If you’re on a two week holiday there and nobody is able to come and ride in front of you then you know you’re very good, even at 15 or 16.”īeing introduced to some of the toughest climbs in Europe at that young age would prove to be instrumental for Vingegaard. We could see when he was really young that he was very good at that. “For years we went on holiday in that area,” Rasmussen says. Claus and Karina regularly stayed with their children in a campsite at the base of the mythical Alpe d’Huez. Over the summers, the family would often holiday in the French Alps, giving Jonas a taste of some of the iconic passes he was starting to hear about. You need to have fun at the start, enjoy it and make new friends.” Holidays in the mountains “The other parents were saying ‘you need to eat this, you have to drink that’ but we’d never done things like that with Jonas. “We went to a lot of races in Denmark in that first year, and we actually saw that many of the other children were living like professionals even then,” Rasmussen says. Instead his parents simply wanted to encourage him to have fun. All the way home in the car he was sitting and looking at it, he was just ten years old back then.”Īs their son’s interest really began to bloom, Rasmussen explains that both he and his wife, Karina, reiterated to him that winning wasn’t everything. “Jonas got 50 Danish krone, but that was no big deal as he got a little trophy. “He didn’t finish first but came second I think,” he recalls.
“We then borrowed a bicycle from the club, as some of the local clubs had organised a small race for some of the kids so we went along to it. “Jonas had a good time actually, so suddenly he was a little bit interested,” says Rasmussen.
ALL RIGHT NOW CHORDS TRIAL
While at the race he rode a time trial of sorts for children, and suddenly, he was hooked. “So I told him that the Tour of Denmark was starting in our town soon and asked if he wanted to go and see it.”Īfter initial hesitation, Rasmussen explains that his son eventually agreed to go along, leading to him meeting members of Thy Cykle ring - the local club. “I could see he was going off it and didn’t want to play in the matches,” he adds. “Actually that was why he began on the bicycle, because he was very small.” “The only thing he wasn’t good at was football actually,” Rasmussen says. Although thanks to a few heavy tackles from older children, he never took to it as Rasmussen explains. Thy Cykle ringĪround that time Vingegaard played football. He was particularly fond of mathematics, Rasmussen says, to the extent that his primary school teacher in Hillerslev would sometimes ask Jonas to help out the other children in class. Remembering Jonas’ early years in education, Rasmussen explains his son enjoyed school, rarely returning with homework to do as he’d already finished it before heading home. “Jonas would always smile and say it was just for fun.”
“The teacher would say to us and Jonas ‘He has to do something with this, maybe be a guitarist or something’” but then he tells us something that seems in keeping with young Vingegaards approach to cycling. “Back in school he played guitar and for quite some time he was taking lessons,” says Claus Rasmussen - Vingegaard’s father - as he recalls his son's formative years in northern Denmark while speaking to Cycling Weekly. Long before cycling became the centrepiece of his identity - Jonas Vingegaard was a talented young guitarist, whose enthusiastic teacher was adamant that his future lay in music. He rapidly developed a willingness to fight in local races when the going got tough out on the roads of the Thy district.īut he nearly didn’t go down that path at all. It’s hard to imagine that the same rider who recently achieved the biggest winning margin at the Critérium du Dauphiné for 36 years was once reluctant to train, although despite his occasional unwillingness to ride, his friends remember that Vingegaard simply oozed potential in the early days. “It developed though and that's why he became so good when he turned professional, there was still a lot of potential.” “Jonas was the type of guy - I would not call him lazy - but if a trainer told him ‘you have to ride for three to four hours a day tomorrow’ he would go and do three,” adds Mikkelsen.
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