'Indestructible' Vingegaard delivers ominous statement - Vuelta Analysis

“It wasn’t particularly that I wanted to make a statement,” Jonas Vingegaard said in Limone Piemonte on Sunday evening, but he delivered a statement all the same. By unfurling a crisp sprint to win stage 2 of the Vuelta a España, Vingegaard has put himself into the red jersey of race leader and issued a stark message to his rivals for the title.

The pre-race favourite has an early buffer of twelve seconds over the UAE Team Emirates-XRG pairing of João Almeida and Juan Ayuso, but the psychological blow is even greater. When Vingegaard fell on a slippery roundabout with 25km to go, his challenge briefly looked in doubt. By remounting and winning with a minimum of fuss, he leaves us with the distinct impression that nothing or nobody can knock him off his stride at this Vuelta. 

“Vingegaard is indestructible,” read the admiring headline on AS on Sunday evening. Nobody is really indestructible in bike racing, of course, but it’s always useful for a Grand Tour winner to plant that idea into his rivals’ heads all the same. Men like Bernard Hinault and Miguel Induráin understood that appearing invulnerable was at least as important as being invulnerable in this game.

And in a race as prone to the unexpected as the Vuelta, there’s probably no harm in hammering home the message early. Indeed, that was the thesis of former ONCE manager Manolo Saiz – who won the race five times before the Operación Puerto doping scandal ended his career – when he spoke to Malpensa24 ahead of the race.

“You win the Vuelta in the first week and then you mustn’t lose it in the following two,” Saiz said. 

Like any categorical statement, it sounds utterly convincing at first hearing but doesn’t entirely hold up to closer scrutiny. Yes, men like Sepp Kuss, Chris Froome, Primoz Roglič and Remco Evenepoel have all built the foundations of Vuelta wins with fast starts in recent years, but there are plenty of counterarguments, too, from Pedro Delgado in 1985 to Alberto Contador in 2012 and Fabio Aru a decade ago.

Still, it is true that the Vuelta tends to play out a little differently from the Giro and Tour, and its position on the calendar means that not all riders set out from the start on the same foot. All the more reason, by Saiz’s reckoning, to set out your stall early and eliminate some rivals before the race even really starts.

“Many riders show up at the start with doubts about their condition and, as I always told my riders, they must be removed from the equation of victory immediately,” Saiz said. “To win the Vuelta, you have to think about it and aim for it from the first metre. If a team does a good job, it can immediately decide the Vuelta.”

Vingegaard didn’t end the chances of any rivals here – a group of 25 riders contested the final sprint atop the category 2 ascent, and Antonio Tiberi was the only GC man to concede more than 20 seconds. But it was notable that Vingegaard scored victory here without having to dig very deep into the reservoirs of his Visma | Lease a Bike squad.

Unlike at the Tour de France, where his team was parked at the head of the peloton day in and day out, Vingegaard was content to let Tom Pidcock’s Q36.5 squad police the breakaway for the bulk of the stage.

Victor Campenaerts was pressed into action to pace Vingegaard back to the bunch after his crash, and Wilco Kelderman put in a fine cameo in the final 3km of the climb to Limone Piemonte, but Visma didn’t have to work particularly hard to create an opening for Vingegaard. Instead, the Dane was content to wait for any opportunity that eventually arose, and he took it firmly by burning past Giulio Ciccone (Lidl-Trek) in the final 100m.

It was Vingegaard’s first victory since the Volta ao Algarve in February, and it came after he spent June and July being held at arm’s length – and sometimes further – by Tadej Pogačar at both the Critérium du Dauphiné and the Tour de France. Vingegaard has finished second a dozen times since his last win. This triumph surely won’t have done his confidence any harm, even if he downplayed its significance in his press conference.

“I wouldn’t say I needed this victory. If I had done, we would have pulled the whole day with the team,” Vingegaard said. “But we decided not to do any pulling today because we’re going to choose our fights. Today was not a day where we wanted to spend too much energy.”

Vingegaard may not have chosen it, but he’s already in the red jersey, and he’s already got a clutch of seconds in hand on his chief rivals for this race. In practical terms, it’s a useful buffer on Almeida and Ayuso ahead of the team time trial on Wednesday. In psychological terms, it lays down a marker for the three weeks ahead, much like Pogačar’s win at nearby Oropa on the corresponding stage of the 2024 Giro.

“I’m curious to see if Vingegaard will try to do what Pogačar has done in lots of races, which is win stages and stages and stages…” Alberto Contador wondered ahead of the Vuelta’s early summit finish.

On this evidence, Vingegaard mightn’t be able to help himself.