Johan Bruyneel participated yesterday in The Move podcast with Lance Armstrong and George Hincapie and explained perfectly what is happening to
Jonas Vingegaard in the
Tour de France 2024. The former US Postal sport director explains that the Visma | Lease a Bike program with regard to getting ready went well, but that to raise the level he needs rest and that's something he can't afford in the middle of the Grande Boucle, so the downturn in this third week
was to be expected.
"Jonas had an excellent program to tune up, that can be done, but you lose a little bit of foundation, and when you get to that weird point in your form, you're usually going to hit a limit where you're going to need a little bit of recovery to get to your best level and that in the Tour is not possible."
Johan is clear that Jonas came into the Tour in good shape and that it is normal that we were excited about a battle with Tadej Pogacar, which, as it turned out, was impossible to happen. After yesterday's stage it seems clear that one is still improving his performance and the other is going downhill.
"All the excitement we've had with Jonas at the start, we were excited with the high level he was at, I think he's peaked. We saw that the last 3 times when Pogacar attacked, instead of seeing him focus on Pogacar, he looked back, 3 times he looked back, normally you don't do that, so I think yesterday, he didn't lose much time because he was saved by his team, great job by Visma, but I think this is an indication of what we're going to see in the next few days. Confidence has to go down and Pogacar's confidence is going like a rocket."
Article written by Juan Larra.