Vingegaard sends Giro rivals warning with clear Pila victory message
Jonas Vingegaard and Visma | Lease a Bike have spent much of this Giro waiting for the right terrain. On the road to Pila, that terrain finally arrives.
From Aosta to Pila, the peloton faces just 132.82 kilometres, but almost every part of the route asks a question. There is no gentle opening, no long approach and no obvious place for the general classification contenders to hide.
For Jonas Vingegaard, that makes this the first day of the race that truly looks like his kind of stage.
“It’s true that it’s the first real big mountain stage here,” Vingegaard said at the start to CyclingPro.net. “It’s the first time that we do more than one real climb and obviously it’s going to be a hard day. Hopefully we have the legs to go for the win. At least for now we have the plan to try to go for it and see what the legs will do.”
The wording was careful, but the message was clear enough. Visma | Lease a Bike are not arriving in the mountains to follow wheels.
Until now, Vingegaard’s Giro has been defined as much by what he has not done as by what he has. There have been flashes, late moves and signs of control, but not yet the kind of sustained Visma pressure that can suffocate a Grand Tour. That may have had as much to do with the parcours as with strategy. The earlier stages allowed attacks, but rarely offered the right terrain to turn one acceleration into a full GC collapse.
Asked whether Visma had the strength to take responsibility from early in the stage, Vingegaard was clear.
“I think we have the strength to control,” he said. “We’ve shown in the last days that the team is very, very strong and that we have the capability to take control of the race.”
Kuss confirms Vingegaard ambition before Pila showdown
Vingegaard’s key mountain lieutenant Sepp Kuss was looking forward to the kind of stage that usually suits him best.
“It’s going to be super exciting,” he said. “These kind of stages I always like. Not much time to think. Just climb after climb.”
The American also confirmed that Visma’s ambition is bigger than simply staying out of trouble.
“Jonas wants to go for the win,” Kuss said. “We have a good team for it. All the stages we’ve been up there with the whole team, so I think we can be confident in ourselves.”
That confidence does not mean the day is straightforward. Kuss expects a strong breakaway, and Visma will have to judge carefully how much control they take and when.
“For sure there’s a lot of other guys that are riding strong and the break will definitely be a lot of strong riders as well, so we have to watch out for that,” he said.
The bigger difference, Kuss suggested, is the course itself. Until now, the race has not really given the favourites a stage where pressure can build over several climbs. Pila is the first day where that may change.
“Up till this point it hasn’t been quite the courses to really attack,” he said “Everybody’s still quite fresh, but at this point in the race everybody feels it in the legs and with a course that’s just up and down like today, by the last climb I think there’ll be more differences than the previous days.”
For Visma, that is the opportunity. For everyone else, it is the warning.
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