass checks every time of the year, not just in the Tour de France, they will come to our house. It’s not like we came out of nowhere.”
Vingegaard, second a year ago, may not have come out of nowhere this July, but the extent of his progression since turning pro with Jumbo-Visma in 2019 has been astounding. In that debut season, for example, he finished 22nd out of 57 starters in the Danish Time Trial Championship, losing nearly three minutes to Kasper Asgreen over 39.8km.
In a time trial of a similar distance on Saturday, Vingegaard averaged 50.559 km/h to finish second behind Van Aert, but ahead of the likes of Pogačar, Geraint Thomas and world time trial champion Filippo Ganna.
“It’s aerodynamic,” Vingegaard said when asked to compare the two performances. “Of course, I would say I’m a better rider now, I push more watts, but I’m also much more aerodynamic than then. We’ve done a lot of testing in the wind tunnel and on the track, etc. We really worked on it and it paid off.”
As Vingegaard sat in the Gramat press room on Saturday evening, one of the journalists before him was Michael Rasmussen, the last Dane to wear yellow in the Tour for the Dutch team. When Rasmussen first returned to the Tour in his current role in 2015, he was asked about his controversial yellow mandate, when he repeatedly denied doping before being pulled from the race when it emerged he had lied about his whereabouts to avoid doping controls.
“So far I haven’t heard any driver say ‘yes’ to the moving camera while racing in their active career, so it’s not really the answer that’s wrong, it’s the question,” Rasmussen said at the time. “It’s a useless question.”
Maybe, but it’s a question worth asking.