Meet Bart Lemmen: from 65 forced hours on the turbo trainer, to key part of Vingegaard's Giro plan

Visma | Lease a Bike were comfortably the strongest team in depth on the Giro d'Italia's first Italian stage on Tuesday. Jonas Vingegaard had — despite the withdrawal of Wilco Kelderman with a broken collarbone — four teammates around him in the front group on the Cozzo Tunno, including Bart Lemmen. IDL Pro Cycling spoke to him after the stage.

The Dutch squad's roles were clearly defined, as stage four to Cosenza showed. After Timo Kielich and Tim Rex had done their work on the flat, Vingegaard was left with Lemmen, Victor Campenaerts, Davide Piganzoli and Sepp Kuss in the lead group of 42 riders. In normal circumstances, Kelderman would almost certainly have been there too.

For the 30-year-old Lemmen, it must have been a welcome confirmation of his fitness — especially given that stage four was only his 16th race day of the season. "Things are going well again. I started the season at a very high level, but then I broke my wrist straight away at the Tour of Oman. That was far from ideal," he explains.

"We crashed on a roundabout that was slippery. Riders went down on both sides of it, and then again a kilometre further on," he recalls. "I rode the stage out, but immediately felt the same pain as last year in the Tour of Holland. Back then it wasn't broken — but it hurt f*cking badly and I couldn't ride the next day."

"This time it was the same thing, so I called Grischa" — Niermann, the team's sporting director — "in the car on the way to the hotel and said: I won't be able to hold my handlebars in the next stage. When I got home, I went to the hospital just to get it checked — fully expecting it to be nothing — and it turned out to be broken."

With that injury, he was confined to indoor training. "I was able to keep training, but at first it was almost entirely on the turbo trainer." In total, in the month after the crash, Lemmen spent more than 60 hours pedalling indoors across 31 sessions. "It is quite different from riding outside, and I noticed that again at the Volta a Catalunya," he says, referring to the race in March where he made his return.

"It puts a completely different kind of stress on your legs," he explains from a rider's perspective. "The torque — your pedal stroke — is different from riding outdoors, because outside you have more flywheel effect and momentum. Of course you're still training your body, but you're not practising. Let me put it this way: you're training, but you're not practising. And that's before I even get into things like accelerating out of corners and so on."

Even after the Volta a Catalunya — which was won by Vingegaard — the road wasn't entirely smooth. "After the Volta I got sick as well, so things weren't going so well for a while. Because of that I headed off to altitude camp for a week. And now here I am at the Giro — but the way I feel, it's as if the season has barely started."

Unlike Kelderman, Lemmen came through the Bulgarian opening without any issues. "It was actually better than I expected. I got the impression there were more people lining the roads than in Albania. In a certain way it's comparable, of course — it's the Eastern Bloc."

"And we have a travel day and a rest day again, which isn't ideal from a performance perspective. Ah well — I'd never been to Albania or Bulgaria before, and now I have. That's quite funny in its own way. But we're here first and foremost with our goal in the race," says Lemmen.

That goal is clear: to win the Giro with Jonas Vingegaard. "Jonas gives a very relaxed impression and... is going well, I think," says Lemmen with characteristic understatement. "He's in a good place mentally, and I think he has the form and the motivation to make something of this race here in Italy."

"Because I went to altitude a week later than the others, I didn't really get to see first-hand just how good Jonas is at altitude camp. But from what I understood, he was able to make the others suffer nicely," Lemmen laughs — adding that he himself is also back to a good level.

"How good? Better than I was — but that's how it feels for the whole peloton after winter, so that doesn't say much. What I can say is that in the last two Grand Tours I've ridden, I was relatively better in week three than I was in week one."

He wants to continue that trend in this race. "I want to do what I always do for the team at Grand Tours — a bit of everything, ha. Riding for Jonas, giving him a push when he stops for a nature break, fetching food, fetching bidons, riding in the wind: I'm not here for myself, I'm here for the team. And that's a role you'll see me play in lots of different ways."