Jonas Vingegaard will line up for his first crack at the UEC Road European Championships on Sunday in a rare appearance with the Danish national team.
The two-time Tour de France winner and recent champion of the Vuelta a España hardly ever competes in one-day races, unlike his top rivals for Sunday’s elite men’s road race, Tadej Pogačar and Remco Evenepoel.
In 2022, he won the Drôme Classic – coincidentally raced in the same area as the European Championships – but then dropped out of Flèche Wallonne and Liège-Bastogne-Liège before going on to win his first Tour de France. He closed his 2022 season out at Il Lombardia with an unremarkable 16th place.
Unlike Vingegaard, Pogačar has become one of the top Classics riders in the world in addition to winning his fourth Tour de France this year. He repeated as world champion in Rwanda last week and won four Classics in the spring.
Evenepoel also balances Grand Tours with one-day races, winning De Brabantse Pijl in his first race of 2025. He has won Liège-Bastogne-Liège twice and San Sebastian three times in addition to his three time trial world titles and his 2022 victory in the World Championships road race.
Both Evenepoel and Pogačar headed to Ardèche from Kigali, where Vingegaard said, “they both seemed in really good shape”.
The 203-kilometre route from Privas to Guilherand-Granges is peppered with climbs, with three ascents of the 7km-long Côte de Saint-Romain-de-Lerps, where Demi Vollering launched her winning move in…
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at CyclingNews RSS Feed…