Escort of fighter planes, convertible procession, large crowd in Copenhagen: the Danish winner of the Tour de France Jonas Vingegaard made a triumphant return to the country on Wednesday, celebrated by tens of thousands of people. Twenty-six years after Bjarne Riis, the first Danish winner of the Grande Boucle in 1996 – who admitted having doped after his career – the yellow jersey is entitled to honors from the balcony of the capital’s town hall, place of great celebrations of Danish sport.
“It’s completely fantastic, completely crazy, I don’t realize,” said the shy Jonas in front of a human tide colored with red and white flags, but also yellow tunics, massed in the main square. Three days after his coronation on the Champs-Elysées, he took out his phone to film the crowd, which started the Danish anthem to celebrate its 25-year-old champion. “Vingegaard! Vingegaard!”, Also shouted this floor, which filled the whole huge square.
Two hours earlier, two Danish Air Force F-16s in red and white livery had earlier escorted the small private plane chartered by a sponsor to transport the Tour winner and his family. The Danish climber then boarded a convertible through the streets of Copenhagen.
Thousands of people lined the route, waving Danish flags and clapping the cyclist’s hand countless times. For Allan Olsen, a 59-year-old Dane, the victory of the young cyclist even outweighs Euro 92 football or the handball titles in Denmark’s sports pantheon.
“Gathered the Nation”
“This is probably the greatest thing that has happened in the history of Danish sport,” he told AFP, painting a yellow banner proclaiming “we are red, we are white”, in the square of the ‘city Hall. In a country that had already demonstrated its passion for cycling during the unprecedented start of the Grande Boucle, Jonas Vingegaard must then join the famous Tivoli amusement park, located just next door, for a new celebratory ceremony. “The whole Tour through Denmark has been fantastic, but this Jonas welcome is still a cut above,” said Kasper Asgreen, present with other Danish Tour cyclists.
The impressive performance of Vingegaard, who overpowered Slovenian favorite Tadej Pogacar and crushed the rest of the competition with his Jumbo-Visma side, raised questions in a sport long plagued by doping. “We are completely clean, each of us in the team,” assured the Dane on Saturday, once his victory was won the next day in Paris.
In addition to Bjarne Riis, Danish cycling has been splashed by doping with the case of Michael Rasmussen, excluded from the 2007 Tour which he was about to win.
The parents and the first coaches of little Jonas said that his beginnings in cycling had been sluggish, with a very frail physique and no victory in his local club.
“He was small and he wasn’t winning,” Ole Iversen, who hosted Jonas when he was 11, told DR television at the tiny Thy Cykle Ring club in the northwest of the Scandinavian country.
On Thursday afternoon, Vingegaard is due to continue the celebrations in his small town of Glyngøre, in the west of the country.
More than 10,000 people are expected, six times more than the number of inhabitants of the village.
“He brought the nation together. It’s really big,” rejoiced Claus, the cyclist’s father, at the microphone of national television DR.