Visma-Lease a Bike have no plan B at the Tour de France. The Dutch team were all in on Jonas Vingegaard, supporting the Dane towards the dream of winning the Tour and Giro d’Italia in the same season.
Sadly, that dream is now over, with Vingegaard crashing out on stage 15 of the race, and breaking his collarbone. It has deprived the race of a key character, the only rider who has ever beaten yellow jersey Tadej Pogačar at the Tour overall.
“What is there to say?” His teammate Matteo Jorgenson said at the top of the Plateau du Solaison after the stage. “I don’t have much other than it’s gutting. We’re on stage 15, we had no Plan B. We were all in with Jonas, we all believed in it, and I thought it was beautiful. Today was going really well, he was on a really good day I think, and bike racing sucks some times, it really does.”
Visma sports director Marc Reef, at the bottom of the climb outside his team bus, added: “We went through a corner, I also didn’t have a good picture on TV, we came around the corner in the car and he was laying there. It’s unfortunately really shit that this happened and he had to abandon. He’s gone to the X-Ray van now to see how he is. I said that I felt sorry for him at that moment, and it was quite quickly clear that he could not continue. He said he had pain, but there’s almost not much you say at that moment.
“They put him in an ambulance and then he left. We had a big goal today to try and win the stage, everything went according to plan until the moment he crashed. We planned this morning with two riders ahead, with the situation under control, with him feeling really, really good. The situation was under control, the time gap was under control, and we were ready to go for it.”
Asked if it the road where the incident happened was dangerous, Jorgenson replied: “It didn’t seem like it, the motorbike double checked in the corner and took the left side of this traffic island, Victor [Campenaerts] was following his line, and it was definitely not the smooth line to the right, we ended up braking, and I’m sure there was a ripple effect, and I’m sure he crossed wheels or hit…
“As often happens in this sport you have a plan, you’re in good shape, these things happen, and they’re hard to accept, but they have to be accepted.”
Until the crash, everything had been going well enough on Sunday. They might have been four minutes behind Pogačar on general classification, but they were still challenging. Now they will have to reset on the fly, easier said that done 15 stages into the toughest bike race of all.
“We have a different Tour now, but I’m at least going to think about what happened today, check in with Jonas tonight, and then we will take the rest day and think about the rest of the Tour,” Jorgenson explained. “It’s difficult to put into words, but it’s our whole life. We spend most of the year on top of a mountain, training, weighing all our food.
“You do everything, you come to the Tour, you do 15 stages, and do everything pretty well, and we’re in a good position, and it’s a mental job to try and accept these things. It happens to everyone, crashing and losing your goal, but every time you have to take a beat and say this is a special sport, for sure.”
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