"This wasn't what we expected. I don't know the cause either" - Visma DS puzzled by Vingegaard's underperformance

Grischa Niermann, DS of Team Visma | Lease a Bike, gave his immediate reaction right after today's time-trial and before talking to Jonas Vingegaard. There was a disappointing performance on the day which saw the Dane lose 1:05 minutes to Tadej Pogacar over the 33-kilometer long time-trial which was not a scenario expected by the Dutch team.

"This wasn't what we expected. I don't know the cause either. I haven't spoken to Jonas yet. But he's simply been consistently losing time to the competition, and that wasn't what we were hoping for," Niermann said to the media present at the finish line.

"After four kilometers, he was already losing eight seconds, and that continued throughout the time trial. Others were clearly better, and we're one minute behind." It was a tough hit that put Vingegaard in fourth place on the overall classification but already with a very important deficit back to the World Champion who can now afford to go on the defensive.

This result, outside the Top10 on the day, came as a specially sour surprise taking into consideration how much focus had been put on this very day. "Jonas has trained a lot on the time trial bike, and we know that time trials are very important. Beforehand, we thought the chance of losing time would be just as high as gaining time, but this is more than we anticipated, and that's a huge disappointment. Will we be attacking more now? We'll have to".

The team also had Matteo Jorgenson finish with a relatively disappointing time, but Edoardo Affini being third place on the day, which indicates that it wasn't something in the team as a whole. "So it's not that anything went wrong across the board; that's not the problem. We won't change our approach, but we do have to find a way to earn back the time we've lost. There are no excuses for now".