Sometimes it feels like more things go wrong than right for Jonas Vingegaard. He’s won two Tours de France, yes, but he’s lost more than that, and aside from the grave misfortune of racing in the era of Tadej Pogačar, his bids to return to the top step in Paris have often been blighted by bad luck.
In 2024, he was the victim of an awful crash at Itzulia, suffering horrible injuries that he somehow recovered from in time to start, but he wasn’t fully himself at that Tour. In 2025, a crash and concussion at Paris-Nice saw him injured again, and his preparation plans were disrupted once more.
Even when things did go right, and he won the Vuelta a España last year, there was some kind of cruel irony in the fact that he didn’t get a real podium, nor even a proper arrival into Madrid, winning the most disrupted Grand Tour in recent memory.
This year, I’m sure Vingegaard was wishing on New Year’s Eve that 2026 would be different, that he’d at least get a shot at arriving to July unscathed. He planned to do things differently this time, skipping those races that had only caused him crashes and bad memories before, and opting to race his first Giro d’Italia to come into the Tour with Grand Tour racing in his legs, and maybe even a pink jersey. It worked for Pogačar in 2024, didn’t it?
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