Matteo Jorgenson's Grand Tour chance is coming – just not yet

To borrow from Tony Soprano, in-house interviews in cycling are generally the lowest form of conversation. The smiling rider dutifully trots out dull soundbites that he knows will already be forgotten by the time the viewer has scrolled to the end of the video. A triumph of slop over substance.

Last week, however, Matteo Jorgenson proved an exception to the rule when he offered some genuine insight in a long interview recorded for Visma | Lease a Bike’s in-house YouTube channel. 

The team has some (inadvertent) form in this regard, given that they themselves released George Bennett’s immortal “he pulled a Landis” comment into the world after Chris Froome’s extraordinary ride on the Finestre on the 2018 Giro d’Italia, but this was a very different format.

In the sit-down interview in his adopted home of Nice, Jorgenson bucked the trend by giving considered and nuanced answers to questions that he could easily have boxed off with the usual old banalities.

Most striking was Jorgenson’s admission that he had taken some time to weigh up Visma | Lease a Bike’s offer of a long-term contract extension last Spring. The American had enjoyed a hugely successful first season at Visma, and most observers assumed that he was a perfect match for their notoriously taxing, detail-oriented approach to preparation and training. 

Jorgenson himself, however, had some doubts. Or at the very least, he wanted to be sure that no doubts were creeping in before he committed to pushing himself to such extremes on a longer-term basis. Rather than pretend signing on the dotted line had been a no-brainer, Jorgenson revealed that the offer itself had led him to question his own willingness to make the required sacrifices.

“I needed to feel sustainable in this job that I could do it at this level for four more years before I signed a piece of paper that was committing myself to doing that,” Jorgenson said. “It took me a long time to actually agree to my extension. I think it was proposed to me early in the year and it took me months to feel right about it.”

Jorgenson’s comments were all the more noteworthy given that they were released in the days after Simon Yates had shocked cycling by announcing his immediate retirement from cycling, even if the interview itself was recorded in late 2025. 

Although Yates has yet to expand on his reasoning in full, his erstwhile Visma teammates have suggested that the Briton had been burned out by the excessive demands required to operate at the top level of the sport.

Jorgenson had already highlighted the literal and figurative cost of his dreams back in 2023, his final year at Movistar, when he outlined on social media how he had invested his entire salary from the opening quarter of the year on his preparation – personal altitude camps, motor-pacing sessions, nutrition and massage.

The benefit of joining Visma, in Jorgenson’s mind, was that his team would now take care of all that planning and expense on his behalf. The relationship bore immediate fruit in 2024, when he won Dwars door Vlaanderen and placed eighth on the Tour de France, but that still didn’t mean Jorgenson was going to sign a contract extension lightly.

“It takes a lot of sacrifice to be a cyclist,” he said. “I was very aware of that this year, of how much I’m giving up in other parts of my life, and I wanted to feel right with that.”

Jorgenson is now decisively on board at Visma until the end of 2029, but it’s still an open question as to where his career develops from here. When his extension was announced last June, Head of Racing Grischa Niermann highlighted Jorgenson’s future potential as a Grand Tour rider, but the American himself confessed to doubts in that recent in-house interview.

“If you asked me 12 months ago, I would have said I really want to win a Grand Tour, and I think last year has provided another reality check to make me think if that is really realistic,” Jorgenson said, though he made clear that he still hoped to lead a team in a three-week race in the future.

“Grand Tours are for me the biggest races in cycling. I really don’t know if it’s possible and that kind of weighs on my mind, but I’m told by the performance team and the people around me that it is possible and they believe in it, so that helps me believe.”

At first glance, it doesn’t seem that Jorgenson’s Grand Tour leadership future will arrive as early as 2026, even if his initial programme strongly suggests that Visma are nudging him toward focusing firmly on climbing in the longer term. 

After playing a key part in Visma’s cobbled Classics unit for the past two years, Jorgenson will eschew those races altogether in 2026, with Visma instead delegating him to lead their challenge at Amstel Gold Race, Flèche Wallonne and Liège-Bastogne-Liège in April.

As things stand, Jorgenson’s only three-week race in 2026 will be the Tour, where he lines up as Jonas Vingegaard’s key lieutenant in the mountains, though he will have an important audition as a GC leader at the Tour de Suisse beforehand. Vingegaard will also lead Visma at the Giro, while the squad – for now at least – insists that stage wins through Wout van Aert and Matthew Brennan are the overarching goal at the Vuelta.

The lack of a designated GC leader for the Vuelta is striking, however, and one wonders if Visma might yet be tempted to dispatch Jorgenson to the race, particularly if he shines at the Tour de Suisse.

Jorgenson himself, however, has indicated that his post-Tour programme will see him ride the Canadian WorldTour races ahead of the Montreal Worlds and Il Lombardia. 

“I’m sure in the next four years that we’ll find a moment where I can put a lot of resources into really trying to do GC at a Grand Tour,” Jorgenson said at Visma’s media in La Nucia on Tuesday, implying that 2026 would not be the year for that particular experiment.

But with Yates retired, with Cian Uijtdebroeks now at Movistar, and with Sepp Kuss firmly back in his deluxe domestique role, Jorgenson is very clearly number two behind Vingegaard in Visma’s Grand Tour depth chart. And that status might not change for the foreseeable future.

“We have to say that Simon Yates cannot be replaced, certainly not by someone who might still be on the market somewhere in the next three years,” Niermann said this week. 

It might not be in 2026, but Jorgenson is in this for the long haul. His Grand Tour leadership chance will come sooner rather than later.