Matteo Jorgenson has confirmed that the notably conservative stance taken by Visma-Lease a Bike on the major climbs of the Vuelta a España boils down to the team opting to take a ‘classic’ approach to Jonas Vingegaard’s bid to become Denmark’s first-ever winner of the Spanish Grand Tour.
Vingegaard did take an early stage win in an uphill dash for the line at Limone Piemonte, and finished third the following day at Ceres, and he has already twice held the lead in the Vuelta. But on neither occasion did Vingegaard need to deploy a full-scale assault by his team on the leader’s jersey.
While the team obviously pushed themselves hard in the team time trial, coming a narrowly defeated second to UAE Team Emirates-XRG, since then, Visma’s role has been more muted, with non-GC threat Torstein Træen (Bahrain Victorious) being allowed to stay ahead to take the lead on stage 6, and Vingegaard mainly following wheels rather than attacking on the two Pyrenean summit finishes.
This stands in stark contrast to Visma’s ultra-active strategy in the first week of the Tour de France, or even to 2023 in the Vuelta a España, where the squad fired Sepp Kuss up the road on the stage to Javalambre, forcing their rivals to chase.
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