How Jonas Vingegaard won Tour de France: ‘We can’t hide you behind Primoz anymore’

Like any Tour de France champion, Jonas Vingegaard‘s path to victory began well before the three-week, 2,000-mile route that, this year, spanned four different countries.

Vingegaard celebrated his first Tour title on Sunday, riding into Paris to claim a trophy he wrapped up days earlier with dominance through the mountains and help from cycling’s dominant team (which also won its much more long-awaited first Tour title).

He began Sunday’s 21st and final, non-combative stage with a lead of 3 minutes, 34 seconds over Slovenian Tadej Pogacar, whose two-year reign as champion ends. Brit Geraint Thomas, the 2018 Tour winner, takes third. It is the first time since 1989 that all three men standing on the podium know what it’s like to win a Tour.

Belgian sprinter Jasper Philipsen won the last stage. Vingegaard, Pogacar and Thomas finished with the peloton in the same time.

“Now nothing can go wrong anymore,” Vingegaard, who refused to acknowledge his assured victory until after the last stage, said while holding 2-year-old daughter Frida in Paris. “Nobody can take this away from me.”

In the first Tour to start in Denmark, a 25-year-old from North Jutland became the second Dane to finish it on the top step on the Champs-Élysées backdropped by the Arc de Triomphe. (The other, Bjarne Riis in 1996, after retiring a decade later, admitted to doping throughout the 1990s and during that Tour.)

Vingegaard is familiar with that picturesque setting in Paris. Last year, he stood on the runner-up step of that podium, a distant five minutes, 20 seconds behind Pogacar, who then at 22 years old looked like he had no peers. Certainly not Vingegaard, who was not supposed to be on the podium.

TOUR DE FRANCE: Final Standings 

Jasper Philipsen