Outside the Jumbo-Visma bus on Carcassonne’s Boulevard Barbès, directeur sportif Frans Maassen thought it best to add a disclaimer to the information he had just provided reporters. “I’m not really sure about everything, we’ll have to see later,” Maassen said apologetically. It was that kind of a day, one crisis after another.
To lose one of Jonas Vingegaard‘s supporting cast before stage 15 of the Tour de France began was a misfortune. To lose another to a crash with 65km remaining was a problem. When Vingegaard himself fell shortly afterwards, Jumbo-Visma risked a full-blown catastrophe.
Vingegaard dissipated the immediate tension by remounting quickly and rejoining the peloton. He reached Carcassonne still in the yellow jersey and with his lead of 2:22 over Tadej Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates) still intact, but the complexion of his team’s race has changed considerably as the Tour breaks for its final rest day.
“It was a tough day for us, not the best day for us,” Maassen said. “But thankfully Jonas was fighting in the final and he looked OK.”
On Sunday morning, before the stage began in Rodez, Jumbo-Visma announced that Primoz Roglič had withdrawn from the Tour, finally yielding to the injuries he had sustained in his crash on the road to Arenberg in the opening week. That, at least, was a loss foreseen. In the days since Roglič’s striking cameo on Vingegaard’s behalf on the Col du Galibier, his contributions to the cause had become more sporadic and less sustained.
“It was not nice to see a big champion like that suffering every day and not riding on his level,” Maassen had said at the start in Rodez, adding that the decision had been a joint one between rider and team. “We made it together.”
It seems likely that Roglič will now turn his attention towards winning a fourth successive Vuelta a España – “I think he’ll go to the Vuelta, but that’s not what we’re thinking of now” – but Maassen downplayed the impact Roglič’s absence would have on Jumbo-Visma’s strategy in the final week.
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Roglič had begun the Tour as Jumbo-Visma’s co-leader and his importance in that role was clear when Pogačar felt compelled to hunt down his accelerations on the Col du Galibier on stage 11. That same afternoon, however, Roglič slid definitively out of the general classification picture, and his strategic value diminished accordingly. At this point in the Tour,…
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