From the fish factory to the yellow jersey: The path of Jonas Vingegaard
DPA
· 18.07.2022
When it came to sport, Jonas Vingegaard initially had a hard time. The slight boy from Jutland played football, but he wasn't really happy with it.
How Vingegaard got into cycling
"I was so small that the others never gave me the ball," says Vingegaard. His path to the yellow jersey in the Tour de France finally began on an August day in 2007.
His father Claus, a salmon farm constructor, took ten-year-old Jonas to a stage of the Tour of Denmark, which started just a few kilometres from his front door. And Vingegaard fell in love with cycling straight away.
Vingegaard in the yellow jersey of the Tour de France
15 years later, Vingegaard is still slender. The 25-year-old weighs just 60 kilograms and his pale torso shows his ribs. But the quiet man from Thisted is now the best professional cyclist in the world. Six stages before the end of the Tour de France, Vingegaard is 2:22 minutes ahead of the Slovenian Tadej Pogacar (UAE Team Emirates).
However, Vingegaard suffered several setbacks before the Pyrenees, where the 16th stage starts this Tuesday. In Primoz Roglic and Steven Kruijswijk, his two best mountain helpers had to abandon the race. Then Vingegaard himself crashed, but immediately gave the all-clear: "I'm okay. Just a few abrasions." However, the crash on Sunday looked so hard that there are doubts about the Dane's reassurances. But of course he doesn't want to show any weakness, especially not in the face of the lurking Pogacar.
Vingegaard outpaces his own father
Vingegaard has always had bite on the bike. At home in Jutland, where the highest point - Yding Skovhöj - measures just 173 metres, he gained the necessary toughness in the strong headwinds of the west coast. "He hit puberty relatively late, not until he was 17. Before that, people in the club were always afraid that he would be blown away," recalls his father Claus. From the age of 15, father and son travelled to France for a week every year to train in the Alps. Of course, Jonas soon outpaced his senior with ease.
At the age of 19, Vingegaard received an offer from the small ColoQuick team, which is something like the gold standard of Danish talent forges. However, Vingegaard initially struggled to cope with life as a professional. "He wasn't well organised, had no routine and got up late," reports his team boss at the time, Christian Andersen. Vingegaard was advised to look for a job.
Vingegaard worked in a fish factory
And so it was that the natural talent on the bike worked in a fish factory in Hanstholm for two years. Every day from six to twelve o'clock, Vingegaard packed the cod in the harbour and then supervised the auction. In the afternoon, he went training with his boss, a good amateur racer.
In 2018, Grischa Niermann finally contacted ColoQuick and was actually interested in another rider. However, the sporting director of Jumbo-Vismato take a look at this Vingegaard. Since the 2019 season, Vingegaard has been slowly built up until he was unexpectedly promoted to captain last year after Roglic's retirement and finished second in the Tour.
Cycling hype in Denmark
This has already created a lot of hype in Denmark. So far, it has not been as big as the one following Bjarne Riis' Tour victory in 1996, but a triumph in Paris should break all the dams in the far north. Vingegaard, who unlike Riis is very approachable, already got a taste of this at the start in Copenhagen this year.
The TV broadcasts had a market share of up to 78 per cent. And when more than 10,000 spectators shouted his name at the team presentation in the Tivoli, it brought tears to his eyes. Now an entire country is hoping for the next tears of joy at the final on the Champs-Élysées in Paris.
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