Racing against shadows: Jonas Vingegaard, Jumbo-Visma, and cycling’s eternal questions

One of the consequences of the decision, made a decade ago, to nudge the Paris finale of the Tour de France deeper into the evening is that, by the time the winner of the yellow jersey heads to the Arc de Triomphe-backed podium at the end of that fourth Sunday, long shadows are being cast down the yellow-tinged Champs-Élysées.

It’s perhaps fitting, then, that Jonas Vingegaard’s second consecutive triumph at cycling’s biggest race has been one in which the quiet, non-assuming Dane and his Jumbo-Visma team have raced in the company of shadows, both on and off the bike.

(Zac Williams/SWpix.com)

And while two of those shadows – perennial rival Tadej Pogačar, an almost literal shadow alongside Vingegaard for most of the Tour, and the conservative, mistake-prone tactics of the Dutch team’s recent past – have been firmly cast aside over the past two summers, one altogether darker shadow remains, one which continues to hang over professional cycling and its most successful practitioners.

Shadows on the road

(Alex Whitehead/SWpix.com)

But before we get to the accusations and suspicions swirling once again around the Tour de France and its winner, let’s focus first on that equally omnipresent, white jersey-clad shadow: Tadej Pogačar.

For just over two weeks at this most pulsating of Tours, Vingegaard and Pogačar followed each other across France. Aside from the more cut-throat, gap-inducing displays of the Pyrenees – where Vingegaard pulled off a close-range smash on the Marie-Blanque, only for the Slovenian to ably return it the following day at Cauterets – the pair were stubbornly locked together, both on the GC standings and on the road; the irresistible force of the UAE Team Emirates rider butting against the Dane’s immovable object (and sometimes vice versa).

After fifteen days of jabs, ducks, counterpunches, run-ins with race motos, and sprint after sprint for bonus seconds (while the rest of the field was blown to smithereens behind their playground games), the Tour’s dominant duo were separated by just ten seconds.

(Zac Williams/SWpix.com)

And then that time trial happened.

Pogačar was not only decent, he was good, very good, on the lumpy road to Combloux (you don’t beat Wout van Aert by 1.13 when you’re on a bad day). But Vingegaard redefined the art of time trialling for the 21st century during that staggering half an hour, channelling his inner Induráin and Anquetil to finally winch open a noticeable, race-winning gap to his Slovenian rival.

The next day on the Col de la Loze, as Pogačar’s lack of race prep – a result of the scaphoid fracture suffered in his crash at Liège–Bastogne–Liège – became alarmingly clear, that gap turned into a chasm.

By the ‘roof’ of the Tour, the shadow was halfway down the mountain. Gone. Dead.

(Zac Williams/SWpix.com)

Pogačar’s demise may have been sudden, squeezed into a chaotic (if slightly deflating) 24 hours, but the means of achieving it were gradual and methodical. Buoyed by last year’s Total Cycling prototype on the Col de Granon, which in one fell swoop completely reconfigured our understanding of the grand tour dynamics of the 2020s, Jumbo-Visma set about grabbing the 2023 Tour by the throat from the outset, setting the scene for what would turn out one of the most relentless, attacking races in recent memory.

The black and yellow army raced the entire Tour on the front foot on all kinds of terrain, with the aim of making the race as tough as possible for a potentially, and ultimately, undercooked Pogačar (whose UAE Team Emirates squad, in fairness, proved on several occasions that they could match the Dutch team’s heavy metal cycling style.)

It may not have been quite ‘attack on the Champs-Élysées’ levels of flair, but Jumbo-Visma’s aggressive – and most importantly, winning – mentality over the past two Tours has proven an antidote to the conservative, tentative, almost sleepwalking to defeat mindset (a hangover of the Team Sky era of dull Tour wins) they adopted on their way to consecutive second places at the hands of Pogačar in 2020 and 2021.

Gone is the Mourinho (or Brailsford) epoch of grand tour racing, in favour of embracing the chaos of the modern Tour de France. And by firmly casting off that other ubiquitous shadow of defensive racing, Jumbo-Visma have thrived in the chaos.

Out of this world

However, there’s one persistent shadow hanging over Jonas Vingegaard’s Tour de France victories that’s proving significantly harder to budge.

The morning after the 26-year-old’s shock and awe in Combloux, L’Équipe’s front page was plastered with the yellow jersey’s focused, effort-filled visage and the innuendo-soaked headline: “Sur une autre planète” (an epitaph also ascribed to the Dane, rather amusingly, by the Tour’s official social media channels. The youth of today, eh?).  

L'Equipe today: "From another planet." 👽💛#TDF2023 pic.twitter.com/NpyqMFqazY

— Mihai Simion (@faustocoppi60) July 19, 2023

For those old enough to remember the same paper’s heralding of a certain extraterrestrial from Texas back in 1999, the implication was clear: the Tour’s dominant rider is out of this world, alien, mutant, pas normal.

Vingegaard’s crushingly dominant defeat of a rider many deem to be the one of the best of the last half-century, broken wrist and fractured preparation aside, was enough to set alarm bells ringing in certain sceptical corners of the cycling world where, after years of false dawns and broken promises, the mantra remains: If it rides like a duck, and it smashes the entire field like a duck, it’s probably a duck.

Some ex-pros, such as former Team Sky sprinter Greg Henderson, have been scathing of the suspicious glances thrown Vingegaard’s way over the past week, pointing to the advances in technology, research, nutrition, and preparation that now account for the riders of 2023 matching and sometimes exceeding the turbo (and everything else fuelled) performances of cycling’s most toxic era.

My twitter feed looks like it did back in the late 2000’s early 2010’s. Armchair experts everywhere. Wouldn’t have a clue about the tech that has evolved in cycling. From nutrition to aero. If they can’t do it themselves then nobody should be able to. It’s sad.

— Greg Henderson OLY (@Greghenderson1) July 21, 2023

Yes, that’s all well and good, the sceptics note, but how do we account for that seven-odd minute gap to second?

Jumbo-Visma boss Richard Plugge’s rather heavy-handed, and at times bizarre, defence of his team – which he claimed owed its success to being more professional, more attention-to-detail minded, and more resistant to the temptations of alcohol than their rivals – has done little to dissuade the sceptics, who shout that they have seen it all before, their sport trapped in a seemingly never-ending cycle of new clean eras and spirit-crushing falls from grace.

> “He can shut his mouth”: Marc Madiot slams “small, shabby” Jumbo-Visma boss who claimed that French riders were drinking “large beers” on rest day

“Stopped watching the Tour after the time trial… The mega-performance, followed by all the usual VO2 max/better nutrition chat is just so ball crushingly familiar,” the cycling-mad comedian David O’Doherty tweeted earlier this week. “It’s Indurain, it’s Pantani, it’s Riis, it’s Armstrong, it’s Contador. It’s so many people. Maybe it’s just the toxic legacy, and this goldfish does keep coming back to it, but it all feels so flat.”

(ASO/Pauline Ballet)

Vingegaard, for his part, has appeared happy and willing to chat about the suspicion swirling around him, and offered a compelling defence of his purity – and the need to ask questions of the sport’s biggest stars – to Danish TV earlier this week.

“I think it’s important to focus on it,” he said. “It has been going on in the sport for many years. It’s not part of it anymore, thankfully.

“But I think, if you don’t question my performance, it will come back. So I’m happy to be asked, because I think it’s a good thing to be critical of how we perform.

“I can understand [people on social media] are critical, but I am not on drugs. I don’t take anything illegal.”

The words of a clean rider, you may conclude. But, unfortunately for Vingegaard, those very same words can be, and have been, uttered by dopers throughout cycling’s murky past.

> Jumbo-Visma and UAE Team Emirates undergo extra blood tests on team bus before Tour de France queen stage

Vingegaard and Jumbo-Visma are perhaps, more than most, unfairly burdened by all of this tainted history.

The unassuming 26-year-old is, after all, the first Dane to win the Tour since Bjarne Riis, who infamously skipped up the Hautacam in 1996 on the big ring and a boatload of EPO.

Meanwhile, the other Dane who came so close to emulating Vingegaard’s feat for his very team, Michael Rasmussen, was sensationally kicked out of the 2007 Tour by the then-Rabobank squad mere days away from securing overall victory.

Rasmussen had been on scintillating form throughout the 2007 race, seeing off the threat of newcomer Alberto Contador in the Pyrenees to effectively wrap up the yellow jersey battle.

But just hours after his dominant solo win on the Col d’Aubisque, the Chicken was sent packing, his team having come under increasing pressure for much of the previous week following reports that Rasmussen had lied about his whereabouts to avoid doping tests during the build-up to the Tour.

Rabobank’s reputation, like that of professional cycling at the time, was in ruins. While they continued for the next five years, picking up a green jersey and a Giro d’Italia title on the way, the USADA report – and the revelations that emerged in 2012 concerning the team’s organised doping programme, supervised by Dr Geert Leinders (who, you may remember, briefly ended up at Team Sky) – proved the final nail in the coffin.

Rabobank withdrew its sponsorship, which had been in place since 1996, with the bank’s board member Bert Bruggink saying at the time: “We are no longer convinced that the international professional world of cycling can make this a clean and fair sport. We are not confident that this will change for the better in the foreseeable future.”

Under the management of new team owner and director Plugge, the squad endured a torrid few years, with one of the smallest budgets in the World Tour and limited success, before the remarkable turnaround that has culminated in Vingegaard’s accession to the top of the cycling world.

In 2012, Plugge was keen to start afresh after years of doping scandals, an approach epitomised by the team’s ‘Blanco’ moniker while in between sponsorship deals. “We started as Blanco to give cycling back to the fans,” the 52-year-old said after Vingegaard’s first Tour triumph last year.

However, despite that apparent clean slate, traces of the old Rabobank era still remain. One of the team’s directors, Grischa Niermann, rode for Rabobank between 1999 and 2012, and in 2013 confessed to using EPO during his career.

Niermann was one of the many voices defending his team leader as the whispers grew louder during the Tour’s final week.

 “I’m not Jonas,” the German said, “but I think he’s said a hundred thousand times that there is no performance-enhancing stuff, which is not allowed, and I’m 100 percent putting my fingers in the fire for that.”

Controversy still dogged the team only a few years ago, too – as he burst onto the scene with a time trial win at the 2016 Giro, the squad’s original Tour hope Primož Roglič was subject to rumours, fuelled by a joint investigation by Stade 2 and Il Corriere della Sera, concerning possible mechanical doping, which he has always denied.

(Zac Williams/SWpix.com)

It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, then, that the Tour de France’s dominant team, and one with such a murky history, would be asked questions about doping and cheating at their sport’s biggest race, one so synonymous with doping and cheating during its 120 years that any rider wearing the yellow jersey, and in such convincing fashion as Vingegaard, is automatically a figure of suspicion and innuendo.

Of course, all these tainted legacies – either of his team, his nation, or the sport in general – isn’t Vingegaard’s fault. But he’s the current standard bearer, and so the microphone is now thrust towards him.

“I can tell, from my heart, that I don’t take anything,” Vingegaard has insisted throughout this Tour. “I don’t take anything that I wouldn’t give to my daughter and I would definitely not give her any drugs.”

The 26-year-old quietly spoken Dane has proved he can answer all sorts of questions on the road during his inexorable rise to the top of the cycling world over the past two years. He’s also happy, it seems, to be asked other pertinent questions about his sport and what it represents in yet another bright new era.

Some shadows, however, are a little harder to sprint away from.