Matteo Jorgenson enjoyed a strong debut season with Team Visma | Lease a Bike in 2024, claiming victories at Paris-Nice and Dwars door Vlaanderen. The American also came heartbreakingly close to a Tour de France stage win, only to be denied by Tadej Pogacar.
In an interview with the Italian magazine Alvento, Jorgenson shared insights into the transformative journey he underwent after joining his new team.
"When I signed with Visma | Lease a Bike in the summer, they sent me to their bio mechanist in Bilbao. He showed me a video of me cycling in the Tour de France and he said: the way you turn the pedals, you are one of the least efficient in the entire peloton," Jorgenson revealed.
Jorgenson joined Visma when the team was on a high following their incredible 2023. Whilst the team endured a difficult time in 2024, Jorgenson consistently showed why he is so highly rated, and that he can be a GC contender going forward.
The feedback set Jorgenson on a challenging path of change, "I had to really want it, because it was going to be a tough, nervous process," Jorgenson recalled. "I had to kind of forget my muscle memory, or break that pattern. If I could do that, I could make big progress."
Explaining the process, Jorgenson said, "I would activate certain muscles after cycling in a certain way for eighteen years. Which ultimately turned out not to be the right way at all."
Jorgenson’s commitment to refining his technique has already paid off, as demonstrated by his impressive results in 2024. With the support of Team Visma | Lease a Bike, the American has established himself as one of the rising stars of the peloton. Fans will be eager to see how he continues to progress in the coming seasons.
My daughter coaches in a different sport and I am constantly amazed at her stories where she just /sees/ the way an athlete is doing something wrong and how they can do the particular thing they need to do better. It’s as if her eyes work in slow motion. She uses film to help them see it as well, coaches them on how to turn this way here, bend that way there, angle this joint in this fashion, use this muscle differently at this moment - someone with that vision is incredible. In her first year of coaching a new team, half her athletes have reached new personal records or school records. All this is to say that I’m not surprised that Jorgensen (or Pogacar, or others) gets better with a new trainer/coach/biomechanical genius to help them improve. It’s amazing what the right eyes can do.
Yes, but also what eyes can’t do. I was an athletics coach for kids for years and you can see and try to correct as many faults as there are but some requirements are just not possible. It’s very hard to visualize but we all know from experiences, in sport, the most obvious one is the swimming conundrum, you can never become a top level swimmer unless your body grew into it young, maybe gymnastics would be similar. And outside sport, it’s as easy as learning to twitch your ear, if you can ;-)
I feel you missed my point - those who can be coached and can change can improve with new insights. And it helps to have people who see what needs to change to move that along. I’m focusing on the biomechanical expert in the article, without whom Jorgensen wouldn’t have improved. Context matters.
And you missed that I wasn’t contradicting but enhancing or adding to the discussion :-) I am surprised MJ made it that far without some of this having been picked up earlier. To further make my point, yes, by all means correct/improve anything that you can later in life but like disease, think of prevention before asking for cures, even in cycling a lot is crucial at the early stages but unfortunately, unlike athletics, cycling is a sport that rarely takes (youth) coaching seriously, if at all, it’s basically each to himself and we’ll pick the better ones once there’s enough development. About the only thing young cyclists get forced to learn is to ride with high cadence and that isn’t even coach induced but almost institutionalised. And as I tried to imply, no matter how much you perfect technique, we are all absolutely unique in our mechanical motions, you just have to watch the posture and strides of runners to note how dissimilar each is, and a crucial point to always remember is that by trying to force a better technique you may gain something somewhere but lose more elsewhere, you have to know whether it leaves you « comfortably within your natural boundaries « , eg, no point to improve your saddle position for more aerodynamicity if you’re going to have to ride uncomfortably for hours coz your mental state will drag more on your performance than your aerodynamics gain.