{"id":953018,"date":"2026-10-31T10:18:13","date_gmt":"2026-10-31T10:18:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/953018\/"},"modified":"2026-10-31T10:18:13","modified_gmt":"2026-10-31T10:18:13","slug":"michael-rasmussen-says-tour-de-france-owners-have-lost-confidence-in-jonas-vingegaard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/953018\/","title":{"rendered":"Michael Rasmussen says Tour de France owners have lost confidence in Jonas Vingegaard"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Jonas Vingegaard about to win stage 11 at Tour de France 2022 on Col du Granon and take his first ever Tour yellow jersey, after dropping Tadej Poga\u010dar\u00a0 and putting almost three minutes into him. But have the Tour de France owners now lost condidence in his ability to win their race this year, or even make a fight of it? (Photo: Charly Lopez)<\/p>\n

Jonas Vingegaard (Visma Lease a Bike) has ridden the Tour de France six times and the Dane has only ever finished outside the top 2 once; this season when he crashed out on stage 15.<\/p>\n

However, his compatriot Michael Rasmussen has now expressed doubts about Vingegaard’s ability to even finish on the podium this year, adding he will never win the race again.<\/p>\n

The former pro rider now insists Paul Seixas (Decathlon CMA CGM Team) and Remco Evenepoel (Red Bull-Bora-hansgrohe) represent a bigger challenge to champion Tadej Poga\u010dar (UAE Team Emirates-XRG).<\/p>\n

Rasmussen was leading the 2007 Tour by over three minutes with five stages to go when his Rabobank team withdrew him as it emerged he lied about his whereabouts for dope test purposes.<\/p>\n

His contract was terminated and he was eventually banned for two years, only to return for a muted final chapter with Continental teams before retiring on the eve of the 2013 season.<\/p>\n

Now a media commentator, he has said Amaury Sport Organisation (ASO), which owns the Tour, has clearly lost confidence in Vingegaard’s ability to truly challenge Poga\u010dar for victory.<\/p>\n

And he believes the Tour route this year has been stacked with more TT kilometres, and is perhaps a little low on summit finishes, in a bid to tilt the odds in favour of Evenepoel and Seixas putting it up to Poga\u010dar, all at Vingegaard’s expense.<\/p>\n

Rasmussen believes that, in the hopes of making a real race of it, ASO has effectively given up on Vingegaard’s ability to add to his two Tour overall victories, in 2022 and 2023, even though he won the Giro d’Italia this year and Vuelta a Espa\u00f1a last year.<\/p>\n

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Denmark’s Michael Rasmussen, riding for Rabobank ProTeam, wins stage 16 of the 2006 Tour de France into La Toussuire-Les Sybelles (Photo: JC Moreau)<\/p>\n

“I don’t think ASO still sees Vingegaard as Poga\u010dar’s main challenger,” said Rasmussen, now 52-years-old and a two-time king of the mountains at the Tour, where he also claimed for stage wins before his doping was exposed.<\/p>\n

“In recent years, the emphasis was strongly on tough uphill finishes, because those were Jonas’s greatest qualities,\u201d he said of the planning of the Tour route.<\/p>\n

“They had to take place in the third week, at an altitude of nearly 2,800 metres, because Jonas was seen as the best at high altitude, in the third week, and on long climbs.<\/p>\n

“Now they are taking a different direction. They are looking at Seixas and Evenepoel, because they think they can be better challengers. And they are doing that by making the course less favourable for Jonas Vingegaard.”<\/p>\n

Rasmussen also doubts if his fellow Dane can now even finish on the podium, especially the way the course has been set up.<\/p>\n

“No, I don’t think so. I see more potential in the riders coming up behind him,” he said when as if a podium was still witing reach for Vingegaard, who he believes will never win the Tour again.<\/p>\n

“I simply cannot imagine that he can still make the necessary improvements,” he said of Vingegaard even winning again, before adding he still does not see Seixas or Evenepoel winning the Tour this year.<\/p>\n

“Unless they organise an individual time trial on 21 consecutive days, I see only one possible outcome for the Tour de France; Poga\u010dar wins. He can only lose the Tour de France.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jonas Vingegaard about to win stage 11 at Tour de France 2022 on Col du Granon and take…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":953019,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[445],"tags":[49,48,635,82],"class_list":["post-953018","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cycling","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-cycling","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/953018","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=953018"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/953018\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/953019"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=953018"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=953018"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=953018"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}