skeletal, does not suffer from heat and cold – Corriere.it

Crowned yesterday for the second time on the Champs Elysees, Jonas Vingegaard demonstrated how the Tour de France winner’s profile is completely different from the past, from the idea of ​​the best possible compromise between a passer, a climber and a time trial man with the added ability not to crash on the descent, to manage the three weeks and to defend himself even if heights, heat, cold or wet roads didn’t suit him. To win the Grande Boucle today, compromises are no longer enough.

Tour number 110 confirmed that the ideal candidate is a skeletal (body fat between 3.5% and 5%) aerobic phenomenon (maximum oxygen consumption between 88 and 90 ml/Kg/min), able to devour a steep climb at an ascent speed of 2000 meters per hour (breaking the records of the 90s), impervious to heat, cold and the effects of high altitude, good at pushing 450 watts on a time trial bike like the best specialists despite being very light and equipped with calves as thick as a breadstick, excellent downhill, tactically impeccable, psychologically super smart.

Behind him there must necessarily be a team like Jumbo-Visma. In the neglected team ranking, the Dutch trimmed a quarter of an hour to Pogacar’s UAE, half an hour to the former despots of Ineos and, above all, from two to ten hours to 15 of the 22 teams competing in the Grande Boucle. In short, Jumbo plays in a different league thanks to an overpaid but, above all, carefully selected and meticulously centralized team, from the captain to the last of the supporters, including replacements. The team demonstrated this at the last Giro d’Italia, when it had to replace the precious Gesink and Foss infected with Covid at the last moment and with excellent results. yesterday the news that in a month Vingegaard will race the Vuelta alongside (or alternatively) Primoz Roglic

, which has already won the Giro, to try to become (it’s hard to imagine who can stop them) the first team in history to score a grand tour hat-trick in the same season. The Dutch are so hungry and have such a surplus of talent that they develop cannibalistic instincts. A grand tour is no longer won alone and despite the terrible crisis on the Col de la Loze, Pogacar’s estate is also thanks to a much better equipped UAE than the one that helped him in his two successes at the Tour in 2020 and 2021, with Adam Yates on the third step of the podium.

Then there is the tactical aspect, now borrowed more and more from Formula 1: if we put aside the suspicions of witchcraft that have hovered over all the winners for thirty years now, the extraordinary time trial of Combleux with which Vingegaard shocked his rivals above all the result of a millimetric analysis of the track by the team’s strategists, which allowed the athlete to plan a super aggressive race behavior which, combined with perfect legs, generated monstrous gaps. No one had ever done such deep simulation work before.

Vingegaard has redeemed the cycling history of Denmark, which won a Tour of shame with the bombed Bjarne Riis and lost one already won for the escape from the French roads of the chicken Michael Ramsussen after messing with doping controls. Holland, also infected by doping in the 90s, did the same thing in the regeneration of the Jumbo, a sort of orange national team, sweeping away the ashes of the very muddy Rabobank. Two nations which, unlike Italy or Spain, are publicly and profoundly ashamed of their past, have not recycled the old drug addicts in improbable technical or managerial roles and have started from scratch. Full stop.

The challenge between the Dane Vingegaard and the Slovenian Pogacar – compared to the modest results of the French, Italians and South Americans in general – then demonstrates how today’s cycling no longer knows what to do with the historical tradition. A finally universal sport recruits talents where there is a hunger for victories, good physical education schools, safe roads, active federations and young people willing to emigrate to build their future.