Jonas Vingegaard does enough to lift the gloom around Visma

It’s rarely wise to draw firm conclusions for the summer from Paris-Nice, because the toughest stage race of the spring often has a logic entirely of its own. At times, it feels like the Bermuda Triangle of the cycling calendar, a place where just about anything can happen and where the things that do happen often defy rational explanation.

It’s no coincidence that riders have won Paris-Nice and the Tour de France in the same year on just ten occasions, and two men – Jacques Anquetil and Eddy Merckx – account for 60% of that figure. Paris-Nice has always been a unique kind of a bike race with its own very specific challenges. 

But even with that caveat, Jonas Vingegaard has ample reason to take heart from his performance on one of the most quintessentially Paris-Nice days of racing in recent memory on stage 4 to Uchon.

On a day of crosswinds and crashes, of biting cold and driving rain, Vingegaard never put a pedal stroke askew. He was in the correct position all day long – in the front group when the race broke up in the opening kilometres, and at the head of that group when overnight leader Juan Ayuso crashed out – and he had the strength to see off his breakaway companions from Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe with striking ease on the final climb, leaving them behind in the gloom as he struck for home.

This win didn’t inspire the kind of shock and awe provoked by Tadej Pogačar or Paul Seixas in recent weeks, but it was an assured performance from a man who always looked in complete control of the situation even on a day of such unrelenting chaos. 

Calm in an emergency has always been a useful asset at Paris-Nice, and Vingegaard’s display here was all the more striking given the apparent crisis he had endured this winter.

Vingegaard’s off-season troubles have been well documented. He suffered a bizarre training crash in January after an encounter with a fan and he subsequently withdrew from his planned season opener at the UAE Tour, citing illness.

Days later, Visma | Lease a Bike announced that his long-term coach Tim Heemskerk had left the team with immediate effect. All this followed the abrupt retirement of Vingegaard’s key Tour domestique Simon Yates in January. Before Vingegaard had even turned a pedal in anger in 2026, his status as Pogačar’s number one challenger in July was being seriously questioned.

That idea was amplified by supersonic displays from Remco Evenepoel, Isaac del Toro, Seixas and Juan Ayuso in the opening weeks of the season, but also by the increasing sense that Visma | Lease a Bike were no longer the force of old.

The team in yellow and black used to dictate the terms of engagement to the peloton all season long, but they haven’t been hitting their marks with anything like the same regularity in 2026. That sense of drift continued on stage 3 of Paris-Nice, where they had to settle for fourth place in the team time trial. Gallingly for a team that prides itself on outthinking opponents, Visma’s subdued showing might have been partly a question of strategy. Rather than strike out alone in the final kilometre like Ayuso et al, Vingegaard finished with two teammates around him, and the approach backfired.

Vingegaard’s win notwithstanding, Visma’s collective malaise continued on stage 4, where he had only one teammate – Edoardo Affini – with him at the front when the peloton split in the opening kilometres.

In years past, Visma were the team routinely forcing the echelons at races like Paris-Nice. Nowadays, they too often find themselves scrambling to try to repair the damage caused by others, and this was just the latest example. 

With 40km to go here, Vingegaard found himself with five Red Bull riders for company in a group of seven. It only underlined the idea that Visma are no longer the collective force of old, but Vingegaard’s deft management of the situation demonstrated that rumours of his decline have been rather premature as he builds towards a tilt at the Giro-Tour double.

The expectation, of course, was that this Paris-Nice would be a duel between Vingegaard and the on-form Ayuso, but the Spaniard’s heavy crash with 47km remaining would end that contest before it even began.

It would have been fascinating to see Ayuso go toe to toe with Vingegaard on the steep final climb, and it’s safe to assume the Dane would have faced a stiffer contest than the one provided by Daniel Martínez. 

Still, a man can only beat what’s put in front of him. Vingegaard had already looked sharp in joining the initial echelon, just as he was vigilant in tracking the cadre of Red Bull riders who had massed on the front prior to Ayuso’s crash. From there, Vingegaard could enjoy a free ride on the wheels of the Red Bull quartet. 

Given the surprising strength of the Van Dijke twins, Red Bull might have taken turns attacking Vingegaard rather than towing him to the final kilometre, but on this terrain and in these conditions, everybody was in survival mode. Besides, after outwitting Red Bull at the intermediate sprint, Vingegaard might simply have struck out alone sooner if he had been attacked. 

No, there was no argument with his superiority here. When the gradient stiffened on the approach to the flamme rouge, Vingegaard simply eased clear of Martinez, putting 42 seconds into the Colombian by the summit to lay down a deposit on final overall victory.

It wasn’t as dominant as Pogačar or as spectacular as Seixas, but it was enough. After such a turbulent winter, that’s already plenty.