'It's a hard start' - Vingegaard braced for early Vuelta summit finish

Better safe than sorry. Jonas Vingegaard’s Visma | Lease a Bike team reprised their Tour de France stance in the closing kilometres of stage 1 of the Vuelta a España, keeping the favourite positioned at the head of the bunch until the last obstacles of the day had been navigated.

Despite the succession of roundabouts in the run-in, the roads were wide enough to accommodate everybody, and Vingegaard rolled home safely in the body of the peloton at the end of the opening stage.

“It was actually a calm day. It wasn’t that stressful, so it was actually a nice day where we got through it just fine,” Vingegaard told TV2 afterwards. 

Vingegaard confessed that his squad had raced as though it were the Tour, with Victor Campenaerts driving the pace in the finale, even though he knows the Vuelta follows a different kind of a rhythm.

“Of course, it’s something different than in the Tour,” Vingegaard said. “There is a bit more stress in the Tour, so in a way you also have to get used to the fact that this is not the Tour. But it’s nice that there is not as much stress as there is in the Tour.”

The Vuelta remains in Italy on stage 2, where there will be an immediate change in tone. Saturday’s largely flat stage was always likely to end in a bunch sprint, and there was a notable calm in the peloton even after the day’s break had been swept up, but Sunday’s summit finish at Limone Piemonte offers something very different.

The category 2 climb is far from the toughest of the Vuelta’s ten summit finishes, but it will be an early chance for the podium contenders to take one another’s measure. The climb, 10km at an average of 5%, will certainly provoke a selection, but it’s not yet clear if Vingegaard and men like João Almeida and Juan Ayuso will be encouraged to go on the offensive. 

Stefano Garzelli won from a reduced group when the Giro d’Italia came to Limone Piemonte on stage 5 in 2002, his final act before he was sent home following a positive doping test.

Speaking to AS ahead of stage 1, Vingegaard was enthusiastic about the presence of a mountaintop finish so early in the Vuelta.

“Today is not so hard but tomorrow and the day after is already a little bit harder,” he said. “But I like it like that. It’s going to be a hard start.”

When the 2024 Giro d’Italia started in Piedmont, Vingegaard’s eternal rival Tadej Pogacar seized the maglia rosa by winning at Oropa on stage 2. The Slovenian would wear pink for the rest of that Giro, collecting six stage wins in the process.

In his role as a Eurosport pundit, Alberto Contador wondered if Vingegaard had a similar exploit in mind on this Vuelta as part of the ongoing psychological battle with Pogacar.

“I’m curious to see if Vingegaard will try to do what Pogacar has done in lots of races, which is win stages and stages and stages…” Contador said. “I’m curious to see how he approaches this summit finish. We’ll see the state of form and whether there are rivals at Vingegard’s level.”

Vingegaard is riding the Vuelta for the third time, having helped Primoz Roglič to victory on his Grand Tour debut in 2020 and then placed second behind teammate Sepp Kuss in 2023.

“Hopefully the third time is the lucky time for me,” Vingegaard told AS. “It’s always hard to tell about my shape because I’m coming out of the Tour, but hopefully I can have good legs and then we’ll see.