The small cloud of question marks that briefly enveloped one summit finish of the Volta ao Algarve for Jonas Vingegaard last Thursday disappeared completely over the race's second and definitive hilltop stage 7 on Sunday as the Dane conquered both the Algarve's final time trial and the overall into the bargain.
In the process and for the third year running, Vingegaard has now taken his opening stage race of the season, following two editions of O Gran Camiño. But if his victories on the opposite corner of the Iberian peninsula in 2023 and 2024 saw the Visma-Lease a Bike leader stand head and shoulders above the opposition from the word go, in Portugal's premier early season stage race 12 months later, it was not so straightforward.
Sixth on the Alto do Foia on Thursday behind no less than three UAE Team Emirates-XRG rivals was, by his own admission, a disappointing initial result. But in the definitive 19.6-kilometre time trial, culminating in a short but very difficult ascent to the Alto do Malhão, Vingegaard forged a very different plotline indeed.
From the word go in the race against the clock and in stark contrast to the flagging other top pre-race contender, Primož Roglic (Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe), from the word go the Dane was close to the top times specialists like Filippo Ganna (Ineos Grenadiers) and his teammate Wout van Aert (Visma-Lease a Bike) had been setting on the flat. Then once he hit the final 10% slopes leading to the summit of Malhao, Vingegaard was truly in his element and a league of his own.
Although the differences were nowhere near as spectacular as in his previous time trial victory in the 2023 Tour de France, after blazing his pathway to the emblematic Algarve summit Vingegaard was nonetheless more than able to repeat history and carve out a significant advantage over his rivals, just like he did en route to Combloux 18 months ago.
11 seconds ahead of Van Aert by the top, Vingegaard managed to vanquish all of his UAE rivals on GC to boot, pushing João Almeida into second place overall at 15 seconds and former race leader Jan Christen into tenth at nearly a minute.
Coming just a few hours after his UAE leader and arch-rival Tadej Pogačar had just conquered the UAE Tour with consummate ease, a clearcut victory of this calibre was surely just the kind of statement Vingegaard and his team had needed to make. And on the Malhao, albeit a much shorter climb than the Jebel Hafeet in the UAE where Pogačar had won, there was no doubt that they made it.
"I don't know if I expected the win," Vingegaard said just a few metres from where he had celebrated the 37th and 38th triumph of his career on the winner's podium, "but I was hoping to take the victory, of course.
"And yeah after the other day maybe I was doubting a bit more, but I think today I showed my real level.
"I'm super happy with how it went, today was a different feeling to the one I had the other day, to be honest, so I'm super happy with the victory and with the performance.
"I don't know if it's a relief but I'm super happy because I know this is my level."
Apart from switching from O Gran Camiño to the Volta ao Algarve as his opening race, Vingegaard's other big change to his 2025 build-up has been to miss altitude camp, in a bid to stay fresher deeper into a season where he'll be fighting for victory in the Vuelta a España in September as well as the Tour de France in July.
"Maybe on the first day, I needed to get a little bit more in the rhythm than I normally do," he agreed, "but today I felt super, super good. I'm really happy and looking forward to the upcoming races as well."
His strategy of not switching to a road bike for the climb itself differed from that of his teammate Van Aert, but given that choice would have involved a kind of major, uphill cobbled Classics-style acceleration to regain momentum, he opted to stay with the TT machine all the way to the top.
"I saw it was a really short climb so if you changed bikes, you'd have to be able to push a lot of Watts on your normal bike because you lose quite a bit of time," he explained. "So I decided to stay with the time trial bike."
Rather than dwell on Van Aert's strategy, in any case, or the most dangerous of his UAE rivals, João Almeida, Vingegaard, said he was "not focussing on beating anyone else in particular, I was focussing on my own race and optimizing my own performance. It was all about doing the best I could and I did so.
"If you want to win the GC, you have to go all out. I didn't think about anything other than that."
As omens for 2025 go, in any case, for Vingegaard, his time trial win and overall victory can hardly be bettered, particularly with his setback on the Alto do Foia so fresh in the memory. He'll now head to Paris-Nice, his next stage race with boosted motivation and likely keen to set another record straight - putting the disappointment of his third place in the 2023 Course Au Soleil behind him as well.
"Getting two victories today, that's super nice and hopefully it'll be a great season," Vingegard concluded about his first-ever participation in the Volta ao Algarve, and at the start of a season where third Tour de France victory after his 2024 will be his overriding goal for the year. "I'll do everything I can."
