Jonas Vingegaard continues to perform at a high level in 2024, dropping everyone on the San Giacomo climb with an average gradient of 6%, doing the best climbing performance so far in this season.
After winning three climbing stages in O Gran Camiño it would be a hard task to challenge Jonas Vingegaard in Tirreno-Adriatico. Juan Ayuso was perhaps the biggest rival, after winning the opening flat time-trial against Filippo Ganna to take some time ahead of Vingegaard in the GC. However this meant that the Dane needed to attack and gain some time against the Spaniard.
San Giacomo (11.9 km, 6.2%) is not the hardest one but with 7-8% sections in the middle it was possible to attack on this relatively shallow climb. This was a different side of San Giacomo to the 2021 Giro d’Italia, where Gino Mäder won his first World Tour stage from a breakaway. The pace before San Giacomo was moderate as Thymen Arensman in the peloton burned 2,555 kilojoules in 2:41 hours, which is 13.58 kj/kg/h.
Jonas Vingegaard would likely prefer a harder stage before the climb but with Visma-Lease a Bike climbing domestiques Attila Valter and Ben Tulett doing strong pulls in the middle section of the climb, the GC group was thinned out regardless. Visma-Lease a Bike even did not use Cian Uijtebroeks on the climb, who was sitting behind Vingegaard and making it harder for others to follow the Dane when he attacked with 5 km to the top. The tempo was so high when Tulett pulled that Enric Mas was distanced earlier than expected. Ayuso, O’Connor, Hindley were helpless after the acceleration and the Tour de France champion immediately got a huge gap. The tailwind in the final part favoured this long-range move.
Vingegaard did the most impressive climbing performance so far in the 2024 season, smashing out 6.68 ᵉw/kg for 26:05 min. After the attack he did 7.04 ᵉw/kg for 11:38 min.
Del Toro, Hindley, Sosa, Uijtdebroeks, Arensman, Ayuso and O’Connor formed the second group after Hindley and O’Connor were caught by the others. Del Toro, who caught the chase group from the back, and Hindley both did 6.30 ᵉw/kg for 27:05 min, losing exactly 60 seconds to Vingegaard. Del Toro paced for Ayuso and showed another great performance at age 20, being scouted early on by Joxean Fernández “Matxín”. The 16 rider group with Tom Pidcock did around 6.02 ᵉw/kg for 27:38 min.
Jonas needs to start targeting some hillier one day races soon. Surely he could win Il Lombardia or San Sebastian with performances like this.
Amazing analysis