Vingegaard turns Giro into a Tour de France training camp

In an interview with La Gazzetta dello Sport last week, Vincenzo Nibali called on Jonas Vingegaard to provide a little more entertainment as he works methodically towards a seemingly inevitable final overall victory at the Giro d’Italia.

On Tuesday, Nibali got to watch the pink jersey in action at close quarters as a passenger in the lead car as the Giro climbed to Carì. It’s not entirely clear if Vingegaard fully met Nibali’s spettacolo quotient with his winning attack on the final climb, but the Sicilian was at least enthused enough to poke his head out the window and take a photo in the closing kilometres.

Vingegaard’s victory was his fourth from four summit finishes thus far at the Giro, and it leaves him 4:03 clear of Felix Gall (Decathlon CMA CGM) atop the overall standings. A relatively subdued display in the Massa time trial aside, Vingegaard hasn’t had a misstep on this Giro, and nobody is labouring under the illusion that they are in the same bike race as him.

As if to illustrate the point, Gall thought about following Vingegaard’s winning attack here for all of five seconds before sensibly tapping out and focusing on the task at hand, namely fending off Jai Hindley, Thymen Arensman et al in the race within a race for second place.

Vingegaard’s condition, meanwhile, looks to be improving as the race draws on. When Gall limited his losses to just a handful of seconds at the Blockhaus and Corno alle Scale, there were murmurs that Vingegaard was some way short of his best.

The revelation that Vingegaard had been suffering from a cold at the end of week one offered a partial explanation, but it seems just as likely that he has simply been moving through the gears on this Giro as he builds towards the Tour de France and the sixth instalment of that annual duel with Tadej Pogačar.

At Pila on Saturday, Vingegaard attacked with 4.6km to go and beat Gall by 49 seconds at the summit. On the final climb to Carì on stage 16, he opted to go a little longer, accelerating with 6.6km to go and putting 1:09 into Gall by the finish. 

Within minutes of the finish, the estimates from the online power-to-weight ratio analysts broadly seemed to tally with the visual impression of the winning ride. The online consensus seemed to put Vingegaard in the range of 6.6 w/kg. 

On winning last year’s Vuelta a España, Vingegaard spoke of how he had taken more time than he realised to reach his best again after his career-threatening crash at Itzulia Basque Country, two second places at the Tour notwithstanding.

He revisited the topic in Carì on Tuesday, nodding when it was put to him that this performance was a confirmation that he had returned to his levels of old. “Yeah, I would say so,” he said. “Maybe even better.”

Vingegaard looks to be growing stronger as the race draws on. His Giro is so far proving to be the perfect training camp for July.

Vingegaard explained that he had expressly targeted this stage because he has often trained in the area. His attachment to his home place of Glyngøre is well known, but Ticino has a certain appeal for the Dane. “I mean, if I wouldn’t live in Denmark, this is the place I would live probably,” Vingegaard said in the press conference truck.

But going for the win wasn’t only an emotional call. Shortly afterwards, Vingegaard revealed that the decision to target the stage hadn’t been taken on a whim in the briefing on Tuesday morning or even on the rest day, but devised with his Visma | Lease a Bike team months before the Giro even began.

In the NFL, teams usually script their first fifteen offensive plays before making any improvisations. Visma, it seems, have been doing something similar on this Giro. Earlier in the race, for instance, sports director Marc Reef told Domestique that Vingegaard’s Lyaskoevts Monastery on stage 2 had already been discussed last winter. 

It doesn’t appear as though Vingegaard and Visma have been forced to deviate from their pre-planned playbook in any significant way. Like at Pila, Victor Campenaerts, Sepp Kuss and Davide Piganzoli took their turns to tee up their leader at Carì, and then Vingegaard followed through with the winning attack, much like a quarter back taking reps in practice.

The name of Visma’s game is to build for the Tour while winning the Giro, and Vingegaard has played it more or less flawlessly to this point. Whatever happens in July, there seems to be little chance that Vingegaard will complain of having delved too deeply into his reserves in May – barring a late shock on stage 19 or 20, of course.

“I think I’ve also somehow evolved or took a bit of a step here during the Giro,” Vingegaard said. “And that was also basically the whole plan we had, because that’s what has happened to me the few times I’ve done the Vuelta after the Tour. My total power has been higher, though my body weight was a little bit higher then as well. But that’s something I can avoid, obviously, so we think, for now, we are on a good track for the Tour.”

Vingegaard will have further chances to win stages at this Giro, starting with Wednesday’s rugged run to Andalo, though he laughed off the idea of trying to win three more stages to better his rival Pogačar's haul from two years ago. “I don’t think too much about what’s happened in the history,” he said and the subtext was clear: the focus is on the future. 

The Giro is won, but Vingegaard’s very public pre-Tour training camp continues.