Jonas Vingegaard has revealed that he considered ending his career in 2025 amid a lack of motivation and the demands of lengthy periods away from home. However, a sit-down with Visma-Lease a Bike management persuaded the two-time Tour de France champion to stick around at least a little longer.
“I said last year that if this was how it was going to be, I couldn’t do it anymore,” Vingegaard said during Danish broadcaster TV2’s ‘AftenTour’ show on the eve of the Tour's first rest day. “That’s also why we changed some things. I also think the team realised that this was how it was, and they could also tell from me that I wasn't happy last year. They accepted that we had to change something, and we did.”
The risk of burnout is being talked about more and more in professional sport, and in cycling, there have been well-publicised recent examples of athletes opting to retire early having fallen out of love with the sport – Ide Schelling and Fem van Empel, for instance, and even Simon Yates whose surprise retirement in early January threw something of a spanner into the works at Visma-Lease a Bike.
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