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 was entitled to honors from the balcony of the capital’s town hall. , the place of the great celebrations of Danish sport.
“It’s completely fantastic, completely crazy, I don’t realize it,” declared the shy Jonas in front of a human tide colored with red and white flags, but also with yellow tunics, massed on the main square.
Three days after his coronation on the Champs-Élysées, 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 escorted the small private plane chartered by a sponsor to transport the Tour de France winner and his family.
The Danish climber then boarded a convertible to wander 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 the Danish victory at Euro 1992 football or the handball titles in Denmark’s sports pantheon.
“Bring the nation together”
“This is arguably the greatest thing that has happened in the history of Danish sport,” he told AFP as he painted a yellow banner proclaiming “we are red, we are white” in the square of the city Hall.
Back in a country that had already demonstrated his passion for cycling during the unprecedented departure of the Great Loop from Copenhagen, 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 welcome from Jonas is still a cut above,” said Kasper Asgreen, present with other Danish cyclists on the Tour.
The impressive performance of Vingegaard, who overpowered Slovenian favorite Tadej Pogačar and crushed the rest of the competition with his Jumbo-Visma side, has 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 trainers of the little Jonas said that his debut on a bike had been sluggish, with his very frail physique and no victory in his local club. “He was small and he wasn’t winning,” DR Ole Iversen, who hosted Jonas when he was 11, told 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 town.
“He brought the nation together. It’s really big, ”rejoiced Claus, the cyclist’s father, at the microphone of national television DR.