Vingegaard, from working cleaning fish in a factory to winning Giro, Tour and Vuelta

There are few stories as incredible and beautiful as that of Jonas Vingegaard. The Danish, born in Hillerslev in northern Denmark, He is today one of the best athletes in the history of cycling and still has a lot of room for improvement. It is true that the presence of Tadej Pogacar He has prevented his achievements from reaching the rank of honor, but it is also true that the rivalry with the Slovenian still gives more merit to the successes achieved by both, while at the same time enhancing cycling.

This last Sunday of May, Vingegaard made history by winning the Giro d’Italiabecoming the first Dane to triumph and make the podium in the Corsa Rosa, the highest point in Denmark is 173 meters above sea level, completing the trilogy in the three grand tours –Turn, Tour and Return-, adding to a track record that, among others, also includes the Paris-Nice, the Tirreno-Adriatico, the Volta Ciclista a Catalunya, the Itzulia or the Critérium del Dauphiné.

A sports resume that neither he nor anyone in his family could have imagined in their wildest dreams. Before discovering his love for cycling, Jonas dreamed of being a footballer like many other children – he liked Liverpool-, although he also practiced handball, swimming and badminton, but while chasing a ball he was going to encounter a handicap that he also had to fight with as a runner: height and weight, and that is that “I was so short that no one passed me the ball and I didn’t do it very well either,” he recently recalled. Sad about this situation, Jonas was going to find his true passion almost by chance, when his father took him to see a stage of the Return to Denmark that passed near his town, Thisted. “I liked it so much that I already told my parents that I wanted to be a cyclist. From that day on I started going out on my bike a lot more.”

His first club was the ‘The Cycle Ring’where “I learned a lot, I enjoyed it and they took good care of me.” Like any father, Claus Vingegaard He wanted to do everything possible so that his son could make his dream come true, so that he would fight for it, although at first he had to overcome the skeptics. “It was difficult for him to stand out and he never won. He weighed so little that the coaches were afraid that the wind would knock him over,” his father recalled. But he didn’t throw in the towel and motorhome trips as a teenager with his parents, Claus and Karina, to the Alps They ended up cementing their cycling status. His father was clear about it in the outings they did together: “In the time it took me to get to the top, Jonas went up and down up to five times.” His life changed in the summer of 2018, when a Jumbo team scout signed him from Team ColoQuick in 2016. They took risks and they were right.

He was with them for three seasons, before making the leap to Jumbo-Vismatoday Team Visma-Lease a Bikeand at Word Tour, and from that time are the images that already began to go around the world in his day, when he was seen working in a ffish factory in Hansthol port cleaning fishon which he was working until the summer of 2018, half a year before signing for Jumbo-Visma, a past that he does not forget. “I know what it’s like to work hard, to get up at five in the morning and that helps me in cycling. I worked part-time in a fish cannery. It was relaxing because I didn’t have to think much. I just had to put the fish in order, take the invoices and then I trained the rest of the day,” he told ‘Gazzetta dello Sport’. A humble past, of perseverance, that your children will surely remember shortly.