Cor Vos
There are bike racers who are cool. They have matching kits, the proper length socks, and the composed facial expressions of someone who has never once considered wearing bib tights over a skinsuit over another layer of bib tights over a jacket, possibly backwards, in order to win a bike race.
Jonas Vingegaard is not one of those bike racers.
At Paris-Nice this week, with weather turning ugly and the peloton bracing for a sufferfest, Vingegaard did what any sensible man who has dressed a four-year-old for a Scandinavian winter would do: He put on everything. All of it. Every layer available to him.
The logistics were, admittedly, complicated. If we work from the inside out, like a reverse Dad onion, we begin with a normal setup. Base layer and then skinsuit as the core, the foundational garments of the professional cyclist. Aero, fast, and efficient, if not particularly versatile in bad weather. A skinsuit also means that layering can’t happen underneath. Vingegaard had only one direction to go: outward. Up. Into ever-greater circumference.
There was a lot of clothing before there was slightly less.
His Visma-Lease a Bike teammate, Victor Campenaerts, a man who travels to races with scissors and a can-do attitude, cut the chamois out of a pair of bib tights on the bus in the morning. Vingegaard pulled them on over the top of everything, shoulder straps sitting over the skinsuit, like Superman putting his undies on over his tights. This is presumably because he planned to take them off at some point (Jonas, not Superman). Then came the jackets — multiple jackets — including, according to observers, one that appeared to be on backwards.
For multiple hours, with the jackets layered over top, we did not know what surprises lay beneath. And then the final climbs hit, and Vingegaard shed a few shedable layers, and like the surprise inside a Kinder Egg, there they were. Straps blowing in the wind.
“All day was just full gas racing, not even time to take clothes off,” he said. “Maybe you can call me a trendsetter with the long pants.”
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