Tour de France: Vingegaard, from the fish market to the yellow jersey

Child-faced, shy and long unobtrusive, Jonas Vingegaard, who on Sunday became the second Dane to win the Tour de France after Bjarne Riis in 1996, forged a character working at a fish market, honing his skills as a climber during his holidays in France.

Denmark’s highest point, Yding Skovhoj, sits at an altitude of 173 meters. This did not prevent the country from breeding one of the best climbers on the planet with Jonas Vingegaard who, on this Grande Boucle, took the advantage in the Alps to better knock out the competition in the Pyrenees.

In the absence of slopes, the pale and frail Dane (1.75 m, 60 kg) developed his skills by riding against the wind which always blows in Hillerslev, the village of 370 inhabitants in the northwest of the country, where he was born 25 years ago.

At first, he struggled with his featherweight, which explains why he is not among the best in the youth categories. Already in football, which he practiced before discovering the bike, he was “always the smallest and least strong of the band”, he recalls.

As a teenager, as he began to show aptitude for cycling, his parents, Claus and Karina Vingegaard, took him to the French Alps for a motorhome vacation. A revelation.

– Dance with the stars –

“We were going there for him to train. At the beginning, I climbed with him but he had made five or six round trips by the time I reached the top! We climbed the Glandon, the Galibier. Then , from 2015, we spent all our July months at the Bourg-Saint-Maurice campsite. We saw the Tour pass twice in Alpe d’Huez”, says in the newspaper L’Équipe Claus, builder of salmon farms, still present with his wife in Alpe d’Huez on July 14 to encourage their son.

In the family, Jonas is not the first star: his mother-in-law, Rosa Kildhal, is a celebrity since she participated in the Danish version of the TV shows Best Pastry Chef and Dancing with the Stars.

With Jonas, we enter a new dimension. At the start of the Tour de France in Copenhagen, he was acclaimed like never before. Faced with so much enthusiasm, he sheds a tear. Sensitive, emotional and delicate.

At the finish of each stage, his first instinct is to make a phone call to his companion Trine Hansen and their granddaughter Frida who joined him on Saturday in Rocamadour for a long hug full of tears, renewed on Sunday on the Champs- Elysees. “I owe them everything, they are my first supporters,” he said.

While his great rival Tadej Pogacar displays a playful character and lives in Monaco, Jonas Vingegaard is discreet and still resides in his native region.

– Behind the sheep, the wolf –

“He knows that there are more important things than the bike. He is very family-oriented”, reports his teammate Wout van Aert. Modest too. After having exchanged with Emmanuel Macron Thursday in Hautacam, Vingegaard launches to his team, very surprised: “He knows my name!”

“Jonas tends to hide his emotions, we worked together so that he opens up more and that it’s not always me who makes the decisions”, confides his campaign Trine, who is nine years older than him, at the Danish daily BT during the Tour de France.

The couple met when she was marketing manager at ColoQuick, her first professional team. It is there that, to forge this anxious and introverted character, the bosses of the team send the young Vingegaard, 19 years old, to toughen up, on a fish market in the port of Hanstholm. From dawn, he packs sole and cod there before going to train in the afternoon. It’s hard. But he reveals himself.

“Behind his sheep’s appearance, he’s a wolf,” says Brian Pedersen, the boss of ColoQuick.

Vingegaard ends up catching the eye of the Jumbo-Visma, in which he breaks out with a second place on the Tour in 2021 to top off a fairly meager record. “He has gained confidence. He has changed a lot, he has become a leader,” insists Wout van Aert.

With success also inevitably come questions about doping in a country where former riders like Bjarne Riis or Michael Rasmussen have been overtaken by the patrol. He promises: “We are completely clean. I can guarantee it to everyone, nobody takes anything illegal, you have to trust us.”

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