“It looked very, very strange” - Danish icon questions Jonas Vingegaard's 'nonchalant' Giro d'Italia tactics as Visma quickly defend strategy

Jonas Vingegaard and Team Visma | Lease a Bike’s unusually relaxed approach during the opening stage of the Giro d’Italia has sparked debate in Denmark after former rider and long-time sports director Brian Holm openly questioned the tactic before quickly receiving an explanation from the team itself.

Throughout large parts of Stage 1 into Burgas, Vingegaard and the rest of the Visma squad spent long periods riding near the back of the peloton rather than fighting for position close to the front alongside the sprint teams. The strategy ultimately worked, with Vingegaard safely avoiding the major crash which split the peloton inside the final kilometre, but Holm admitted afterwards that he still found the approach surprising for the overwhelming favourite to win the Giro d’Italia.

“Honestly, when the big favourite and the whole team are sitting right at the very back, I think it looks very, very strange,” Holm said on Eurosport.dk after the stage. “We haven’t really seen that before. Maybe people did it back in the 1980s.”

Holm even described the tactic as slightly “nonchalant”, despite acknowledging the chaotic finale may ultimately have justified Visma’s decision. “Sure, there was a crash at the end, but I still think it looks strange when you’re the overwhelming favourite to win,” Holm explained.

Holm did, however, admit there may have been a logical explanation behind Visma’s confidence at the back of the peloton during such a nervous sprint stage.

After the finish, the Danish analyst said several riders had described the opening stage as unusually calm and slow for a Grand Tour opener. “We spoke to some of the riders after the stage - Mikkel Bjerg, Oliver Naesen and Rasmus Sojberg,” Holm explained. “They said it was simply the slowest bike race they had ever ridden. They averaged 110 watts. So maybe that explains a little why they were sitting at the back and thinking nothing at all was going to happen. But we can’t avoid the fact that it still looked strange.”

Before Stage 2, Holm and Eurosport colleague Bastian Emil Goldschmidt then directly put the questions surrounding the tactic to Visma sports director Jesper Morkov, who revealed the team’s approach had actually been discussed internally long before the Giro began.

“We’ve actually used it a couple of times this year already, both in Paris-Nice and the Volta a Catalunya,” Morkov explained. “It’s really something we started talking about after last year, and also something we discussed over the winter.”

According to Morkov, the specific design of the Stage 1 finale made it the ideal scenario to apply the tactic. “Especially yesterday, it was a perfect finish to use this tactic because we had the big wide main road,” he said. “And then there was the five-kilometre rule, and the five-kilometre rule started before we entered the technical section. So if there had been a crash out on the big roads, we could actually quite easily have ridden past that crash.”

Morkov also stressed that avoiding the stress and energy expenditure of fighting for position is one of the major reasons behind the approach. “It’s actually something we’ve used several times both to save energy, but also to save stress,” Morkov said. “And in our eyes, it’s a little easier to ride around a crash when you’re sitting back there.”

Holm nevertheless continued to argue that the tactic also carries risks if the race becomes more selective without crashes or neutralisations. “If the crash hadn’t happened, he could maybe have risked losing time,” Holm warned. “When you sit at the back all day, I think you lose a bit of concentration. You need to be near the front at the end of a bike race.”

The debate is also unlikely to continue unchanged into Stage 2, with Morkov already admitting Visma planned to completely reverse the approach on the more complicated terrain around Veliko Tarnovo. “We obviously need to be up there,” Morkov concluded. “We need to position Jonas. In relation to what we’ve just been talking about, it will be the opposite tactic from yesterday.”

After spending the Giro opener deliberately avoiding the chaos around the sprint teams, Visma now appear set to place Vingegaard much closer to the front as the race begins to move onto more selective terrain.