'How fun it must be to be that good' - Kulset on the Vingegaard gap, Uno X’s Giro win and the Milan chaos

Speaking on the Domestique Hotseat podcast, the 22-year-old Norwegian described that feeling with unusual honesty.

“It’s a combination of humiliation and motivation,” he said. “It’s painful to see somebody being so much stronger than you, but at the same time, it’s really motivating.”

He was talking about Jonas Vingegaard and the Visma train in the mountains. Kulset had been up the road, emptying himself, when the GC race came through behind.

“When Vingegaard is going, like on Blockhaus, when I was in the wheel at the bottom and then you’re struggling like crazy and then you watch the race over and you are dropping while Vingegaard is nose breathing. So that’s painful,” he said.

Still, there was envy in it as much as defeat.

“How fun it must be to be that good,” he said.

There was little spin in Kulset’s assessment. Uno-X came to Italy with a top 10 in mind, but the mountains have been less forgiving. Kulset is 21st overall, more than 14 minutes off the lead, and the gap to Vingegaard has not been an abstract one.

Then came Milan, and a result that gave the team’s Giro a different shape.

Frederik Dversnes won the stage from the break on a day that looked made for the sprinters. It was Uno-X’s first Giro stage win and, according to Kulset, the second biggest win in the team’s history after last year’s Tour de France victory. It also changed the way the whole race will be remembered for them.

“One stage win makes the Giro a big success,” Kulset said on the podcast.

The win had been hiding in plain sight. According to Kulset, Dversnes had marked the Milan stage from the opening days of the Giro, precisely because it was not an obvious day for the breakaway.

The logic behind the idea was simple. The obvious mountain and medium mountain breakaway stages are packed with riders who are almost impossible to beat. 

“When you are not one of the top, top tier riders, then you have to maybe look at some other stages than the natural breakaway stages,” he said.

Milan became messy for reasons beyond the breakaway. The finishing circuit was heavily criticised inside the peloton. Kulset said the surface was poor, with train crossings, bumps, holes and potholes. There were punctures. Enric Mas crashed. Jonas Vingegaard pushed for the GC times to be neutralised before the finish.

Kulset backed him.

“The road surface was really bad,” he said. “It was really dangerous.”

He thought the decision to neutralise the GC was right. He also thought it should not have required a late intervention from the riders.

“They knew the loop beforehand and they could have done this maybe before,” Kulset said.

Kulset’s point was not that the neutralisation was wrong. Quite the opposite. His question was why the decision had come so late. The circuit had been known in advance, and so had the road surface.

And then came the motorbike discussion.

After Dversnes crossed the line, the debate quickly moved to the vehicles ahead of the break. Max Walscheid of Lidl-Trek and Elmar Reijnders of Unibet Rose Rockets were among the most vocal, questioning whether the escape had benefited from the motorbikes and race convoy in front of them. Kulset did not pretend there is no effect. He also pushed back against the idea that this was simply about one television motorbike helping one breakaway.

“What people don’t see from the TV camera is that you have many cars,” he said. “You have the car convoys in front of the guys in the front. And then you also have 10, 15 police motorbikes.”

Kulset argued that the advantage is baked into the sport, and that riders still have to put themselves in the position to use it. Within Uno X, that seemed to be where the discussion ended: Dversnes had read the race, taken his chance and left the noise to everyone else.

“He listened to the lovers and not the haters,” Kulset concluded.

Listen to the full Domestique Hotseat podcast with Johannes Kulset 👇