The cobblestones of the Champs Elysées come from a quarry in Saudi Arabia, mysteries not of geology but of the organization of world trade, and on them, after the Belgian Jasper Philipsen raised his arms winning the Paris sprint, and not very Far from the Champs-Elysées Theater from the scandal of the Rite of Spring premiere, that bassoon, that Stravinsky, the last podium of the Tour is installed, with views and perspective of the Arc de Triomphe, to consecrate a little Dane more calmly, Jonas Vingegaard.
It happened on the pavés, on the boulders of the fifth stage.
Jonas Vingegaard has problems with his bike.
The chain has been blocked.
The Dane panics.
He grabs Van Hooydonck's bike, which is a foot taller than he is, waits for the car, changes once, then again.
The Tour has just started and he already thinks that he has lost it.
Tadej Pogacar, happy, dances on the pavement, left over, effortlessly.
Like children in fairy tales, Vingegaard is saved by the stage, and the Tour, a good giant, his almighty companion Wout van Aert, who gets into his pocket, calms him down, and leads him to the finish.
So much suffering to lose only 13s.
The scene is perhaps not the one that best defines a person as calm, but tranquility has perhaps been the great virtue for a 25-year-old Danish man who as a child was a slave to anxiety attacks, an overwhelmed teenager after .
And he has defeated Tadej Pogacar, the winner of the last two years, the 23-year-old Slovenian with an invincible air who, when the first 10 days were talked about, was only to speculate on which day he would give the Tour the final blow and send everyone the aspirants to fight to be seconds.
Or perhaps Jonas Vingegaard, who was born in Hillerslev, northwestern Denmark, and still lives there, not in Andorra or Monaco, where most of the world peloton lives, is not the calm child he appears when he pedals oblivious to the daily exhibition days of Pogacar, on the stones, on the Longwy slope, on the Lausanne slope, always chasing the yellow and green shadow of Van Aert, the cyclist who disputes the leading role in the networks;
calmer still, when he comes out of the shadows to test the Slovenian on the wall of the Planche des Belles Filles, and, although he loses on the line, he understands that unlike the previous Tour, Pogacar is not stronger than him: or his cold tranquility, a surgeon, a sniper, definitively sticking the knife in the heart of his rival in the Granon, the first arrival in the great Alps, stage 11.
Perhaps then, rather than feeling like a champion on the brink of achieving the greatest success of his life, he thought of himself as a mere pawn in the final blow of his team's finely crafted, collective strategy to take down Pogacar.
All the Jumbos had armed the game from the first day, in their rainy Copenhagen, throughout the stage: Roglic's attack on the Télégraphe going down, the exchange of blows, five each, he, Roglic, on the Galibier;
the noble, brave, quarrelsome response of someone who never says no to an invitation that leads him to the precipice, of the Pogacar who enters into the state of euphoria prior to the splurge of waste and even allows himself to speed up his wheel with Vingegaard for the rest of the Alpine giant.
Everything is calculated.
He gets the checkmate move.
She runs it in the last five kilometers of the Granon.
He provokes the biggest crisis that Pogacar has ever suffered, the crisis that no one thought he could suffer.
In 10 stages, the hyperactive Slovenian in yellow, smiling, boy, had beaten 39s.
In five kilometers, he gave her 3m 1s.
And the Tour.
And he gives the fans the best possible Tour.
All his attacks in Alps, Pyrenees, Massif Central, are neutralized.
There is no way.
Vingegaard is a rock.
A quiet stone.
Immovable.
A winner of the 21st century who is just a Tour man, who does not shine too much in other races, who does not show himself in the classics.
In the Tour, two participations, once, second;
other first.
25 years.
A growing cyclist.
The Tour is the dream that as a 12-year-old boy takes Vingegaard with his parents and sister every summer to tour the Alps in his parents' caravan during the Tour, to applaud their idols, Riccò and Contador park it in a camping in Bourg d'Oisans, at the foot of Alpe d'Huez, and every day they take out the bike to climb the cols that in Denmark they call wind.
And the father admires the strength and character, and the endless energy of the child who climbs all the ports once, twice, even three times, and faster than him.
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He celebrates his victory, that of the second Dane to wear yellow in Paris after Bjarne Riis who broke Miguel Indurain's streak in 1996, with a press conference in which he shows the virtues of discretion, the right word, laconism , sportsmanship.
Not a memorable phrase.
Not a word mispronounced.
Account at
L'Equipe
Trine, his girlfriend and mother of his daughter, Frida, two years old, who when he met him he was 21 and she was 32, and it seemed that he was 14, how sweet, and how quiet, and he didn't even know he would be a professional cyclist .
Trine is the head of marketing for ColoQuick, the sponsor of the amateur team in which Vingegaard runs, who, from Monday to Friday, goes to work in the fish market of the fishing port.
He prepares the cod boxes, organizes the auctions.
“I got up every day at five and worked until 12. I structured my day.
He trained in the afternoons.
Working with my hands, a thankless job, made sense.
It allowed me to do something without thinking about what I was doing, and it allows me to think now that I am privileged to be able to be a cyclist,” she says.
“I didn't need the fish market to live.
He was a cyclist, but he only ran on weekends.
The rest of the days I was bored alone at home.
I had to do something.
It was a simple life.
Less stress.
Sometimes I miss her."
The stress, the anxiety, made him vomit on the eve of the races, kept him from sleeping, closed his stomach.
When he woke up he spent a couple of hours lying in bed thinking only about everything that could go wrong during the day.
“He put a lot of pressure on me.
I didn't allow myself to fail,” he says.
"I'm still afraid, but I've learned to channel it."
In the winter of 2018, the Jumbo coaches go to Denmark to sign Mikkel Honoré, but someone tells them that the good guy is Vingegaard, make no mistake.
The boy from the fish market shows them his Stravas from Coll de Rates, he surprises them with their power tests.
They sign him
They send him to their wind tunnels in Eindhoven, where they save watts by playing a thousand details.
They prepare him in his Mentalen Academy to overcome his problems.
They make him grow.
But they don't succeed as much as Trine, his girl, the one who gives him two smacks on the ego when he gets silly, the one who tells him he's not the center of the world, that everyone gets nervous, that he doesn't exaggerate.
It is she who makes him the quiet Dane who wins the Tour.
She is the one who receives the first calls from him as soon as he finishes the stages.
The kisses from her.
His only, and final love.
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