‘This route is simply tailored for him’: Visma documentary reveals Vingegaard’s Tour frustration

The Dane believes the route of the 2026 Tour de France made it particularly difficult for him to challenge Tadej Pogačar.

In a new documentary released by Visma | Lease a Bike, viewers are taken inside the team during a Tour that ended in disappointment for Vingegaard.

The Dane was forced to abandon the race after breaking his collarbone in a crash on stage 15. But even before his crash, Visma was struggling to find a way to put Pogačar under sustained pressure.

After stage 14 from Mulhouse to Le Markstein, that frustration became particularly clear.

Pogačar attacked on the steepest section of the Col du Haag with 7.5 kilometres remaining and rode clear to take his fourth stage victory of the Tour. Vingegaard eventually crossed the line in fourth place, 44 seconds behind the Slovenian, leaving him 4 minutes and 30 seconds down in the general classification.

Back inside the Visma bus, Vingegaard felt there had been little he could do differently.

“I just think this route is simply tailored for him,” Vingegaard said, referring to Pogačar.

“There was nothing I could do today. He is too explosive.”

For Vingegaard, the issue went beyond Pogačar’s explosiveness. The 2026 route also made it difficult for the Dane to turn the race into the kind of long, sustained climbing effort that traditionally suits him best.

“When I try to make it less explosive, the descents and flats break the rhythm,” Vingegaard said.

Inside the Visma bus, the analysis was similar. The team felt Vingegaard needed to keep the effort as steady and sustained as possible, but the structure of the stages repeatedly worked against that approach.

“Unfortunately, there is always a flat part or a valley after the climb,” the performance staff concluded. “That’s where he also loses the most time to Pogačar.”

It was an issue Visma had already encountered much earlier in the race.

Vingegaard and Pogačar began the first major mountain stage, stage 6 from Pau to Gavarnie Gèdre, level on time after Visma had won the team time trial in Barcelona.

Visma approached the day with a relatively defensive plan. The aim was to follow Pogačar and reach the finish without losing time, while keeping faith in the belief that Vingegaard would become stronger deeper into the Tour.

That plan unravelled on the Col du Tourmalet.

Pogačar attacked near the top of the climb and initially opened a gap of around 30 seconds by the summit. He then continued to increase his advantage through the descent and the road towards Gavarnie Gèdre.

By the finish, Pogačar had won the stage by 2 minutes and 38 seconds over Vingegaard. With time bonuses included, the Slovenian held a 2 minute and 42 second advantage over the Dane in the general classification.

There was, however, one stage that Vingegaard and Visma had been waiting for.

Stage 15 finished on the Plateau de Solaison, with a steep final climb that appeared much closer to the terrain Vingegaard believed could work in his favour.

The team had identified stage 15, along with stage 20, as one of its key opportunities to attack before the Tour began.

“This is exactly what we need today,” sports director Marc Reef said ahead of the stage. “We want to win the stage, fight for it, and take back time on our opponents.”

Vingegaard shared that confidence.

“Yesterday wasn’t steep enough for me,” he said. “I also had the feeling, especially yesterday, Pogačar did not look comfortable on the steepest sections.”

With the steep final climb to Solaison still to come, Vingegaard liked what he saw on paper.

“I think this one should be the best of all in the Tour de France,” he said before the start.

The Dane never got the opportunity to find out. Vingegaard crashed during the stage and suffered a broken collarbone, ending his Tour while sitting second overall.

Back with his team afterwards, the Dane struggled to hide his disappointment.

“The boys rode like a dream today,” he said. “They were amazing. It feels awful that we couldn’t defend our chances when everyone was in peak form.”

And Vingegaard was convinced his own condition had been good enough to fight for victory.

“It’s easy to say now, but with the legs I had today, I believe I could have won.”

Vingegaard has since gone further in his assessment of what went wrong.

Speaking after the Tour, he admitted Visma may have prepared him for a different type of race than the one they ultimately encountered.

“We may have misunderstood the Tour a bit this year,” Vingegaard told Feltet.

“We made me better on the longer climbs. But it could well be that we should have realised I needed to be a bit more explosive and look more closely at the route.”

There was also another complication. Vingegaard arrived at the Tour after winning the Giro d’Italia, making it difficult to combine his preparation for long climbing efforts with the explosiveness required to repeatedly answer Pogačar.

“Obviously, it’s difficult to be explosive when you’ve just ridden the Giro,” he admitted.

The documentary shows that those concerns were already present inside Visma during the race.

What emerged afterwards was a broader admission: the team may not only have struggled with Pogačar’s superiority, but also with the type of Tour it had prepared Vingegaard to ride.