After cloudy winter, Race to the Sun will shed light on Vingegaard's 2026 prospects

Cycling has always been a ‘what have you done lately?’ kind of a business, but the trend has accelerated, like everything else, in the supersonic 2020s. It’s been a long winter for Jonas Vingegaard, not without problems, but it’s easy to forget that the Dane is also barely five months removed from a Grand Tour victory. 

A training crash after a close encounter with a fan, an unspecified illness that delayed the start of his season, the loss of a key domestique and the departure of his long-term coach all added up to a troubled off-season for Vingegaard.

But even so, murmurings of Vingegaard’s decline are probably overstated and certainly premature. As ever, the proof will be in the racing, and the first examination comes this week when he belatedly gets his 2026 season under way at Paris-Nice.

Vingegaard will set out with the clear aspiration of carrying the yellow jersey to Nice, and with good reason. He doesn’t get the same accolades for it, but just like his rival Tadej Pogačar, he tends to make a winning start to his seasons. 

He won his first race in each of the past three seasons (the Volta ao Algarve last year, O Gran Camiño in 2023 and 2024), while he also scored early victories at the Drôme Classic in 2022 and the UAE Tour in 2021. 

Despite a reputation to the contrary, Vingegaard is not a rider who only races in July. But more than anyone else, he is a rider who suffers from comparisons with Pogačar.

That was never more apparent than last autumn. In winning the Vuelta a España, Vingegaard had restored some pride and confidence after a chastening defeat at Pogačar’s hand in the Tour de France, and he had also landed a prize that the Slovenian himself had yet to claim.

Three weeks later, however, the lingering feelgood factor from that Vuelta triumph was dispelled by Vingegaard’s ill-starred tilt at the European Championships. He abandoned after being dropped with more than 100km to go, just as Pogačar was embarking on his latest solo exploit for the ages.

The contrast couldn’t have been starker. Even though Vingegaard has twice beaten Pogačar at the Tour and finished second to him on three further occasions, it only added to the feeling that their long-running space race for supremacy was now a duel in theory rather than in practice.

Vingegaard’s subsequent decision to make his Giro d’Italia debut in 2026 certainly felt like a tacit concession that Pogačar is now more or less unbeatable in July, but it’s also a clear chance to write his own piece of history by joining the elite cadre of riders to have won all three Grand Tours.

Like so much with Vingegaard these days, it’s all in the eye of the beholder.

A glass half-full reading of the situation says that Vingegaard is still one of the best two bike riders in the world and, on the evidence of last year’s Tour, still considerably closer to the stratospheric Pogačar than the rest of the three-week pretenders are to him.

A more pessimistic analysis suggests that Vingegaard is slipping further and further from Pogačar’s coattails, while a younger generation – not just Remco Evenepoel, but Isaac del Toro, Juan Ayuso and Paul Seixas – is now arriving at a considerable rate of knots behind him.

The picture has been made hazier by the clouds that have been gathering over Visma | Lease a Bike since the turn of the year. 

Simon Yates’ abrupt retirement didn’t just see the Giro champion leave the building; it also triggered some very public questioning of the foundations upon which the whole edifice was constructed. Former rider Tom Dumoulin, who clearly knows of what he speaks, was among those to highlight the mental demands of Visma’s micro-management of its riders.

That furore might have died down had Vingegaard’s coach Tim Heemskerk not left Visma shortly afterwards. To lose a Giro champion out of the blue like that could be regarded as a misfortune. To lose your best rider’s coach on the eve of the season looked more like carelessness.

Meanwhile, Vingegaard had endured some other setbacks. He crashed in unusual circumstances when he fell while apparently trying to ride away from a following fan during a training ride near Malaga. Four days later, Visma indicated that Vingegaard would miss his planned season debut at the UAE Tour, citing an illness, though no further details were given.

Not for the first time, Visma’s communications strategy regarding Vingegaard left a vacuum that would inevitably be filled with conjecture. Visma have had more to say about a new AI sponsor recently than about their two-time Tour champion. No wonder Patrick Lefevere’s bullshit alarm was going off. 

Even Bjarne Riis, hardly the most loquacious as a rider or a manager, decried the lack of clear information emanating from the camp: “The unfortunate thing for the rest of us when it comes to Jonas is that we never get any communication about where he stands from the Visma team.”

The next bulletin about Vingegaard landed early last week, when Visma made the surprise announcement that he had added Paris-Nice to his schedule to offset his absence from the UAE Tour. Along with the Volta a Catalunya later this month, it will be his only race this side of his tilt at the Giro-Tour double. “I took the necessary time to recover,” Vingegaard said. 

To the disappointment of many, Vingegaard missed a direct contest with Isaac del Toro and Remco Evenepoel in the UAE, but Paris-Nice will see him go head-to-head with João Almeida, the man who placed second at the Vuelta and the man most likely to challenge him at this year’s Giro.

Vingegaard also has some previous with the race itself. His crash and concussion at last year’s Paris-Nice prematurely ended his spring slate of racing, while on his debut in 2023, he suffered a sound defeat at the hands of Pogačar – even if he would claim the big prize that July.

Paris-Nice won’t make or break Vingegaard’s season, but after two years punctuated by repeated ill fortune and two years where Pogačar disappeared off into the horizon, he will appreciate the pressing need to build a bit of momentum. Winning it would be a useful way to remind everybody – himself included, perhaps – of precisely where he stands. 

However it plays out, the Race to the Sun will shed considerable light on Vingegaard’s 2026 prospects.