"It's a big advantage to be able to start early with Jonas. We need that if we want to close the gap to Pogacar."

This is how Jonas Vingegaard 's coach, Tim Heemskerk, describes the start of the training of the Danish two-time Tour de France winner in an interview with Velo.

"By starting training so early, we can provide a great base," he explains, "and we really needed that. Because of that crash (in the Tour of the Basque Country, ed.), Jonas was missing some things."

Heemskerk says the crash caused a lot of difficulties. "Jonas was in the hospital for twelve days without any activity and that caused him to lose a lot of muscle mass. That had an impact for the rest of the year. A body needs time to recover, but Jonas went straight from the hospital to rehab and the Tour."

"All of this took a lot of effort and Jonas never fully recovered. He needs time to get his body back to the balance it was before that crash. Also, we can't sit back and say that Pogacar would have been beaten without that crash. We have to accept that Pogacar has raised the bar even higher this year. We have to look at everything to beat him. We know we have a big task ahead of us."

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