Interview Lennart Jasch: His path from the ice oval to victory in the Alps

It is the lateral entrants from winter sports who have recently made positive headlines in German cycling. After his podium finish at the Tour de France 2025, former biathlete Florian Lipowitz has already shown good form again this year, finishing in the top 3 at the Spanish WorldTour races in Catalonia and the Basque Country.

The latest success now comes from a former speed skater who began to attract attention last season. Lennart Jasch from Prien am Chiemsee won the queen stage of the Tour of the Alps. As a soloist, pursued by a greedy peloton, most of which is in the final stages of preparation for the Giro d`Italia, the 25-year-old wins after 168 kilometres over more than 4000 metres in altitude and thus lays the foundation for the mountain jersey, which he wins the following day and thus takes home a first classification jersey in addition to his first victory in a professional race.

Jasch, who is competing for Tudor Pro Cycling from Switzerland in the development team, is only in his third season as a cyclist. At the start of 2024, he was still part of the German national team as a speed skater. His father Helge and mother Antje work for the German Speed Skating and Short Track Association (DESG), while his sister Maira, who is four years younger, was on the track at the Winter Olympics in Milan-Cortina in February.

In the Rehea: Ergometer shows cycling potential

And Lennart Jasch would still be doing his laps on the ice oval today if it hadn't been for a muscular imbalance that kept causing problems with skates under his feet. On the bike, which was once only used for training and rehab, there was no sign of this. And so the switch was made, because the figures he achieved on the ergometer showed real potential.

Jasch rode his first UCI race for the German amateur team Max Solar. He finished tenth in the Oberösterreich-Rundfahrt at his first attempt. Through his contact with Dan Lorang, coach at Red Bull - BORA - hansgrohe (at least until the summer)he switched to the development team of the German WorldTour racing team in 2025 and achieved his first successes there. In September, he won the Giro della Regione Friuli Venezia Giulia. The Italian race with the unwieldy name belongs to category 2.2, meaning that professionals from cycling's premier league are excluded from the start.

However, Jasch proved that he can also hold his own against the bigger names at the Tour of the Alps, a race of the second highest category in cycling. At the provisional peak of his still young career, he spoke to TOUR about the recent Tour of the Alps, his switch from speed skating to cycling and his future development.

TOUR: A video on your Instagram profile shows you on stage at the Tour of the Alps celebrating with champagne over the mountain jersey you never wore in the race but won in the end. That looked pretty routine. Where did you learn how to handle these bottles? Biniam Girmay proved impressively that something like this can go wrong when he won Gent-Wevelegem in 2022, his first major race.

Lennart Jasch: I actually learnt that at the Red Bull team camp in 2024 (laughs). For team building, we organised a soapbox race, I was the driver. Afterwards, we all got a bottle of champagne. I'd never done that before. And by the time I had it open and could splash around, everyone else had long since finished. That annoyed me and then I decided to take a closer look at how it works because I didn't want to make a complete fool of myself if I did win something at some point. And at Friuli I had another chance to practise a bit.

Where does the current top form come from? At least the results in the races so far haven't necessarily indicated that.

I wouldn't necessarily say that it's top form. It's more a continuous build-up, a fundamental increase in my performance level. I did a lot of races in the first part of the season, but from March onwards I also had time for two very good training blocks at home. That doesn't come from an altitude training camp or anything like that. I think it's just a natural progression.

Further development is a good keyword anyway. Where do you see the biggest difference between the Lennart Jasch from 2025 and the one from now?

The elephant in the room is, of course, this result. But if you look a little behind the facade to see where this comes from, you probably quickly come to the conclusion that I've simply become even more confident and have further consolidated the skills I've developed over the last few years. This means I can start the races with more self-confidence. That was also evident in my victory, for example, when I was in the breakaway group. I believed in myself straight away and didn't say: 'Let's see what happens here, as would probably have been the case in the past'. Sometimes I really have the feeling that the proportion of legs and head is 50:50, so the mental factor is really very big.

Health is also a major factor. You had to retire from speed skating, which you had been doing since your youth, due to muscular imbalances. You now cycle intensively. The problems have not returned?

No, luckily I'm still symptom-free. And I've also managed to train out a few other speed skating aches and pains in the meantime. If you only ever skate in one direction - it's always anti-clockwise, i.e. to the left - then your body gets used to it and you somehow get a bit crooked. But that's gone away, I'm now as straight as a normal person again (laughs). But it would also be like this: if you have any major problems, then you can actually forget about riding at such a level anyway. If something is not 100 per cent right with your body, then you will notice it very quickly.

But everything is just right for Lennart Jasch. And that is also reflected in the results. What direction do you want to go in, what do you want to specialise in?

Because I come from ice skating, the shorter things still suit me very well. Thanks to the intensive strength training, I still have a relatively high level of explosiveness for a mountain biker. But I've never really been able to try out the classic uphill stuff, 45 minutes uphill. At least not in the race. From the power data in training, that might be possible. But we haven't really decided on that yet. That's also one of the goals for this year, to find out what suits me best. I've never ridden a profile like the Liège-Bastogne-Liège, for example. However, I will probably tend to be a classics or mountain rider. This is also reflected in the fact that I've tended to get my results on profiled terrain so far.

What about time trialling? That's the closest thing to speed skating.

Mentally, yes. But time trialling is a difficult thing. I've only done one proper time trial so far, that was at the German Championships last year. I believe that if you want to become world class in the time trial, you have to pay for it. So, if you haven't been in the wind tunnel and don't have a custom cockpit and don't do this and that and invest a lot of time, then you don't stand a chance. At the moment, the team has given me an off-the-shelf time trial bike, so to speak, and I train on it every fortnight. I think if you start making the necessary investments and tackle the project, you'll see relatively quickly what you can achieve. If you then start from the CdA value (Coefficent of Drag Area, the most important metric for quantifying the aerodynamic efficiency of a cyclist) If you're still lagging miles behind, you soon realise that you might not be a born time trialist. At some point, I'll have to do that too.

You changed teams in the winter, switching from the Red Bull - BORA - hansgrohe development team to that of Tudor.

And I'm happy with it. I was very well received by the Devo team, but also by the pros. And I think I've already earned my place and respect.

So far, you have been travelling almost exclusively with the professionals. Is that a sign?

It is above all a sign of my age (laughs). The Devo team is first and foremost an U23 team. And I'm no longer part of it. But the big and important races in this age group have been on the programme so far this season. And nobody would have benefited if I hadn't raced at all. It was the same last year. I simply used this phase to see what it's like to ride with the pros and gain experience. The second part of the season will then be a mix of races with the Pro and Devo teams. There it will be even more about learning how to ride in the final and hopefully win.

But that has already worked for the professionals.

Yes, but also out of a situation in which I was actually helping our captain Michael Storer. I originally went into the breakaway group to make sure that we didn't have to work at the back. It wasn't foreseeable that it would turn out the way it did.

Was the attack on the mountain jersey on the final day, after you had previously won stage 4, also something of a coincidence?

I would say it was a nice by-catch (laughs). Just like the fact that, in addition to the blue jersey, it was also enough for the black jersey, which goes to the rider with the most kilometres in the breakaway group. But it was actually the same as the day before. We didn't want to let a big group go. When there was an attack, I was at the front again. And then I was in the group with the twelve riders. When we were away, I had contact with the car. And then it turned out that if I won this one mountain classification, then I would be first in the classification and it would have to be crazy for me to lose it on the last mountain. When the time came, I started the sprint and was first over the mountain. And now I have a medal (for the victory of the day) and two special jerseys at home. They are already framed. But I don't know exactly where I'm going to hang them yet.