Jonas Vingegaard is generally a man who dispenses words in press conferences about as willingly as he concedes seconds to Tadej Pogačar. Since taking the yellow jersey at this Tour de France in the opening week, the Dane kept things just as buttoned down in the press conference truck as he has out on the road.
On Sunday evening in Saint Gervais, for instance, Vingegaard was patently reluctant to shed anything but the faintest of light on his thoughts during his latest mano-a-mano with Pogačar on the final haul up Le Bettex on stage 15.
“We’re looking a lot to each other,” the Jumbo-Visma rider said. “I’m just thinking about staying with Tadej.”
Later, Vingegaard saw little point in dredging up the energy to indulge in niceties when a reporter asked a question – “Do you still believe this Tour will be decided by minutes?” – that he felt he had fielded enough times already. “I had that question the last two days, so you can look at the answer of the last two days,” he said pithily.
Vingegaard’s demeanour and word count were rather different, however, when he was asked if he could understand the scepticism that has greeted the extreme levels of performance at this Tour. Then again, this has always been the kind of question that makes a yellow jersey sit up and take notice.
For context, on stage 5, Vingegaard and Pogačar climbed the Col du Tourmalet faster than anyone in history, breaking the 30-year-old record of Tony Rominger and Zenon Jaskula. On the Col de Joux Plane on Saturday, they were on course to beat Marco Pantani’s seemingly unreachable 1997 time up the ascent until they stalled to mark one another in the final 2km.
Vingegaard knows enough about cycling history to understand that displays surpassing those achieved in an era when the peloton was awash with EPO are always going to face scrutiny.
He also knows enough about press relations to understand that reacting to doping questions with irritation – as his teammate Wout van Aert did on last year’s Tour – doesn’t make them go away. He adopted a conciliatory tone here, as he did in response to a similar question in Rocamadour on the final weekend of the 2022 Tour.
“To be honest, I fully understand the scepticism and I think we have to be sceptical because of what happened in the past because otherwise it will just happen again, I would say,” Vingegaard said on Sunday’s response to a similar question in Rocamadour on the final weekend of the 2022 Tour.
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