Funeral atmosphere at Visma | Lease a Bike team bus after significant time loss by Jonas Vingegaard in Tour de France

While Vingegaard had managed to gain eighteen seconds on Pogacar in the Dauphiné time trial over seventeen kilometers just a month ago, this time the roles were reversed. In Caen, Vingegaard lost no less than 1 minute and 5 seconds to his biggest rival for Tour victory, and the gap to Evenepoel was a massive 1 minute and 21 seconds.

There was certainly no celebratory mood at the Visma | Lease a Bike team bus. Aerodynamics specialists Jamie Lowden and Mathieu Heijboer had a dismayed look on their faces, while sports director Grischa Niermann scratched his forehead as he lined up for interviews, having to admit that what they saw in Caen simply wasn’t good enough. “This was not what we expected,” said the German.

“What the cause is, I don’t know either. I haven’t spoken to Jonas yet,” he continues. “But he just consistently lost time to the competition, and that wasn’t what we were hoping for. After four kilometers he had already lost eight seconds, and it continued like that throughout the time trial. Others were clearly better, and now we’re one minute behind.”

According to Niermann, the preparation wasn’t to blame either. “Jonas has trained a lot on the time trial bike, and we know time trials are very important. Beforehand, we thought the chances of losing time were about the same as gaining time, but this is more than we expected and it’s a big disappointment. Will we go on the attack more now? We’ll have to.”

Matteo Jorgenson (11th) and Edoardo Affini (3rd) rode faster time trials than team leader Vingegaard, who finished 13th on the day. “So it’s not that something went wrong across the board, that’s not where the problem is. We’re not going to change our approach, but we do need to find a way to make up the time we lost today somewhere else. For now, there are no excuses for this.”