Jonas Vingegaard exhales deeply, puffing out both cheeks as he sits on a black plastic chair, with the world’s cycling media staring at him from under obscuring face masks.
A long-sleeved yellow jersey fits loosely around his stick-thin arms. The jersey has a high collar that is zipped from the back, almost all the way up, to the nape of his neck.
A modern-day golden fleece that Vingegaard began specifically preparing for in mid-April. It’s now late July.
He has been told there is a five-minute wait until the beginning of his press conference as winner of the 2023 Tour de France, held traditionally after the penultimate stage, so has taken a seat to the left of a podium reserved for formal proceedings.
He stares contemplatively at his hands that are loosely clasped in his lap as the clicks of raised smartphones and long lenses in a white marquee, which has served as the day’s press room for print media and now a bunch of TV crews that have arrived from a separate compound for broadcasters, reverberate.
Former Dutch pro turned TV pundit Tom Dumoulin stands out dressed in an all-cream ensemble, sat against one of the walls.
Vingegaard, who warmly greeted his ex-Jumbo-Visma teammate on the way in, eventually gets up and goes back to speak with him, killing time. Cameras follow.
The Dane knows the process. He won his first Tour title in only his second race appearance 12 months earlier, after placing runner-up to Tadej Pogačar (UAE Emirates) on his debut in 2021. And at the 110th edition, he’s spoken daily to press in attendance since assuming the maillot jaune from Jai Hindley (Bora-Hansgrohe) at the end of stage six in the Pyrenees.
Following the time trial on stage 16, Vingegaard’s victory seemed secured
In each of those daily encounters, Vingegaard gave little away. His answers to print press, which he faced after running the gauntlet with broadcast media, were usually one to two sentences maximum.
He didn’t treat the collective with contempt but wasn’t there to entertain or seek fame, validation or favour either. Vingegaard was all business. Not commercial business, but the business of winning cycling’s most renowned stage race. And you got the impression that he knew the longer he spent on the video link at the end of every stage talking about his day, rivals, chiefly Pogačar, doping, if the Tour would be won by seconds – popular sentiment he always refuted, saying, what proved rightly,…
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