'A lot of pressure to put on three races' - Matteo Jorgenson weighs up Ardennes rethink for 2027

After the year he’s had, it was probably worth a roll of the dice. Matteo Jorgenson ignited Il Lombardia with a daring move over the Madonna del Ghisallo, but the gamble didn’t pay off. The inventive effort was snuffed out over the other side, and the American had to settle for bringing the curtain down on his campaign with 23rd place in Como.

It’s been that kind of a season for Jorgenson, who never quite succeeded in converting a string of placings and strong performances into a win. It started well, with second at the Faun-Ardèche Classic behind a rampant Paul Seixas and second at Tirreno-Adriatico behind Isaac del Toro.

But a crash at Amstel Gold Race ruled Jorgenson out of the centrepiece of his spring at the Ardennes. He recovered to take fourth at the Dauphiné and ride the Tour de France in support of Jonas Vingegaard, but he only truly hit his stride again in the final weeks of the year. 

When Jorgenson spoke to Domestique on the eve of Il Lombardia, he wasn’t entirely sure how to couch his campaign. On the one hand, his MVP role at the World Championships on behalf of American teammate Brandon McNulty might just have been the outstanding performance of his career. On the other, the year ended without a win.

“I think it’s been a good season, I can’t be super negative on it,” Jorgenson told Domestique. “If I line it up with my expectations for the season, it hasn’t gone to plan, and I haven’t won a race. I haven’t really met any of my objectives that I set out at the beginning of the year, but you can’t always have a perfect year. 

“For sure, crashing an Amstel changed a lot for me. I think that was my peak shape of the season and losing it there on that corner was disappointing. But I’ve managed to find pretty good form now at the end of the year, which is new.”

There was a novelty early in the year for Jorgenson, too. He had been a mainstay of Visma Lease a Bike’s cobbled Classics unit in his first two seasons at the team, but this time around, it was decided that he should focus exclusively on the Ardennes Classics. 

His Tirreno-Adriatico displays suggested he was coming to the boil at the right time, but his Amstel crash ruined the experiment. At this remove, Jorgenson is not sure if the approach will be replicated in 2027.

“I’ve been thinking about it, and I don’t know exactly if I want to do that same run up again,” Jorgenson said. “I mean, doing the Ardennes would be really nice either way but really focusing on them again… It’s a lot of pressure to put on three races, and it’s also a lot to do a month of altitude for just three days. So maybe we do something different where we add a race before or after, but it’d be cool to do them again.”

Jorgenson’s appetite for the Ardennes must surely have been sated by his performances in hilly one-day races across the final weeks of the campaign. He was eighth at the GP de Québec, fifth at the Giro dell’Emilia and third in a high-octane edition of Tre Valli Varesine. 

But the standout performance came at the World Championships in Montreal, where Jorgenson drew accolades for his policing of the group of favourites after McNulty had soloed clear with 33km to go. Jorgenson helped himself to eighth place at day’s end, but his result was merely a footnote to his masterful exhibition of teamwork.

“I hesitate to say it because I want more time to reflect on it, but I think it might be the race I’m most proud of, just because I feel like I had a big role in planning it and also I had a big role in executing it,” Jorgenson said. “And then it’s just the whole weekend, and the context of it being with childhood friends and achieving something that big… I’ll be glowing from it for a long time. I’m really proud of it.”

The United States had historically been underachievers in the elite men’s road race, with Greg LeMond and Lance Armstrong accounting for all of the country’s medals in the event. But there was growing optimism ahead of this year’s Worlds that Michael Creed’s team could make a serious impression, with Jorgenson, McNulty, Quinn Simmons and Kevin Vermaerke all part of a deep roster.

When defending champion Tadej Pogačar was ruled out through injury, Jorgenson realised that a historic opportunity had presented itself. Before the team had even assembled in Montreal, he took it upon himself to compile a document to focus minds on the rainbow jersey.

“When Tadej was still racing, I was under the impression that we should race for the podium, that’s what I had discussed with the USA Cycling management,” Jorgenson said. “But once it was clear he wasn’t going to be there, I started to dream about it, and my brain started to work it over.

“I thought about it a lot on all my training rides this summer after the Tour – what could be the best plan, who the competitors are. It was a matter of speaking about it and I wrote a document just to get my thoughts on paper and I sent that to all the riders about a week before the race, and then the night before we made the final plan.”

Jorgenson had previously raced the Worlds in Leuven and Zurich, and he also took ninth in the road race at the Paris 2024 Olympics, but the build-up to Montreal marked a change in philosophy for the American squad. The team wasn’t fulfilling a fixture so much as fulfilling its potential. A crucial difference.

“I think it was new because we saw there was actually a possibility to win the race,” he said. “We’ve had good teams before but a) we’ve never been on a course that suited us as well, and b), we’ve never had the level required as a collective to actually do something like that. 

“I think a lot of things came together, and there was also a lot of luck in that other guys had bad days, and it was just a magic day.”