Jonas Vingegaard, the 26-year-old Dane, lifts his bike as he celebrates winning the Tour de France on July 23, 2023.MARCO BERTORELLO/Reuters
On Sunday afternoon, cyclist Jonas Vingegaard got to perform one of the great triumphal rituals in sport – gamboling down the Champs-Élysées with the Tour de France in his back pocket.
This was the 26-year-old Dane’s second Tour win in a row, and what a win. He didn’t beat his competitors. He thrashed them.
The race turned on the 16th day of competition. To that point, there was nothing to separate Vingegaard from his nemesis, Slovenia’s Tadej Pogacar. These two men are the Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay of contemporary cycling – used to viewing the rest of field from far above.
Nobody expected Stage 16 – a 22.4-kilometre time trial – to create a definitive separation between them.
Pogacar put in an exceptional ride. Vingegaard put in one that made Pogacar’s effort seem like he’d been toodling around on a Rhone wine tour. The race took only half an hour to complete, but Vingegaard won it by 98 seconds.
“My bike computer was showing such high numbers that I thought it wasn’t working,” he told French TV afterward.
That day, nearly a week before it ended, Vingegaard won the 2023 Tour de France. And the grumbling started.
Danish rider Jonas Vingegaard wins Tour de France for second straight year
You do something “extraterrestrial” in cycling (one European outlet’s description of Vingegaard’s Stage 16 performance) and people don’t think you’re great. They think you’re cheating.
Experience is their guide. Look up a list of modern Tour winners. The first thing that hits you is a big blank space near the turn of the century. Those are the seven Tours in a row that Lance Armstrong won – now vacated.
The first time a cyclist was sanctioned at a Tour for doping was in 1968. French blog cyclisme-dopage.com found that about three-quarters of the subsequent winners were caught doping at some point in their careers.
Unlike Armstrong, the rest were smart enough to make sure their fame did not transcend cycling. So when they were caught, there was no need to obliterate their championships as well as their reputations.
Since Stage 16, Vingegaard and the media have been doing cycling’s mating dance. The press asks Vingegaard how he’s doing this and Vingegaard pretends to be hurt by the insinuation.
“I can tell, from my heart, that I don’t take anything,” Vingegaard said during one of those plea-bargaining sessions. “I don’t take anything that I wouldn’t give to my daughter and I would definitely not give her any drugs.”
Bringing children into this sort of thing is a gamble. Sure, some people will hear that and think, ‘Who would tell that lie?’
But we’ve seen this act before. Armstrong swore up and down and every other which way that he was as clean as the driven snow. So some will hear that and think, ‘You know what they say about gentlemen and too much protesting.’
Over the past few days, Vingegaard’s people have been slugging for him. Again, maybe too much. In the midst of explaining how focus and prep is what makes Vingegaard better than everyone else, his team manager, Richard Plugge, did a drive-by on another group of Tour riders. He had very personally witnessed these other, lesser cyclists drinking “large beers” at the team hotel.
In turn, that team’s manager hit back, first hard and then low. He called Plugge’s accusation “vile” and “pathetic” and finished with, “I don’t watch what he puts in his riders’ bowls.”
If there had been a crowd there to watch this back and forth, this is where they would have said, “oooooh.”
By the time, Vingegaard was making his way into Paris, the big reveal wasn’t whether he would win. It was how he’d do on his last doping test. He hadn’t failed one yet.
Now that the height of the PED hysteria has passed, you can roughly divide fandom into three parts.
There are the people who still have faith in athletic honour. These gentle souls believe competitors when they say they haven’t done anything wrong. There used to be a lot more of these people.
There are those who think everyone in sports (and life, generally) is working some sort of angle. You haven’t been caught? That isn’t because you’re clean. It’s because you’re one of the smart ones. This growing cohort believes in guilty until proven guilty.
Then there’s the third group, the one to which I belong – the people who don’t care. I could happily start from either philosophical proposition – that very few athletes do banned drugs, or that all of them do.
As far as I’m concerned, beating drug testers has become part of the competitive process, like going to bed early and doing push-ups. You make sure you’re hydrated, that you’ve stretched, that you’ve packed the bike in the car and that you have a catheter for that urine sample your brother-in-law gave you. Something like that.
Once upon a time, everyone was equal because they were all clean. What if they are now equal because they’re all pulling a fix? The caught-doping statistics suggest cycling is closer than most sports to this golden mean.
This is not to say anything in particular about Vingegaard. Maybe he just is that much better than everyone else. Because his competitors are all among the fittest, toughest people on Earth, the performance spread is curious. But it’s foolish to speak in absolutes, about anything.
When people talk about doping and sport now, we are supposed to do it mournfully. Like something fundamental and decent has been lost. I’m sure the first medieval bowman to catch a cannonball in the head felt the same way (briefly).
But doping isn’t a tragedy. It’s just another way of doing business. The fact that the Tour continues to operate, to pull huge crowds, to draw billions of people (yes, billions) on TV proves that viewers don’t really care whether the athletes do drugs.
All a sports audience wants is drama. Cheating – thinking about it, talking about it, occasionally catching someone at it – just adds more of that.
Cathal Kelly