UAE Team Emirates team manager Joxean Fernández Matxin has said that it is “only right” that double Tour de France champion Jonas Vingegaard (Visma-Lease A Bike) will be taking part in the race this year and that “I don't doubt that even if he had a 10% chance of winning, I’d have done the same.”
Vingegaard’s Tour de France participation was thrown into considerable doubt when he was badly injured in a major mass crash in the Itzulia Basque Country in April. Since then he has not raced but has concentrated fully on recovery.
The definitive announcement both he and Wout van Aert would be racing in the Tour was made on Thursday. Giro d’Italia winner Tadej Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates) will now be facing the double Tour de France champion as well as the top Belgian racer in a key support role as he battles to become the first rider to do the double and take both Grand Tours back-to-back since Marco Pantani in 1998.
“It’s only right,” team manager Joxean Fernández Matxin told Cyclingnews. “He’s a rider who’s won the Tour for the last two years and he’s got to be motivated to try to win the best race in the world again.
“I have no doubt that even if he only had a 10% chance of winning, I’d have done the same [and brought him].”
With the presence of Vingegaard added to the already confirmed participation of Pogačar, Remco Evenepoel (Soudal-QuickStep) and Primož Roglič (Bora-Hansgrohe), the Tour will be even more spectacular than before, Matxin agreed.
But in terms of how this will change the race in terms of strategy for Pogačar and UAE, Matxin said this would not alter anything, reasoning that they had already factored in Vingegaard’s participation back in December.
“We’d already planned things out with our eight riders for the Tour right back at that training camp in December and we already had the idea Jonas Vingegaard would be taking part, he hadn’t crashed at that point. So we haven’t changed our perspective at all," he said.
However, the fact that Vingegaard has not raced since April post-injury could perhaps change the way Vingegaard races, at least in the early part of the Tour, Matxin observed to Cyclingnews.
“It could create a few small doubts in his mind, maybe about how he’s going. We had the same situation last year with Tadej” - after his crash in Liege-Bastogne-Liege and fractured wrist injury - “that was obvious.”
“You want to know how you’re doing, what your level is compared to the rivals.”
The other new addition for the Visma-Lease A Bike Tour de France line-up announced on Thursday will be Van Aert, a hugely successful Tour racer in his own right, with victories in all kinds of different terrain and, together with Sepp Kuss and Roglič, a righthand man for Vingegaard in the mountains of the 2022 race. Van Aert was set for the Giro d’Italia, but injuries incurred in his own bad crash in Dwars door Vlaanderen meant a dramatic rethink of part of his 2024 plans.
“He’s one of the best riders in the world, what more is there to say about Van Aert?” Matxin commented. “The fact that he couldn’t go to the Giro because of that crash means he’s had to change direction and head for the Tour.”
But as he added, Visma-Lease a Bike were always all but destined to be a key player collectively as well as in terms of individual riders, in the upcoming Tour. “The whole team is going to be massively, massively important. They won the three Grand Tours in 2023, how could they be anything but important this year in the Tour?”
As for Pogacar and his plans for winning a Giro-Tour double, Matxin argued that from their own point of view, “We remain focussed on what we do, rather than thinking about what our rivals could do. We have to keep very much in mind who they are of course, but we have to work on what we can work on, and that’s our team. And Tadej is concentrating on his work, his training and on doing things as well as possible to get to the Tour at 120%.”
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