The Dane is signed to Visma-Lease a Bike until the end of 2028, and Danish media put the question to him directly on Thursday: was that where his career ended?
“I haven’t decided yet when I will stop,” Vingegaard told reporters on the start line.
“Time will tell. If I feel at the end of 2028 that I don’t want to do it anymore, I will stop. But it is also possible that I will continue.”
He is 29.
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‘I can use my arm now’
The more serious update was his right arm. Vingegaard crashed out of the Tour de France on stage 15, fracturing the collarbone and ending his general classification defence.
“It’s getting better, it’s not really bad anymore,” he said of the arm.
“I can use my arm now. It’s not quite like before, but it will be.”
He arrived in Glyngøre, the northern Jutland town where he grew up, to a large hometown crowd on the start ramp of the stage to Skive.
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Montreal Worlds still open
Whether Vingegaard races again in 2026 is not settled.
He said he had not yet had that conversation with the team and was still recovering, both physically and mentally, from a year that had already included the Giro d’Italia and the Tour.
“I needed a break after the Tour. It’s been a tough year and a tough bike race, so in any case I needed a break because there’s been so much.”
The Road World Championships in Montreal in late September is the natural marker for a return, but the rider would not commit.
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“I actually don’t know yet, it depends on how the collarbone reacts, and how it heals, and how it recovers. It’s not out of the question for me, but I also don’t want to say now that it’s going to happen.”
On what had gone wrong on the road to Paris, Vingegaard was more direct.
“We may have misunderstood the Tour a bit this year. They made me better on the longer climbs. But it could well be that we should have realised I needed to be a bit more explosive and look more closely at the route.”
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