Mads Pedersen: Vingegaard’s Tour win not surprising, but his 2021 podium was unexpected

Denmark’s most recent Tour de France winner and the country’s most recent World Champion will cross paths in a race for the first time in 2023 this Sunday, when Jonas Vingegaard (Jumbo-Visma) and Mads Pedersen (Trek-Segafredo) head for the start of Paris-Nice at La Verrière.

Pedersen was himself a stage winner at the 2023 Tour, and he is looking to complete his Grand Tour ‘set’ of victories with a participation in the Giro d’Italia this May. He has also fixed himself the goal of a first Monument victory and five WorldTour wins in 2023.

Yet although 2022 was an exceptional season for Danish cycling, Pedersen warns that even with the logical rise in popularity, the economic crisis is hurting the sport there just as much as anywhere else. As the Trek-Segafredo rider puts it with his characteristic directness: “You don’t put €200,000 into sponsorship when you don’t know how big your electricity bill will be next week.”

But if the presence of Tadej Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates) in Paris-Nice will inevitably evoke memories of Vingegaard’s stunning Tour de France defeat of the Slovenian last summer, Pedersen, for one, was not so surprised by the events of last July. But while Vingegaard is now set on chasing another Tour win in 2023, Pedersen has his own goals to focus on achieving – and much sooner than the summer, too.

Pedersen is never one to hide his ambitions, and his team manager Luca Guercilena says while he has no complaints about his Danish star’s consistency over the last three seasons, “what would be great is if he could combine all these results he’s had since 2020 in a single year".

“I’d like one big Classics win rather than lots of top results,” Pedersen tells Cyclingnews. “You say I maybe have unfinished business in the Classics, I know you are fishing for a comment about Paris-Roubaix, and it’s true, I have unfinished business there.

“In Roubaix I always crash out or some stupid mistakes or I’m not good enough, so…now it’s time to be the quality rider that I was this year [2022] in the Classics as well. That’s why Luca hired me. I didn’t win any of them yet, or I did, but now I have to win some more.”

Despite his rock-steady but not stand-out Classics performance last spring, from sixth in San Remo through to seventh in Gent-Wevelgem and eighth at the Tour of Flanders, Pedersen’s mood when discussing his 2022 season is a notably jovial one  -  and he’s right to be. 

“How many wins did I promise you in the Vuelta, Steven?” Pedersen calls across to his sports director Steve De Jongh, sitting nearby, when asked about his performance in the Spanish Grand Tour.

It emerges, amid the friendly banter that Pedersen promised De Jongh three stages before the race started, and he duly delivered. But he also took the Vuelta’s points jersey in 2022, with a stage win in the Tour de France and one in Paris-Nice also among his 2022 haul of nine victories. Yet Pedersen is not willing to settle simply for these kinds of results, it seems, without making an impact in one-day racing as well.

This year there have already been some encouraging results, given Pedersen has already taken a stage victory in Etoile de Bessèges, just as he did in 2022. This was also his first time trial win in five years, which is an interesting development. Although Pedersen is off the mark for 2023, his ambitions are at a higher level. “I would like to have a smaller number of victories, but the right ones. A Monument and five WorldTour victories – that would definitely count.”

Last year Pedersen took five WorldTour wins, three of them in Spain, so that’s not an unrealistic goal: “When I said three wins in the Vuelta to Steve, I was pretty confident could take one, two or maybe three and then Steve came up with the idea of the points jersey, so in the end the Vuelta was a lot more than we expected,” he recalls.

“But actually to win three WorldTour races in 21 days is not easy. I believed I could win all the chances I had, but it went way better than I had thought.” In the process, Pedersen also secured the Vuelta points jersey by a jaw-dropping margin, 409 points to runner-up Fred Wright’s total of 186, though the contest would surely have been closer had Sam Bennett not been forced out with COVID-19.

In terms of his off-season, given he showed such consistency last year, it’s not surprising Pedersen has opted for a very similar one throughout.

“The whole idea is a copy-paste. Calpe in December, Christmas in Denmark, another training camp, and then onto racing. I’ll do between 80 and 85 race days in total, so that’s pretty much the same.” The only difference, of course, is that Pedersen is hoping that he’ll be finishing the season with a Monument in his saddlebag and another breakthrough confirmed.

The Danish racing scene - boom, bust or wait and see?

If Pedersen’s spring goals are essentially similar to 2022, he’s riding against a very different sporting backdrop for his country, given last July produced the first Danish winner of the Tour de France in nearly three decades. Yet interestingly, although only a year separates Vingegaard and Pedersen in age, and cycling is a minority sport in Denmark, their paths only really began to cross as professionals.

“I didn’t see him much in my junior years as a racer, he was not on the national team and we were on different squads. Plus we didn’t really race against each other because the junior races in Demark didn’t really suit him,” Pedersen says.

“I’d heard about him more in the U23 races when he started to get results internationally in races, on the climbing events. And you could see he was good.”

After last July, of course, it’d be hard to find a cycling fan that hadn’t heard of Vingegaard, but even before beating Pogačar, Pedersen says, the Jumbo-Visma racer had made it clear he was setting the bar very high indeed.

“His victory was not at all surprising, though I was surprised that he finished the race second the year before,” he says. “Maybe he could see it coming, but the rest of the people really didn’t.”

However, Pedersen believes that for all there has been a raise in cycling’s profile in Denmark – just think of the massive crowds that turned out in Copenhagen to welcome Vingegaard home – compared to before Vingegaard claimed yellow for good in Paris last July, things haven’t changed much.

“Of course, when you have a Danish guy winning the Tour, people are more excited about cycling and watch it more. But they don’t stop me in the street more because of Jonas, they stop me because I’m also winning races. That’s in my area – he lives 400 or 500 kilometres away from me,” Pedersen says.

“But it’s not crazy anyhow because cycling is not that big in Denmark. For the first few weeks after the Tour, there was a lot more attention paid to the sport, but now it’s pretty much back to normal. I can still do my shopping.”

It is much too soon, Pedersen says, to talk about how Vingegaard’s win could benefit the sport in Denmark in the long term. But while the federation-backed national teams in their various categories are “doing very well”, everything can grow, he points out. A more significant factor, given the ongoing harsh economic times in Europe and beyond, however, is that “everything costs money".

“I think we’re in a tough time right now, businesses need to keep money for themselves,” he says. “You don’t put €200,000 into sponsorship when you don’t know how big your electricity bill will be next week. It’s better to keep this money for yourself rather than giving it away.

“If you’d asked me two years ago, before COVID, it would have been different. But now even if the bigger teams will be safe, it’s a tough business for smaller teams.”

On the plus side, he says, “for sure there’s a big interest in Danish talent and hopefully it’ll keep growing and we’ll continue, at least, to have the same number of professional riders in WorldTour.”

All the while, Vingegaard is flying the flag for Denmark in stage races, with Pedersen doing his best to make sure his country hits the high notes in the Classics as well. And when the two come together in an event like Paris-Nice, as the Tour showed last year, from the flat stages to the GC days, Danish road racing has a chance to shine on all fronts.