ANALYSIS | What makes Jonas Vingegaard so 'bad' at one day races?

Jonas Vingegaard arrived at Sunday’s European road race with a clear mission and a rare admission. He knows he hasn’t “really discovered how to perform” in one-day races and wanted France to be the laboratory. Instead, he was dropped on the Côte de Saint-Romain-de-Lerps with 108km still to ride and climbed off soon after. So no, it was not the return to racing after the Vuelta victory that he would have liked. The contrast with his Grand Tour pedigree could not have been clearer than it was on Sunday afternoon.

“I haven’t ridden many one-day races recently because I haven’t really discovered how to perform in them yet,” he told Wielerflits in the days before the start. Those aren’t the words of a rider in denial; they’re the words of a multiple-Grand Tour winner who understands that the craft of one-day racing isn’t simply an extension of winning over three weeks. In fact, they require completely different styles and tactics.

Vingegaard’s calendar and physiology are tuned to the long game, multi-hour mountain efforts, controlled pacing, team tempo, and he has built an era-defining résumé there: two Tours de France, runner-up at the 2021, 2024, and 2025 Tours, and victory at the 2025 Vuelta a España. None of that, as Sunday proved, guarantees fluency in the spiky vocabulary of a classics style race. Vingegaard is a man whose power and endurance fades slower than his competitors, but that doesn’t necessarily help in one day races.

The immediate evidence is brutal. His bid to “crack the code” of one-day racing turned south before the race’s decisive phase; the moment the course demanded repeated surges and instant positioning, he lost contact. Vingegaard’s own pre-race framing now reads like a diagnosis: “If I find the recipe for tackling one-day races at this European championship, I’d love to compete in more in the future.”

So why hasn’t a rider capable of dismantling rivals over Alpine blocks been able to transpose that to a single day? Start with specificity. The steadier, threshold-heavy exertions that decide Grand Tours are worlds apart from the elastic, punch-repeat-punch patterns of major one-day races. Vingegaard himself points to preparation puzzles others solved long ago: “I find it difficult to figure out what I need to do the day before a one-day race – what I need to do to be good at them.”

But, as we saw in the opening week of this year’s Tour, Vingegaard does have explosive power. So maybe the question is less about the physical side, and more about the mental side, in particular tactics.

So let’s talk experience. Since 2022 he’s barely touched the Classics calendar. Velo counted just one one-day start in 2024 (San Sebastián, DNF) and listed his last five one-day results as: 2024 San Sebastián DNF; 2022 Il Lombardia 16th; 2022 Liège-Bastogne-Liège DNF; 2022 Flèche Wallonne DNF; 2022 GP Denain 76th.

He has only one win in a single-day event, and he downplays even that: “The only time I won a one-day race at the Drôme Classic was the day after another one-day race. So you couldn’t really call it a one-day.” Perhaps then, the lack of classics form is simply due to the fact he doesn’t know how to race them.

Tactics and team dynamics matter, too. In July, Team Visma | Lease a Bike can blueprint mountain trains, control valleys, and neutralize chaos on Vingegaard’s behalf. On a championship Sunday with national teams and open-ended racing, the script is looser, the traps multiply, and the penalty for one missed split is terminal. Rivals see the vulnerability.

“Tadej and I have shown we’re in good form; Jonas is still a bit of a question mark,” Remco Evenepoel said before the race, adding that “one-day races have been a bit of a weak spot for him (Vingegaard) in the past.” The race then played to type: Evenepoel and others stayed in the fight while Vingegaard’s challenge evaporated long before the finale.

None of this means he’s condemned to struggle forever. Denmark’s national coach Michael Mørkøv pushed back on the narrative: “I don’t really believe he’s weak in one-days. He has already performed remarkably well several times in the first stage of races he has participated in.”

Mørkøv pointed to the Dauphiné opener this summer, “He did incredibly well there… It’s hard to argue that a first stage is not equivalent to a one-day race”, as proof the Dane has the tools when the terrain suits and the timing is right. On that day, he exploded the race including Tadej Pogacar, Mathieu van der Poel, and Remco Evenepoel, but we saw nothing like that form at the weekend.

There’s also the question of calendar architecture. Vingegaard has long prioritized a Tour-first season, and this year he added the Vuelta, where he won, on top of that. The price of that double can be a dulled edge for a volatile one-day event staged just weeks later.

Pogacar and Evenepoel spent August and most of September recovering and training after the Tour. Vingegaard, and Almeida, battled at the Vuelta. Both pairs experienced hugely different fortunes on Sunday.

Crucially, Vingegaard is not pretending otherwise, and he is fully aware that this an area he is yet to perfect. For a man that is already a grand tour legend, the fact he has no presence whatsoever in the classics is surprising. But are we just judging him based on the all-conquering characteristics of his arch nemesis Tadej Pogacar?

For now, the split screen remains. On one side, Vingegaard is one of the Kings of July and September, capable of carving minutes in high mountains and closing out a Vuelta title. On the other, the rider who admitted before France that one-day racing remains a puzzle and left the course early after failing to hold the necessary accelerations. “If I find the recipe for tackling one-day races at this European championship, I’d love to compete in more in the future.” For now however, he’s yet to perfect that recipe. In fact, he is a long way off.