- Jonas Vingegaard, taking part for the third time, is the hot favourite of La Vuelta 25.
- For the 90th anniversary of La Vuelta and its 80th edition (23 August-14 September), which will be the 300th Grand Tour in the history of cycling, the legendary Alto de l’Angliru is back for the 10th time, and so is two-time Tour de France winner Jonas Vingegaard. Their destinies are closely linked!
- Jonas Vingegaard climbed the Angliru as a team-mate of Primoz Roglic in 2020 and during the Jumbo-Visma triple in 2023 with Sepp Kuss and Roglic.
Since 2017, when Alberto Contador crowned his magnificent career by winning, as he did in 2008, at the Alto del Angliru, La Vuelta has twice taken on the giant of Asturias, its 12.3km at 10.1% and its famous 23.5% Cueña les Cabres passage, in 2020 and 2023. This corresponds to Jonas Vingegaard’s two participations in the Spanish Grand Tour.
The first time was on November 1st, the year of the Covid-19 pandemic. Vingegaard, 23, was racing his first Grand Tour, in the service of Primoz Roglic. He had just one pro victory to his name (a stage of the 2019 Tour of Poland). Roglic, the outgoing winner of the race, was defending his red jersey (La Roja) against Richard Carapaz. In fact, he lost it at the Angliru, but was able to limit the losses thanks to the help of his team-mates. Between Robert Gesink and Sepp Kuss, the Slovenian’s lieutenants in the mountains, a new pawn in the Jumbo-Visma team had appeared, a smaller, unexpected rider: Vingegaard. We can see the Dane again on the replay of the images of stage 12, dragging his leader up the Angliru climb. 3.5km before the summit, Vingegaard pulled away, leaving Kuss to finish the job, which was enough for Roglic to regain the lead for good the next day, in the time-trial leading up to the mirador de Ézaro.
Vingegaard was so efficient in the service of Roglic on the 2020 La Vuelta, which was won by just 24 seconds, that the Slovenian demanded that he replace Tom Dumoulin in the squad designed well in advance for the 2021 Tour de France, before the Dutchman, winner of the 2017 Giro d’Italia, put his career on hold. The rest is history: two crashes for Roglic promoted Vingegaard to leader of Jumbo-Visma for a second place in Paris in 2021, which heralded his two final victories in 2022 and 2023.
Here's what Vingegaard said in a flash-interview in Salamanca on 6 November 2020, a few seconds before taking the start of stage 16, which saw his compatriot Magnus Cort win the stage in Ciudad Rodrigo in a sprint ahead of Roglic: “I’m just trying to help Primoz as much as I can. I think I surprised the public, but also myself and the team here in Spain. I know I’m at a high level when I’m at my best, but I don’t think that I’ve reached my limits yet in La Vuelta.”
For the fifth time in a row, the Dane finished in the top two in this year’s Tour de France, again in second place behind Tadej Pogacar, but he has been saying for several years that the race for the Maillot Jaune is not the only thing that guides his career, and you can hear the great tenderness in his voice when he says that he also wants to “win La Vuelta a España”. He always specifies ‘a España’ and you can tell that he loves this country where he has also won the Itzulia, in the Basque Country, and twice the O Gran Camiño, in Galicia, two regions with a great cycling tradition that he will visit again on La Vuelta 25, before and after the Angliru.
Two years ago, Vingegaard won at Col du Tourmalet (stage 13) and Bejes (stage 16) on the eve of the Angliru. At the time, he was second in the overall classification, 29’’ behind team-mate Kuss, while Roglic was 1’33’’ adrift. In the Jumbo-Visma camp, the idea was still that the strongest of the three should win La Vuelta. At the top of the Angliru, Roglic and Vingegaard crossed the line in that order, followed by Kuss at 19’’, but giving the impression that they were racing against each other. “None of us liked the way we raced,” said the Dane afterwards. “The team management didn’t like it either and we told ourselves that we had to stop it, that we couldn’t race against each other within the team. That’s what I wanted to do on the second rest day. I was third then and happy to stay there. I had asked that we not attack each other and that we only fight against our opponents. Fortunately, after the Angliru, the management told us: now it’s over and we have to keep the ranking as it is. We’ll never know which of the three of us was the strongest in this Vuelta…”
But the fact is that Vingegaard, second in 2023, has yet to win La Vuelta. Moreover, no Dane has won the event since its creation in 1935. La Roja has not been worn by a Dane since Jakob Fuglsang took it after the inaugural team time trial in 2011. History remains widely open for Jonas.
