Jonas Vingegaard, admitted since last Thursday to the Txagorritxu hospital, in Vitoria, underwent surgery on Monday, a plate, some screws, on the clavicle that was fractured in the great Itzulia crash at the Olaeta curve, and the Those who understand the matter say, what good news. If they have already operated on him, five days after the fall, it means, they explain, that the injury to a lung – contusion and pneumothorax caused by several broken ribs – is perfectly controlled in the ICU, where they monitor that the tube they inserted through side of the chest to the parenchyma (the lung tissue) look for the exact negative pressure to free the lung of collapsing air without breaking the tissue.
Vingegaard will be able to start rolling as soon as he is discharged. It will be the beginning of a great 80-day journey towards the Tour de France, change of plans, recovery, pain, concentrations, and perhaps the Dauphiné Libéré on June 29 in Florence, a still hazy goal.
With the lung problems solved and the clavicle recovered, a third element will somewhat delay the 27-year-old Dane’s preparation: broken ribs. The pain. Only painkillers calm him down and even if Vingegaard gets used to training with discomfort, there will come a time of demanding sessions when it will be impossible for him to comply with what is required.
“Will he recover in time for the Tour? Yes, definitely. Will he be in a position to compete for a third consecutive victory? “A mystery,” says, certainly skeptical, Pedro Celaya, trainer and doctor at Armstrong, Contador and Haimar Zubeldia’s Discovery, Astana and RadioShack. “Each athlete is different.”
It is the genetic factor. The trainability gene that allowed some champions, like Óscar Freire, to get in top shape with just a few training sessions, or the memory of the cells, which know when to be well and shorten the recovery times of the best, which are also distinguished by that. And Vingegaard is one of them.
Armstrong was a universe unto himself. He fell a few days before the 2003 Tour and hit his knee badly. He arrived lame to the Tour and so that Jan Ullrich, his rival, would not find out and attack him immediately, his partner at the time, the singer Sheryl Crow, made up his knee so that it would not be noticeable. Ullrich could not attack him among other things because the German fell before the initial time trial and already started behind Armstrong. One more: “On March 23, 2009,” Celaya recalls, Armstrong broke his collarbone in the Vuelta a Castilla y León. A month and a half later he competed in the Giro, finishing 10th, with no other objective than to prepare for the Tour, and on July 4 he arrived in Monaco more than convinced that he could win it, he was so fit. Contador, however, had other ideas.”
Celaya speaks of other times, very different from the current ones, in which the Tour favorites already begin attacking on the first day. A non-stop Tour that, in addition, in the upcoming edition will already have high mountains, the Galibier no less, in its fourth stage, on Tuesday, July 2. It cannot be believed that the idea of allowing Vingegaard time to recover by delaying hostilities until the second or third week could fit into the head of Tadej Pogacar, as aggressive a runner as he is. And like Pogacar, defeated in the last two Tours, the debutant Remco Evenepoel, who will also arrive with a screwed collarbone, or the former teammate, now rival, Primoz Roglic, also fallen, but unharmed, in Itzulia, who until now seemed to be the owner of the monopoly of bad luck in the Tour de France.
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